Matthew Sorrels

Really wish it had some tooltips on the GUI.

I guess all these things that the Custom Shop say are only in MAX 5 were also in MAX 4 (which I did buy/have) so I own them. I guess. The "new" Custom Shop still doesn't show a check on a bunch of the SE gear though, but clearly I own those. Perhaps it's not showing the check on things included in the free version? I fed some Orange Tree guitar through some of the new presets, sounds nice. I like the resizing GUI a lot. Though the color choices are kind of bad (not enough contrast). In the end of the day I guess it's how it sounds that matters most.

So in the preset browser if I click this mystic icon on the far right I think it lets me toggle between things I own and things I don't own and both: And it seems to affect the presets too. Except it's claiming I don't have licenses for 279 presets. Most of which are Legacy stuff. All of which load just fine. Under custom shop though there are 13 presets I guess I don't own the gear for? Though they load without a warning. I guess there are a few items that are only in Amplitude 5 MAX? Even though right now it's showing me as owning them (except the preset browser thinks I don't?). I think there are 2 Jet City amps and a Seymour Duncan Power Grid Distortion pedal that are MAX only. Custom shop shows a green check box on them for me. But the description says included in only AmpliTube 5 MAX. Since I picked up Joe Satriani I thought I had everything that was in AmpliTube 5 MAX by getting AmpliTube 5. Not a lot of AmpliTube 5 presets come with it. They sound pretty good though.

I'm beginning to think they rushed this because of NI and Guitar Rig 6.

The new Custom shop doesn't seem to have a way to list unpurchased gear. It also doesn't seem to be giving me credit for anything I owned as a part of Amplitude 4 Max. Assuming the green check mark means owned. I also love this But for some reason I don't own it?

I did the reboot. It used a authorization on my Web account. It even claimed to have authorized it but the PM still shows it unauthorized and it says it's not authorized yet. I even put the serial number into the old IK Authorization Manager. It took it but it still is un-authorized. The preferences UI in the stand alone is kind of hard to read. My monitor is color calibrated with an iDisplayPro too, so I'm pretty sure the levels are right but the "tabs" in the preferences are almost unreadable black on a dark/dark gray. I bet it looks fine on a Mac with a different gamma setting.

WhyReboot (an app that tells you what is setup to happen on a reboot) says there is nothing pending. Usually a reboot after an install is because the installer needs to update/replace some locked system file. In this case there isn't any obvious reason Amplitude 5 needs a reboot. Be right back. After I reboot. For no reason.

Ubisoft is doing a new give away every day from Dec 14 to Dec 18, you do need to register/have an account. https://ubi.li/happyholidays Today's freebie is a free PC copy of Starlink today: Battle for Atlas™ Digital Edition on Ubisoft Connect PC when you register Clock turns over at 2 PM CET (which I think is 8am Eastern) Ubisoft's giveaway has ended. Epic's giveaway has just started. https://www.epicgames.com See this post for leaked list of games, so far it's been accurate.

I don't really use it all that much. That's true for all the Sonokinetic phrase libraries though (and I have almost all of them, only missing Tutti and Espressivo). They are great libraries but at the end of day it's just loops. Magical and mixable loops with all sorts of interesting overlaying abilities sure, but still just a loop. The drag MIDI does help a bit though.

Largo is the 2nd largest Kontakt Player library I own at 100.6 GB. Only thing I have larger is Spitfire's Bernard Herrmann Toolkit at 136.5GB.

I was going to pick up a few things but wanted a day or two to think about it, thinking I had time. Oh well, that one got away.

I often get that silly dialog about wrong computer but when I run the XLN installer it never says anything about reauthorizing and acts like everything is fine. And even inside Cakewalk after getting that wrong computer dialog, AD2 loads and works just fine. Usually the dialog only comes up once in a while (maybe OS updates) in this case I'm pretty sure it was running the installer and it updating AD2. It's like it doesn't really mean it or something. But at least I've never been locked out of it.

After running the new installer

The downloader is funny. I pointed it at a 8TB hard drive with about 330gigs free and it complained that it needed 80gigs to download. I don't think they can handle the large drive size math right. Oddly enough it still let me start (and finish) the download even though it keep displaying the warning there wasn't enough disc space the whole time.

If you try to move the library (from where it downloads to) the Sonokinetic Manager will complain it can't find it. This is because it's looking for "Ibrido Zero.nicnt" instead of "Carousel.nicnt" I just copied the Carousel file to "Ibrido Zero.nicnt" to make it happy (you need to keep the Carousel file for the instruments of course).

I was 25 mins late (forgot!) and I still got it. They must not be limiting it as much as last year.

I had a bunch of problems downloading the updates with the Arturia Software Center. I ended up going to the site and downloading the Software Center installer and re-installing it. Oddly enough this install was different (it didn't up itself correctly maybe) and the downloads went without a problem. The version of this better one, in the lower left corner, is 2.2.0.62.

I skipped the Cubase upgrade figured I'd wait for Nuendo, was glad to see they rolled it out quickly.

The V6 to V7 upgrade was intro priced at $199 (marked down from $299) but they later did drop it to $99. You might have seen a better intro deal if you bought some of the synths they added before the next collection? Like now it's $199 for people that didn't buy the OBXa and $149 for them.

Doesn't look like any of the retailers other than Sweetwater list Nuendo upgrades or did I miss someone?

Everyday for the next 11 days (day 1 already happened) at 11am Eastern Sonokinetic will put up a new daily offer (each good for two days, I think). https://www.sonokinetic.net/sale In the past at least one of the daily offers was for a free Kontakt Player instrument (so no need for full Kontakt). So it's very likely at least one of the 12 days will have another freebie. But the number of free licenses is limited (last year they gave out 1000) and first come, first served. The second day's offering is considered likely for the first free one -- though no guarantees. And you can count on their website being swamped. The past years free products have mostly been from the Ostinato Series and retail for around 80 euros(+vat). After the free licenses are used up, the product will be offered at a discount (so if you miss getting a free copy, you can buy it for a discount). Most of the days they will just have a 50% (or more) discount on one or more products or bundles. So if you have any interest in their products the sales for this 12 day event are usually pretty good.

Maximo is nice (for a phrases library). I think the first freebie will totally break their website.

For me after Softube Central updated every time I started it, it insisted on installing/re-installing the Softube Installation Helper. Like it couldn't tell it was actually already installed. To fix this I had to manually uninstall the Softube Installation Helper from the Control Panel and download its stand alone installer from Softube and run that (outside of Softube Central). https://www.softube.com/installer-windows I think using the auto/internal update on Softube Central doesn't work so well. You might need to unistall both parts and download and install them again.

Just tried the ProChannel version of all the Softube plugins and it still crashes when added to a track. They updated everything I had (all of Volume 4) but no fixes for the broken ProChannel support. Here's the change log for 2.5.9:

Aren't they offering a grace period upgrade to Amplitube 5 SE for people that bought recently? It may be a while before this is in one of the bundles.