Matthew Sorrels

I may have been a bit hard on Spitfire Solo Strings. Comparing the SSoS violin with Joshua Bell a lot of the difference (and why I don't like the sound that much) is they have recorded it in-situ. Which means it's panned pretty hard to the left and the volume level is way down compared to Bell, which is front and center and crazy loud. It doesn't make up for the lack of script magic, but you can adjust the stereo settings and tweak the mics on SSoS which results in a much better sound. Honestly it also seems like it could use some eq and compression too. I'm sure the way it is out of the box is great for mixing over/with other orchestras, but it's really bad at soloing. While I may have little use for them Ricotti Mallets is the nicest set of those instruments I've got. The harp I'm less impressed with.

The updates to Colours Animator and Colurs Orchestrator they announced a few weeks ago are now available to download in Native Access too! https://vi-control.net/community/threads/animator-and-orchestrator-2-0-updates-out-now.100320/ And they added a new product in the Colours line: Adaptive Runs

For the $749 I paid for BBCSO when it shipped I wasn't so happy. Their player was kind of buggy. It's less buggy now, but still has major memory management issues (compared to Kontakt). They are also selling it a lot cheaper too. The version you get today for $599 is a lot better deal all around. And they now have the core option which to be honest might be a better fit for me. Especially in terms of disc space. I really don't use all those mics in pro, though I do like having the leaders/solos.

Unlike last year I was willing to spend enough to get the Aperture Orchestra this time. But I'm kind of regretting it. I picked up the Ton and got Spitfire Solo Strings (completed the bundle with Albion One). I don't have a solo strings library yet so it seemed like a good fit. But playing with it this morning I am kind of disappointed. It sounds very synthy. At least the violin. Compared to Joshua Bell it's really bad. The Aperture Orchestra is nice but it's not all that amazing really either. Spitfire is very hit or miss for me. Now I'm thinking I should also get the Embertone Intimate Strings. I was disappointed they don't have a discount on the bundle, but if the instruments are better maybe that's not so important. I just have to decide if I want the Friedlander Violin, or if I should skip it (in favor of Bell) and just get the other three.

I had (before this) two of his MIDI packs. It's better if you have the libraries he uses of course but these are actually pretty good MIDI packs.

The tempo changes are continuous. It's like they recorded a conductor. Or they drew the tempo with a pen tool. Or pulled the tempo from a performance using Melodyne. It's very weird.

Oh, you mean BBCSO Core. Almost had a heart attack there, I so don't want to spend another 600GB on BBCSO.

They do seem much more like what I was expecting from ProMidiFiles. I vaguely remember bookmarking Smash Up The Studio last year saying I'd wait for a sale to buy something. Any chance they will do a Black Friday deal?

Well it's definitely not Cakewalk. Captain Chord's crashes on exit in Cubase and VSTHost (it's a test app for plugins), neither of which use any of the shared Windows stuff. At this point I have to assume it has something to do with Windows 20H2, though it may be something Captain Chord ultimately needs to fix. Except they moved their support forum to Facebook, so that's dead end for me. Good news is it seems to run/work just fine, only crashes closing the DAW. I'm going to keep looking, I may be able to figure something out but the stuff that is in the call stack are all part of the OS install now. Could also just be something that only effects me, won't be the first time that happened.

Yes. But this isn't the first crash exiting Cakewalk I've seen recently since moving to Windows 20H2. I'm beginning to suspect it's the bad guy here. But it could also be something that installed/overwrote something. Software uses so many system/shared things it's very easy for things to break.

With the latest Calkwalk, Captain Chords crashes when I exit. I start Cakewalk, add Captain Chords, select Go on the default scale and then File->Exit and Cakewalk crashes. Captain Chords uses a bunch of .Net framework stuff (just like Cakewalk). I've tried repairing things, but fixing .Net installs is a lot harder than it looks. Anyone else on Windows 20H2 getting crashes exiting Cakewalk after adding Captain Chords?

