Matthew Sorrels

They don't send email, ever. And I own a bunch of their symphobia's.

I have a bunch of these, too many to take this offer. If you can use vocal samples (which is a hard thing) these are pretty decent. But I doubt you can honestly get $90 worth of use out of it really. I think I average using perhaps a few words or maybe a line per-pack from vocal libraries if I'm willing to use the vocal as a starting point. And mixing different singers rarely works that well. Oddly enough the parts of this I don't have (the battle rap, chants, etc) might actually be the more generically useful stuff. Instead of $90 for this you might want to look into one of the subscription services. Splice, Noiiz, Loopmasters. Several of these packs are available on those services.

You might want to check the UVI's Mello library. It has some nice strings and you can control the noise. https://www.uvi.net/en/vintage-synth/mello.html Also Arturia's Mellotron V (best deal if you buy in the collection, I think you can get a 20 minute demo version to try) https://www.arturia.com/products/analog-classics/mellotron-v/overview Both of which have sales far more often than GForce.

To be fair I only spent about 5 mins doing it. I have the Waves plugins because they came with a bundle, but I've never really used them. It was a nice excuse to try them. Noise reduction is always a tricky thing and my lack of skill and knowledge with the Waves noise tools may have meant I missed something. Z-Noise does work, but I wasn't very happy with the balance between getting rid of the noise and killing the sample. It does have a bunch of options that might have been usable to improve that. The X plugins seemed very narrow, I was kind of surprised at how it pretty much couldn't hear the crackle I fed to it, even at the highest settings. I think they are setup for a very specific kind of real time noise filtering, which is why there are bunch of them. Z-noise is the more generally useful of the bunch. I rarely use the Kontakt factory library, but I don't think it's Melotron samples are all that good. You might have better results finding another library. The replace a single bad note thing can work though. Use a slightly higher/lower note then fix it in Melodyne maybe. You might even be able to fix it in Kontakt itself, remap the key and have Kontakt repitch the note. Looks like you can change the pitch in the mapping editor. So pick the bad note, remap it to a sample one semitone above or below and then change the mapping zone to the correct pitch for that one key and save the new instrument.

X-crackle doesn't seem to see any crackle in the Kontakt Factory Library Melotron Violin, so I'd say it's not going to help you at all. X-noise is also not very useful, I couldn't get a clean sample of the noise for it to be really effective. It can't seem to tell the noise from the sample. Z-noise can remove some of the noise on the samples, but you end up losing a lot of the sound. It worked the best of the three for me. Part of the problem is with samples like this you don't have a clean section to sample the noise from really. You might be be able to get one from the wave's inside Kontakt -- maybe tweak the instrument in full Kontakt to play a small bit of the sample that's just the noise in a loop. Then feed that into a noise reduction system like Z-Noise. RX 7 Advanced did a bit better job, but you can't run it real time. And cleaning up full rendered wave file may not be what you had in mind. Another way of approaching this might be to re-sample the Kontakt instrument (there are a few VST samplers that can do this) and then feed the wave files that generates into something like RX 7 (or any noise removal system, there are lots) and then use those cleaned samples. Not quite what you have in mind. The latency any of the Waves plugins adds makes it pretty impossible to play though. You hit the key and hear the sound way later.

Kontakt Hub is trustworthy and that's a crazy good price. https://www.kontakthub.com/product/the-orchestra-complete-upgrade/ Same thing at Best Service is $119 and that's on sale. I wonder if Kontakt Hub's price is an error?

Sales is on till Jan 2. But you want the Orchestra Complete (yes, you really do otherwise you don't get all this new stuff) which isn't on sale. So you buy The Orchestra (on sale) and the upgrade to Complete (also on sale). At Best Service that comes in just under $300 US. But they don't let you play any currency games (paying in Euros might be better for US customers right now). So other stores might get you a better deal. You'll need to do a lot of math with the currency and the incentive coins/credits. Lots of dealers carry the Best Service products though so you should be able to get a deal. I also think you'd want Elysion, which you can get a crossgrade price on. It's pretty nice too. It's what Spitfire dreams of when they realize how bad EDNA Earth is.

New 1.1 update looks pretty awesome

Well the new presets are easy to find, they have a New In 1.2 section in the presets with exactly 100 presets. To be honest they are kind of blah. But some of them have crazy amount of routing and variations. Taking them apart might be useful to figure out how to use Massive X. But I didn't hear anything that made me go "That's the sound". I like that the GUI scales up. I wish it had a stand alone exe version. I hate loading a DAW and inserting an instrument just to walk through some presets.

I thought they have been pretty clear that's never going to happen.

I don't think I've used much of the ProPack, but I see it kind of like a giant classic library. When I bought it you couldn't download things that sized, it was a much bigger deal. And the amount of content was pretty amazing. Today though, it's hard to see how useful it would be. Zero-G does tend to Acidize loops correctly (more or less) which puts them a step above some loop publishers. Just looking through the content it's kind of like reliving the early 2000's all over. Very heavy on break beats/drums/dance grooves. It's kind of the digital version of crate digging. If you can use that kind of material I think it's worth having. If you use Acid I'd say it's a goldmine (which is why I bought it).

I do. For vocal samples it's about like a zillion other packs. The nicest part about it is it contains a lot of content, including India stuff (if you need Ragas). The bad part is they are almost all complete songs which can be kind of hard to bend to your own work. Vocal Forge does have a Toolkit set of loops with vox/bits/pieces though. The Kontakt instruments are a bit dated. But as far as vocal libraries go at one time it was pretty close to the top of the heap. I do remember using a few phrases from several of the songs in some very bad early EDM stuff (I kind of liked the Bars On My Phone song, not sure why). I think for $26 it's fairly priced. But like all vocal libraries using it may be a bit difficult.

