antler

9 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

tools like Sonible's true: balance (and, it would follow that Izotope Insight suffers the same problem) are comparing your unmastered master bus mix tracks to reference tracks that are actually mastered tracks, which is not an ideal comparison.  I'd love to get thoughts on this. 

IIRC, Insight is just a metering suite - I don't think it makes comparisons to anything. Possibly you might mean Tonal Balance Control, where you can choose different genres and see a relative frequency curve?

I'm not sure I follow. If we're using mastering tools to master our unmastered tracks, I don't understand why we'd not want to compare against a mastered track. It's true that we probably wouldn't want an exact match to the reference curve - every song is unique and different instruments/arrangements lead to different frequency distributions - it's useful to know if we're approximately there. For example, an EDM track would probably sound quite strange if it had the same relative frequency distribution as a violin concerto. But while we wouldn't want it to have the exact distribution as <insert the name of an EDM track here>, it's nice to know if it sounds roughly the same.

9 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

I suppose this is some sort of deal to make us think their subscription plan is attractive, as this is not part of even the Collector's Edition of Komplete 14, which should in theory have everything NI makes.

It's new (and came out after KCE 14); it'll (most probably) be in 15.

I think NI have figured out they have two types of customers: the more studio-experienced ones, and the newcomers to music. I think their subscriptions are targeting the latter. Unlike other subscriptions that include every product in their catalogue for a recurring fee, the NI one is different. It includes instruments more towards the 'instant gratification' end of the scale. It doesn't include Kontakt, and I think someone who Komplete Now is targeted at wouldn't fully appreciate it.

To be clear, I'm not saying any one group is 'better' than the other; just that there are different types of users and that NI are trying to cover all the bases.

Apparently, this is a 'goodbye' sale, and it won't be available for purchase after the beginning of June (I think). However, the email I got noted that existing owners will still get to redownload via Pulse, and still get support.

Seems interesting, but I think I'm covered for drums with Toontrack.

Kinda sad that Audiomodern seem to have completely jettisoned their Kontakt instrument range, e.g. Opacity

19 hours ago, ALC said:

Gig Performer 4 has become my preferred plugin host for plugin maintenance (deleting unused/unwanted/non-working AU/VST/VST3 plugins) as it scans new plugins incrementally.  Once I have my plugin directories cleaned up, then I go to my other DAWs to scan/categorize.

Thanks for the tip!

I remember this issue coming up the last time this plugin was on PA_EXT. If I remember correctly, the explanation was that the developer would update their product at least once in 10 years, meaning the licence would get refreshed anyway. Or something like that...

13 hours ago, Carl Ewing said:

And people complain about subscriptions like Composer Cloud, which is like 10 terrabytes of high quality products across a huge range of instruments for $200 a year.  And here we have NI selling OT's Time Macro for $200....and that's 50% off. lolol.

I think the problem is more with the recurring payment.

If someone's a pro and they're doing this day-in day-out, it's undoubtedly a great deal that can be classed a business expense.

If someone's a hobbyist and they only make music occasionally, the recurring payment might not seem worthwhile. In addition, being locked out of your old projects if a subscription expires is a bit of a turn-off - though I know there's the possibility of bouncing the track.

6 hours ago, Yan Filiatrault said:

Someone on another forum got a confirmation that Ark 5 is newly released on Kontakt with this sale. It was previously released on Orchestral Tools Sine player. 

Interesting - I thought they'd fully abandoned Kontakt as a platform. In any case, a tad too pricy for me right now.

18 hours ago, RSMcGuitar said:

It needs a better browser IMO.

Yup - the current one works, but it is quite cramped.

4 hours ago, jude77 said:

Oh man, oh no, what are we coming to?

In my case, someone with little free disk space and a DAW plugin scan that takes a while. Don't worry - I'll probably get round to clearing it up and then I'll be back wanting every deal again soon. 😁

I like it. Whether it's the 'right' one for the job, I like to use this for my drum sends (though it's also good for other uses too). Load up to five IRs and tweak the levels as you like to get the sound you're after. You can even use your own IRs if you have any.

1 minute ago, Bapu said:

But this one is new and shiny dull looking. 🙂 

I know... that 'new-ness' is niggling away at me too. I'm just trying (my best) to be sensible 😁

Does anyone have smart:EQ Live?

