Matthew Sorrels

Loot Audio is a good retailer, definitely recommended. Ben Osterhouse strings are pretty good too (I like his Pattern Strings a lot) but neither are really a bread and butter string libraries. They have very narrow focus, which for the price are great. I picked up The Ton but to be honest I wasn't impressed with OA Evolutions (but I only played with it for about a half hour). I'm not a big fan of the whole EVO thing to start with though. The Vintage Keys is nice, but I have so many choices for those sounds, I doubt I'd choose it.

I'm coming up ~$120 short for this version of Aperture. May have to take my own advice and just skip it.

I have the full orchestra one (they had nothing worth spending that much for in 2019). To be honest it has not exactly done much for me. It's a great toy/demo but the articulations are kind of weird (things like Flautando Clouds, Overblown Shorts, Extra Muted,Cosmic Shorts, Titan Long, etc) and its usability as a result is kind of niche. I'd recommend avoiding the fear of missing out on it. If you do happen to find a good deal at Spitfire that just happens to qualify for it, awesome. But don't go out of your way to make sure you hit the trigger price.

All of the instruments you can get via this Play4Life can just be bought out directly though, but a year sub including 2 instruments is a better deal (than buying 2 outright). But I'm not so sure if having to buy 5 years now is a better deal. Guess it depends if you need 10 of these instruments right now? I usually use 50% off normal retail as the benchmark for a good deal. In this case $199 for 2 is 33% (two $149 instruments, even less if you pick the $129 or $99 instruments) with the year subscription as a bonus. The old me might think that was a pretty good deal, but having dozens of projects I built when I had a Composer Cloud subscription that aren't really usable anymore has convinced me that subscription instruments are a bad idea. If they did allow you to continue to renew yearly with the you own 2 each year with renewal (lock in this deal), that would be a good deal. But $1k up front locking you into 5 years is a bit harsh.

My take on it is you have to buy all five years now, during this special. You may not get this special offer next year when your renewal is up. So yes, $1000 now, maybe. Who knows. And no this isn't a "good" deal really. If/when Roland gives up on the software as a service business and kills their servers all these lifetime instruments will quit working.

FAQ seems to say you can buy 5 years and get 10 instruments. But I'm not sure I trust my reading of what they say. https://rolandcloud.com/support

The main reason it got smaller was they switched to using the NI Kontakt compressed format. Before then all the samples were uncompressed. You could actually compress the old version yourself (thought it took a while), I know because I did it. There was a long period before they started offering the updated and compressed version directly.

I stuck it on my 4 drive QNap NAS. Sure it takes forever to load, but I don't use it often enough to warrant having it on a fast drive.

RIP Studio One.

Top tier features are things that are useful to the consumer. Never on sale is just marketing nonsense. People don't like when things get sold for less than they paid for them ,sure, but that feature doesn't help me make music. It doesn't make my compositions better. It doesn't even really make me feel better. In fact it may make me feel worse, since it means I over paid for it. I don't have a problem with a developer generally not putting products on sale and telling customers they don't normally do sales. But that is not a feature you highlight on a moving banner at the top of your website. To date every single music software/software instrument manufacture that has claimed to not support sales have at one point or another done something that would ultimately count as a sale or a discount or a better deal. Even the ones that have mostly kept to that line find themselves in a situation where a better deal is possible. It's a silly promise to ever make really, even if it were kept 100% true. It doesn't actually make me, my life, or my music any better. It ranks last on features I want from a product.

Never on sale is not a top tier feature. Hard pass.

This video (back when it came out) made me add this to my "pick it up on sale" list. Guess I can cross it off now! Picked it up at AudioDeluxe (I had some deluxe bucks and it granted $16.72 new ones)

The PluginGuru stuff for BBCSO and Unify is really a ton of fun. Definitely recommended. I think there are a few other versions of the CbB BBCSO templates (Starise's which is linked in that thread with articulation maps) and a few other threads. One interesting thing about how Spitfire setup BBCSO is you can use a Pro based template even with the lower level's -- which I thought was pretty nice. I still don't like the Spitfire player all that much though. It isn't better than Kontakt, for me at least, it might be better for Spitfire. In some ways is actually really painful to use. BBCSO Pro is very good sounding though and has really good articulations and features. I just think the disc and memory management is kind of weak and the full price is crazy high. If they had offered Core from the start I most likely would have gone with it instead of Pro, but they didn't. So I kind of feel disappointed by it. That and the first six months the performance issues made it unusable.

Cakewalk templates for BBC:

The web pages changed and now it's offering me both RX9 Advanced and RX Post Production Suite 6 for $149 (I have RX Post Productions Suite 5 already). So I went ahead and got it. The Product Portal doesn't seem to support installing it directly. Had to download it from the website. The "Spectral Editor ARA Plug-in (only in Logic)" feature is very disappointing. Since Dialog Match is ProTools only (and is still ProTools only) and now this new feature is Mac and Logic only. I should have watched the videos and read the details and waited for an even better deal.

So there is no price for RX Post Production Suite 6 and the "upgrade" section in my account shows no price and gives an error when I add it to the cart. It also appears the only difference is RX 9 Advanced (which I do have a upgrade offer on). Very odd.

I combined the upgrade voucher with my $25 monthly voucher, got it down to $25, so not really that bad. Honestly I'm not sure there is a lot of meat on the bone for upgraders though. The new UI is actually cleaner and seems nice (don't judge it by the screenshots). The presets seem the same and the sound is about the same. I'd have to dig in to find what's new other than the GUI though, since couldn't find any guide on the website/ads/emails.

The one thing I think is awesome about Acoustica 7 is the crazy fast startup time. It opens nearly instantly. Makes it a winner compared to Sound Forge (even with all the vst groveling turned off).

Yep, does it for me too. And the same process play fine in Nuendo 11. The MIDI event list in Nuendo seems a bit odd though. I'd need to compare the event list in Cakewalk to the event list in Nuendo to figure out what's different. I suspect Cakewalk's import MIDI process has some issue with the MIDI that MODO Drums is generating.

RX trial doesn't allow you to save. It's not a trial, it's a demo. See this page: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/rx8/en/authorization/index.html

No it wasn't a false positive. They were really infected. Something had injected some code into their menu system loading something from a corrupt Wordpress site. This wasn't the software/downloads but rather the website itself.

I only needed this to get to 10. So you all can stop now. Thanks. 😁

Right now R-MIX is part of the Roland cloud but it claims to be 32-bit only https://www.roland.com/us/products/rc_r-mix/ And it doesn't look like you can buy it (only subscribe) (unlike some parts of the Roland cloud) they don't show a lifetime key price. https://www.rolandcloud.com/memberships I went with F-Rex as my replacement for the X2 version of R-Mix. It's not quite as good but pretty close featurewise.

You have to or your old projects won't load. 😭

6 is pretty nice but the key question is will you buy any new libraries? Some of those may require 6. Worst time I had was the short window when I was waiting for Komplete with 6 and using my full Kontakt 5 and Kontakt 6 Player for a few libraries that needed it. But if you are happy with 5, there is nothing wrong with it. But it kind of takes you out of the whole library pool.