I don't think working demos was a design goal for the Spitfire player. It could have been, but it wasn't. So if you have Albion ONE, but not the legacy 1, and are in the $29 boat, are these worth getting at all? Or does Albion ONE cover so much of this, in a better player, that getting these would just be a waste? My guess is if you didn't have anything though, $58 isn't that bad for what this offers. But it's a lot less clear if you have Albion ONE.

The ACID version of ProPack is pretty nice. I have it on a DVD. I don't think you can actually buy from Zero-G the Acid version, but Time&Space keep selling it somehow. I'm half-tempted to buy it just to make Zero-G put it into my account as a download.

I've really liked all the J.Allen courses I've bought, which is why I picked these up. I think the Groove3 stuff looks fine though, I just wanted to do one course from an instructor I liked. I'm still not really sure why exactly I bothered to get Live 10 Suite, but if I'm going to have it I figured I might want to learn how to use it. If you already had a Groove3 subscription (and you should) I'd start there for sure.

Pretty sure Kontakt doesn't enforce a 2 machine limit, since it has no way to deauth. I think that's a legal thing not a technical one.

The newer Ableton 10 class is 6 parts, available in two classes at Udemy Ultimate Ableton Live 10 COMPLETE: Parts 1, 2, and 3 https://www.udemy.com/course/ableton-live-10-complete/ Ultimate Ableton Live 10, COMPLETE: Parts 4, 5, and 6 https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-ableton-live-10-complete-parts-4-5-and-6/ The two right now are on sale for $10.44 each, so together cheaper than this Skill Success bundle and covers Ableton 10

I bought this the last time it went on sale. Skill Success (where the course lives) is not that great a site. The video quality is really poor, 720p is as high as it goes. J.Allen has a newer Ableton 10 version of the course at Udemy which has much higher quality video (and newer content).

Between this and what they did with the Black Friday bonus library that wasn't offered to earlier BBCSO purchases (so if you had waited to buy you would have gotten the same price, less bugs and a unique not for sale library) it's clear Spitfire and I have differing views on how to treat customers.

I think for Reason 11 they removed rewire completely.

Resolve is most likely a better choice for "All I want to do is make videos with lots of particles & FX with 3D Titles & Text for my music, and some gaming videos." But Blender or Resolve(with Fusion) or HitFilm all are just different takes on the same problem really. And that problem is that good motion graphics isn't easy. So you either end up with something that looks bad or you end up using someone's template (commercial or free). Or you spend 10,000 hours(*) and learn to make your own. I don't think it matters which cheap/free app you pick really though. None of them really change the problem. Just like Protools vs Cakewalk won't really make your song a top hit. The Humble Bundle is a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it, and if you are producing videos it could be a useful investment. Also the Humble Music & Sound Effects bundle might also be useful. You also might want to skip all of that and buy some online classes. Though finding a class that is narrowly tailored to what you need that only uses cheap/free software might be difficult. Most of the better classes focus on After Effects. For example I enjoyed this Udemy class but it's After Effects based https://www.udemy.com/course/motion-typography There are lots of free instructional videos/websites though, but don't rule out paying for a class just because it's not free. Sometimes it's easy to get so focused on what things cost instead of what they actually are. Don't rule out free just because it's free and don't rule out expensive just because it's expensive. * Your mileage may vary.

Emperium Titan and Lacrimosa are both from the same recording session. The Destiny choir is another one that makes up the Emperium bundle. It was discounted a lot during black Friday, but still way too much for what it offered. It's not clear how much better the Emperium Titan is over Lacrimosa. It looks like it has more mics and some sort of legato difference. But the secret nature of the V8P products make it kind of hard to really tell what is what. I've never been a fan of lite products as a rule. I understand their place but that doesn't mean it makes me happy to use the toy version of anything, ever. In this case I think 8Dio is kind of playing people. The media composer crowd loves the idea of "rare" instrument libraries. I'm not exactly sure why, but it has a long history. And since they are the ones that are actually willing to buy really overpriced sample libraries, it's not surprising they have catered to them. Spitfire used to do the same with their bespoke libraries. Doesn't mean the products are reasonably priced though.

Yeah if this were $98, it would be a different conversation. Lacrimosa is kind of noisy. The samples aren't as clean as I had hoped I guess. It's hard to say but I found I'm always having to lower the expression and other dials to get rid of glitches when it blends between notes. Like if you push it too loud/hard it doesn't blend right. If you fiddle with it you can usually clean it up but it's annoying. I also really dislike the old-style 8Dio interface on this. Not that the new Century-style interface is much better. Other smaller 8Dio vocal libraries aren't as bad. But this giant choir isn't quite as nimble as I think I need it to be. Of course it could just all be in my head. Every time I load Lacrimosa up I think to myself, there is a bigger more pro package of this (Emperium in the V8P program) that I didn't want to spend the money on and I see it like I'm driving the lite version. It's perhaps just a mental thing but it's why I've avoided buying Majestica too.

I don't have Insolidus, but to be honest I've found Lacrimosa pretty disappointing. Not sure I'm willing to roll the dice on yet another 8Dio choir. Troels can make anything sound good, but actually getting something good out of it yourself is an exercise left to the reader.

I used ALT+F4 to close Action Pro. Thought it was annoying not to have an exit feature.