MakeMusic has announced the upcoming release of Garritan Harps, a new virtual instrument collection.

The virtual harp revolution began with GigaHarp over a dozen years ago. Garritan Harps represents the next step of evolution, taking virtual harps exponentially further, according to Gary Garritan, MakeMusic director of instrumental sciences, and himself a long-time harp performer. In addition to pure pristine recordings of each note and a full range of harp articulations, new technologies allow for advanced glissando emulation, sampled acoustic spaces, and much more.

Garritan Harps features a variety of harps, including Salvi Pedal, Venus Concert Grand and Lyon & Healy. Special features include full-ranged harp articulations --traditional angelic-sounding harp plucks, harmonics, Pres de la table, picked, dampened, and other types of playing techniques. Through a variety of options, Garritan Harps also makes playing glisses accessible to any musician, Garritan says.

The ARIA player, which includes Ambience Reverb and Convolution Sampled Reverb, is included with Garritan Harps. With this technology, the sound of specific performance spaces can be captured and shared.

Garritan Harps is designed as an addition to music notation-based programs, like Finale, as well as to all sequencers and digital audio workstations. The standalone ARIA Player allows anyone to load and play back MIDI files and produce audio recordings of the MIDI file or live performances, without additional software.

Garritan Harps will be available as a download in February for US$149.95 and as a boxed (DVD) version for $169.95. For more info go to www.makemusic.com .