I bought the bundle. They are not good or useful at all really. It's not clear exactly what virtual instruments they actually wrote these for. All you get is some track names to go on. The couple of cinematic ones I loaded all had changing tempo maps. So to get it "right" you can't drop it in, you have to open it with Cakewalk. But that doesn't fix the crazy weird instrumentation. The EDM/Pop stuff seems slightly better than the cinematic stuff I guess. I think I should have realized this wasn't going to be good when there are no audio samples on the entire site. Check the free ones before you buy anything. They are exactly like the paid versions in every way only difference is more MIDI files. Each product has a single image file and a License file and a pile of MIDI files. That's it.

Steinberg It's awful. I still can't believe Steinberg has nothing to help tell me things I have installed have updates available. This morning I realized I didn't have Halion 3 SE outside of Steinberg apps, so I went and downloaded (using SDA) it's standalone installer. When I ran it, it claimed it needed to update my bundled Halion as well as install/add the vst3 version for non-Steinberg apps to use. But the crazy part is that I had just installed Halion with Dorico 3.5 Elements (BF discount, still thinking about getting the full version) on Monday. Surely that should have gotten me the most recent version, but no.

So people that bought Abbey Road One: Orchestral Foundations for $349 before Nov 26 don't get this free library. People that bought it during the pre-order period do still get a Film Scoring Selections bonus but no Aperture Orchestra. It's the BBCSO all over again really.

Pretty sure the rules on the Ton are it must consist mostly of products I've already purchased (at higher prices). 😂

Right now TreeSizeFree says my MDrummer library is taking up 79.2gb. 56.9gb of that is DrumEmpire 2020. Too be honest that's kind of large for as little as I've used them. MDrummer has never managed to convince me it's worth dealing with. The UI/feature set is really confusing. Could I figure it out and find it's the most powerful drum system ever? Sure, but to be honest I mostly just stick with Superior Drummer 3. I've yet to need a class on how to use it. MDrummer kind of sets a high record for Melda confusion factor. I'm pretty sure it's crazy over powered but I've yet to invest the time to learn how to use it. Last time I tried to get the Rhythm Editor to do something was petty much a nightmare (I'm still not sure what exactly it did end up doing). I think if I were to watch a few videos I'm sure I'd find it's not so bad. Ultimately though I really wanted to see a drum kit and it let me click on the drums and hear them. I guess you can sort of do that with MDrummer's mixer tab, sort of. While I love the Melda plugins and use them when they are the best fit for the thing I want done, MDrummer and I have never gotten along. But I'm not very drum focused either. My advice would be to try the demo first and find some videos that can teach you how to use it. There are a bunch of Melda plugins I never use/wouldn't have bought outside the bundle. MDrummer is one of them.

Assuming this works like the Aperture Strings last year, you get it free by buying so much during the sale. I bet a lot of Abbey Road purchasers/pre-purchasers aren't going to be so happy. It will be interesting to see if the pre-order bonus next year is better than this.

The Groove Perk 25% won't stack with the crossgrade price. They are doing the crossgrade price with a coupon and you can only seem to apply one. Adding "groove3" as a coupon kills the crossgrade discount coupon.

MDrumReplacer does show me all the Drum Empire 2020 samples, so I think it does let you use everything.

I so wish they would update this. Or open source it even. It definitely has a more than a few bugs (some crashing).

The best winning move is to not buy anything and jump in at the MCompleteBundle level during the 50% off sale. Every other choice and you'll end up paying more (sometimes a lot more). The bundles are especially bad since you can't upgrade from a bundle to another bundle (other than to Complete) even when they share a lot of the same plugins. Of course MComplete is crazy expensive, but it does get you everything they will ever make, in theory. That said the Mastering or Mixing bundles plus the paid free bundle is a pretty decent set and is a lot more affordable.

Those three engines, Bkav, Cynet and Cybereason are all junk. Honestly most of the engines are junk, but those guys get it wrong a lot more than most.

May have spoke too soon on the quality. Just tried the settings for Albion One and they don't appear correct at all, at least for me. Not exactly a surprise really. I'm not even sure how anyone could maintain the quality for the number of articulations they are listing. If something looks impossible, it may actually be.

BabylonWaves shipped out Art Conductor 6.6.1 for Cakewalk that fixes my problems with the snapshot articulation maps and it looks like a bunch of other problems too. Very nice. I tested the Ark 3 stuff and it looks good. Given the crazy number of instruments this supports keeping it all straight is always going to be tough. But I have to admit everything I've tried has worked.