PavlovsCat

Every freebie from this developer has been good, but their Electric Keys electric piano is one of my all time favorite freebies. Superb.

Same. As I'm just a hobbyist, and not a pro with a time sensitive project, considering that Toontrack's regular prices are not exactly low, the only time I pick up expansions are flash sales and BF sales. It's great stuff, but I hope they get some serious competition that causes them to bring prices down.

My quick / hot take review of Ink Pads: The download transfer was sluggish. On the upside, it was an excuse to grab a cup of coffee. The user interface, as you can see in the walkthough video, is interesting, but I think it could be more user-friendly. The sounds of the instruments reminds me a lot of the sounds from a developer I own a few libraries from, Beautiful Void Audio. The developer's landing page for the library states: "There are forty five unique pads across five Kontakt instruments." That set my expectations for 45 presets or snapshots. If that's what you're thinking too, let me clear that up. There are a total of five (5) presets (NKIs) and no snapshots. I think the website copy could be clearer on this point to ensure that visitors don't think that they're getting 45 presets. Each instrument uses 9 layered pads. You can remove any of them or adjust various settings for each layered pad. A note that hanged in KONTAKT 7 (latest version) when using the Feedback instrument. I had to re-load the library to stop the sound. The library is 4.78GB for five instruments / layered synth patches. It does seem that the library could have been better optimized. That's not an expert opinion, it's based on what I have come to expect from similar libraries for 5 patches. The file size just seems very excessive for what it is. TBH, I could end up deleting this from my hard drive over that issue. If you like the sounds in the video walkthough, aren't expecting more presets, and are okay with the large file size, I think you'll be happy with this library for $5 -- a buck per instrument. Would I be satisfied with this library for $20 USD? I'm not really sure. I think the file size is the only issue I have with the library. But I would say that a price of $10 - $15 USD and a smaller file size, would make this a satisfying purchase for me.

Kirean, I've never heard of this developer before, but I'm with TheSteven. I'm hoping someone will chime in and tell me this is an instabuy, because it sounds like it to me. Beyond Ink Vocal -- which I'm also intereted in, InkPads, which clearly is using Mellotron sounds along with some synths and sound design is one I'm going to buy no matter what (I'm a total sucker when it comes to Wurli and Tron sounds, forget it with this demo, it's too late to stop me; even if someone chimes in and says the dev is just meh, it's too late; it's not even the price of a Venti Soy Latte...). https://ink-audio.com/collections/frontpage/products/ink-pads Please, I second Kirean and TheSteven, I'm probably going to buy this stuff anyhow at this point. I wouldn't spend time at this forum if I had great self control, but it would be great to hear from anyone who knows this developer and has bought/used their libraries. Otherwise, if you wait a bit guys, that person -- I predict --- who is going to give you feedback on this developer's work is me.

100%. You can do a lot more with them than the presets or even Cory's presets might lead one to realize. If you have solid mixing skills -- (FTR, I don't; I was a musician, not a sound engineer; I relied on sound engineers back in the day) -- the raw samples in say NI Abbey Road Modern Drummer and Session Drummer can cover a lot of ground, far beyond the factory presets or even Cory's presets (which are really just tweaks of the factory presets). If I were just getting my start with sample libraries today and looking for an acoustic drum kit library, I think I could just buy SD3 with its factory kits (alternatively ezDrummer) and be able to accomplish a heck of a lot by creating my own presets using the various drums, layering drums, swapping cymbals, applying effects like the internal compressor, transient designer, reverb, etc. and save the resulting presets for furture use and for future tweaking to make even more kits. Because I don't have sound engineering and design skills, I do tend to rely on presets and tweak those -- and in my case -- I have a developer friend who's shared a bunch of AD2 presets he's made and he goes deep and some of his presets are so substantial that it's like buying a new drum library/expansion pack, because he does sample development and makes presets for his own libraries for a living. I think a lot of what Toontrack and other acoustic drum plugin makers sell is the expert-created presets, as they sell many libraries/expansions that, very candidly, aren't substantially that different from one another that you one could get pretty close to if you just have mixing expertise. I would love it if Toontrack sold additional presets for each drum expansion. $15 - $20 USD for 30 new very different expertly made presets for an SDx that sound good to my ears -- I'd buy that in a heartbeat and it would be a high profit margin item for them. Someone who knows their CEO, please go pitch the idea to him!

