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Applie Acoustics Systems are announcing native 64-bit VST plug-ins for their Professional and Session series instruments on Windows 7 and Vista. This new feature allows for 64-bit VSTs to be supported without the use of any “bit bridge” technology.

The update will take place in the form of routine maintainence and will be out in the first quarter of 2010 to all registered AAS users.

My wife works retail and has worked for a few different clothing retailers. Her favorite job when we lived in California was Anthropologie. Think of it as the more grown-up Urban Outfitters.

Since we’re newly married, broke 20-somethings, she does a lot of online window shopping. Yesterday she pointed me to a couple of really cool wood-based audio gadgets that are sure to turn heads (and can’t sound that bad, either):

• Barky Turntable: Yep. It’s exactly what you think. A turntable made completely out of wood. For a cool $1,298 it can be yours. It’s made with high-quality turntable parts and looks absolutely amazing.
• Skullcandy Wood Earbuds: For $98, you can have these pretty amazing little earbuds by Skullcandy. They’re said to have the “natural acoustics of wood,” but I bet they sound like nice iPod headphones.

Not really ground breaking news, but if you’re looking for some cool accent pieces for your home or portable (read: iPod) setup, check out these devices.

So you thought FLAC was the best sounding thing you could get right now, didn’t you? Well, according to apt-X, you may be wrong.

Here’s a list of what apt-X says are the advantages of their new lossless codec:

Highly scalable and dynamically adaptive coding mechanism
High-performance lossless compression – up to 96 kHz sampling rates
Mastering-grade audio – sample resolutions up to 24 bits
Extremely low coding delay
Low computational complexity, run-time overhead and device power consumption
Hybrid lossy coding for communications links with stringent bandwidth constraints
Easily portable across multiple hardware and software platforms

Interested in the press release? Check it out after the jump.

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Akai’s answer to the Korg Nano series is now shipping to all major retailers.  I know all Guitar Centers have them (or will have them soon), and the pricing on these units is pretty great.

They’re USB-bus powered, about the length of a laptop keyboard, and thin enough to fit into any sort of messenger/laptop bag you can think of. Sadly, Akai wasn’t at AES this year so I couldn’t get any good info/demos of the units, but from what I’ve seen the build quality on these Akai units seem to be much more solid than the Korg units.

Go check out your nearest retailer and check them out!

Applied Acoustics Systems has announced the 1.1.2 update for their Ultra Analog VA-1 software synth for both Windows and OS X. According to the press release, it’s mostly a collection of bugfixes. Here’s a list of the fixes:

- Fixed lots of preset change glitches;
- Fixed DC output saturation on some oscillator/filter combinations;
- Fixed filter cutoff glitch on large sudden pitch changes;
- Fixed Recorder crash on Windows;
- Fixed automation from plug-in window in Logic 8;
- Fixed audio cuts when the plug-in window was displayed;
- Fixed MIDI Link crash on “Default” channel;
- Fixed Cubase 5 crash on Windows;
- Now works with Cubase 5 64-bit VST Bridge;
- Now works with Sonar 64-bit BitBridge;
- Fixed “Fatal Error 417″ during authorization on Mac OS X;
- Fixed Edit MIDI Link dialog values glitch;

The update is free for all registered users of VA-1 and is available from the AAS website.