Is it really only useful for live performances, or can it help out in studio settings? And if so, would smart:EQ 3 be a better choice for studio anyway?

3 hours ago, cclarry said:

My upgrade  offer is $79

Same. I think I have enough mastering plugins such that I can wait.

41 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Or you could use the free CHOW Tape, which can pretty much sound like any of those Tascam jobs due to how configurable it is.

Thanks - I didn't know about that one.

1 hour ago, Grem said:

CWbBL has tape emulation built in the each track. Works as expected and is very light on cpu. And it comes with several tape options.I 

If you're talking about the pro-channel modules, I believe they're a cut-down version of TapeDesk; when Sonar was announced as discontinued, Overloud offered a crossgrade price.

7 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

its hard to get an idea how people are using them. I was always under the impression, because they are so heavy on CPU, they are bus plugins and you are supposed to feed them multiple instruments.

For lighter tape plugins, e.g. Overloud Tapedesk, I'll put one on each track/bus as the last plugin.

For the IK ones, I'll just put one instance on the main bus as a finishing effect - usually after compression and EQ, but before the limiter.

Sounds pretty good. Hopefully, IK can do something similar one day and make MODO DRUM fully modelled.

Sounds great!

I love the main Ethera series (featuring Clara). Ethera Gold 2 introduced a male vocal (Daniele), which offered some nice variety to the tonal palette. Prometheus might be in response to positive feedback from that.

Looks interesting. Wish they had a few more videos of it in usage, though there is a demo.

16 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

Space piano. Musk hauls it up there. Parks it past Mars.  Recorded with highest resolutions, hundreds of velocity layers, with pristine preamps. Total library size is 5TB.

On sale at introductory $29, and we all complain. Especially as there is no sound to be heard.

 

Can't imagine how many files there would be if the compressed library of silent files totals up to 5TB.

The guy has some quite interesting ideas about how to modify a piano. In one video, he wired it up so that there were electrical sparks every time he played a key!

38 minutes ago, MarcL said:

I don't like that too many programs/plugins (try to) access the internet on my PCs! Do you really know what all of them do on your systems? Can you be sure that all of them are programmed safely? I think the risk of fraud grows with the number of programs accessing the internet, that's that simple IMHO!

That's fair enough, but chances are they already have your details from when you purchased the plugin. Also, you'll know if they access the vital parts of your system because you'll get a popup asking for admin permissions.

44 minutes ago, mibby said:

I used a YouTube converter site to download a .WAV file, then ran it through the YouLean online analyzer.

It's a "modern" mix by Serban, one of THE most in demand mix engineers today ( https://serbanghenea.com/).  Even turned down on Spotify, you cannot objectively say this mix lacks "oomph!" In fact,  I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a better mix in spite of the lack of dynamic range in this one. (material dependent of course!)

Be careful with that - YouTube and Spotify (probably) do different things with the audio. According to this, YouTube could be applying compression to the audio which could affect the results of analysing audio from YouTube.

In either case, I agree it's a great sounding mix - if that's the sound you're after, it's definitely worth using that as a reference track.

1 hour ago, mibby said:

I think when a mix is too loud, it'll just get turned down to whatever the normalized level is.  That 8 LUFS mix is giving up some dynamic range for loudness.  If you can make a great sounding mix that comes in at 8 LUFS (like the pro mix you mentioned ) then you're ahead of the game.  It'll just get turned down, but will still sound good - AND louder overall than a more dynamic mix.  (At least this is my current understanding anyway.)

I don't think that's the way it works unfortunately. Once a mix has given up it's dynamic range, it's gone. Consider two mixes:

• Mix A targets -8 LUFS. The kick drum peaks with the rest of the (squashed) mix.
• Mix B targets -14 LUFS. The kick drum peaks higher than the rest of the mix.

When played back at the same volume, the kicks in mix B will be louder than the rest of the mix and will really let you feel the oomph. You wouldn't be able to do that in Mix A because the mix is already squashed and there's no further headroom. You might be able to do some ducking on the kicks or something else that's clever; it might work, but it's likely to sound less natural than simply having more headroom to emphasise the peaks.