The one thing that is a bummer with the Abbey Road Drummer series and the NI Studio Drummer library as compared to SD3, EzDrummer3, AD2 and BFD3, is that all of those players let you swap and layer drums and cymbals between libraries and the NI libraries do not permit that. Other than that, I think the NI stuff is great to have (NI Studio Drummer, Abbey Road 60s Drummer and Abbey Road Modern Drummer are my favorites of the NI acoustic drum libraries; I play rock and singer/songwriter music).

I don't own it, but I know a bunch of people that do and every one of them has highly praised it.

Why? I think using a robot is a great way to achieve consistency in velocity layers. I know of a few sample developers that use robots for hitting the piano keys. Skybox Audio comes to mind and I think their results speak for themselves (they make superb libraries).

Nick, you clearly don't have a kid in college. For those of us who do, we have a much more modest list! Also, as Carl was asking about Conduit, I vote for a video of you playing including Conduit. I think most people here would be into your playing and gear. For those who haven't seen it, Nick makes some very cool videos of him playing a ton of cool synths and drum machines with enough cool gear it will make most of us envious (me included in that group).

I agree, and I never see anyone posting anything about Abbey Road Drummer when people discuss sampled drums. I also like NI's Studio Drummer too, as one of the kits reminds me a lot of how I used to tune my own drums. If you anyone wants a really nice set of additional presets, my late, very talented friend Cory Pelazzari made presets for the entire Abbey Road Drummer series and Studio Drummer that you can find along with his related video (sorry, I'd link to them, but I'm running out the door) .

"Considers themselves a former semi-pro drummer?" First, no one -- absolutely no one -- is impressed by anyone who was a semi-pro anything, especially in the distant past. But I still have the posters somewhere in my basement, I think. And all of my old drums and cymbals. I recently found that a snare I bought right before my injury is a collector's item and in mint condition and will soon be selling that stuff. I have witnesses to Jimmy Chamberlin (Smashing Pumpkins) walking up to me at one of his shows and telling me I was one of his favorite drummers and named two bands I played in over several years (okay, he did say, "one of my favorite drummers on the Chicago scene" not just "favorite drummers" but I prefer to remember the first part before he limited the scope down a bit; but he didn't say like, in the 60804 area code, he said Chicago, and that's pretty big, right???). But I digress... Seriously, I think you've misunderstood my point. My advice was to someone comparing 3 drum plugins, and not knowing the genres they played in, I tried to give the best advice I could. And, as I explained, I haven't used BFD3 myself, so I realize that my recommendation is less solid due to that fact. I was basing my understanding on what a friend who is a pro developer and very knowledgeable on mixing told me, that he wasn't crazy about the capabilities in BFD and was sending everything out to external effects and thought it was too big of a hassle compared to what he could do with alternatives. My personal go to drum plugin is SD3, but I also use AD2 and KONTAKT. I don't use SSD5, but I did try to the demo. I think for someone looking for ready to go, production ready presets for high energy hard rock, SSD5 for it's current sale price, is a really good deal. I absolutely prefer the sound of real drums, and so I was comparing what I know about BFD3 and what a developer friend told me about it -- and considering that, I was comparing it to what I know as a SD3 user and former ezDrummer user (version 1). I recommended that instead, as it has a lot of the great capabilities of SD3, but more simplified, with less customization available, it's rock solid software and I love the drum kits. I think for many users, ezDrummer 3 is a great fit. Personally, as I wrote earlier in the Toontrack BF sales thread, I'm a huge fan of SD3 and love the SD3 ecosystem. I love having high quality effects like a compressor, transient designer, reverb, etc, in the plugin so that I can save everything as presets and reuse them in other projects. I love and regularly use the ability to swap and layer drums and cymbals. For me personally, if I had to rank what I like the best and considering BFD3's history of software problems (that's enough to make me uncomfortable with it) I'd rank ezDrummer3 first, then BFD3, then SSD5.

