According to online chatter in several Roland-oriented forums including Roland Clan, it appears that Roland is readying a new, powerful Fantom workstation for debut at NAMM this week. The new keyboard will reportedly be positioned as a workstation “category-killer,” and is said to raise the bar above the current crop of Korg and Yamaha products. No...

FutureMusic will be reporting live from MacWorld and NAMM all this week. Stay tuned to It’s A Beta World for the latest announcements on new gear, music technology, portable media players, computers, and the latest gadgets…it’s going to be non-stop insanity! We promise!!

The Canadian Federal Court of Appeals drop-kicked a proposed “iPod Tax” on digital music players, and storage devices recently. The planned levies were going to charge Canadians CAN$75 for digital media players with 30GB or more of storage and around CAN$5 for Flash memory between 1GB and 4GB. The insanity was aimed at compensating creatives for...

Japan’s Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry has announced that it is seeking to make Super Hi-Vision / Ultra High Definition a broadcast standard by 2015. The next-gen HD sports 7,680 x 4,320 resolution (33 megapixel) and 22.2 channel surround sound (Boy Howdy!! —Ed.). Nevermind that currently there really isn’t a video camera that...

Access Music have unveiled the Virus TI Snow, their new portable, table-top synthesizer based on the Virus TI series of synthesizers. Access claims the Snow is the ideal companion for live musicians and for those who want to take a powerful but compact synth to a jam session. With 3 programmable hardware knobs per patch and additional ones for filter and...