Do you have SD3 or ezDrummer? I don't know if ezDrummer allows you to swap drums and cymbals, I think it does, but aren't sure. That is the feature that really hooks me deep into the SD3 ecosystem. As a former drummer, I had all sorts of physical cymbals and snares and loved to be able to swap snares for different songs. I'd generally have two or three snares for bigger shows and different bass drum beaters, even different size sticks based on the songs. So I LOVE being able to switch out the various drums and cymbals in SD3. It has made it harder for me to buy drum kits in say, KONTAKT format, where that's not a possibility. Plus, having so many effects inside the plugin where you can apply them and save the presets to use in the future, is awesome (as opposed to having to use external effects where you can't just save them as a user preset). For this sale, I loved the kits in Custom Shop and I've been thinking about Indiependent for a long time. So this sale was pretty much perfect for me. I should be good until next Black Friday!

This is difficult and I think it's dependent on what genres you do. I think SSD is best suited for harder rock styles. It's production-ready for certain styles of harder rock. It really doesn't fit what I do -- and I'm friends with Steven and sincerely think it's excellent for what it is. Listen to the demos and if it's right for you, I think that it's pretty much in no brainer territory at the sale price. I own BFD Eco, not BFD3. I think the kits in BFD3 are more versatile, more natural sounding than SSD, which is more to my liking. A developer friend of mine who is a superb musician who has made a bunch of excellent demos many of you have likely heard, did use BFD3 for a while, but eventually deleted it from his hard drive because he found it too much work to deal with (maybe jngnz could explain that, I seem to recall something about just requiring a lot more work to mix the drums and set outputs for various effects). While I don't have the latest version of ezDrummer, I have the first version and switched to SD and am now on SD3, I would pick it as my favorite of the three choices. I find the drums are extremely well recorded and tuned very well from kit to kit. The interface from what I've seen is far more sophisticated and easy to use than BFD3 -- although BFD3 probably gives you more options. So my picks would be ezDrummer for rock, jazz, singer/songwriter style music and SSD if you're doing harder, high energy rock and more slick, aggressive productions.

And I missed it. So sad.

Why can't that AcousticSamples dev ever give a deep discount on his Wurlie???!!!It sounds soooo amazing. (I realize I sound like a bad ad for it, but I mean it). My dilemma is that I already have several Wurli libraries -- I'm not even looking, it may be a dozen -- and I'm very happy with Skybox Audio's 145, e-instruments Session Electric W (a 200A), but AcousticSamples Wurli is probably, to my ears, the most amazing sounding Wurli (it's a student model of the 200A) library that I've ever heard -- and I really don't like the UVI UI, but I can overlook it in this case. But the dev asks over $90 USD for the library and his sales discounts are pretty small and it's over my mental limit for yet another Wurli library. Okay, I might be obsessed with Wurlis. I should shoot him an email making the case to put it on a big discount -- how about a group buy on his Wurli, then my fellow Wurli-aholics can enjoy it too.

Waves. Come for the free plugins. Stay for the WUP. We're counting on it.

That is correct. Frederick, the original owner of VI-C, led the defection from Northern Sounds as the developer owned NS (Garritan being that dev) became increasingly difficult and combative with other devs. Most developers I've talked to -- and I've advised more than 3 dozen, including the current owner of VI-C -- felt that the lesson of NS was that it's too great of a conflict of interest for a developer to own a forum. More recently, as the current owner of VI-C has used the forum to attack a couple of competitors pretty viciously, it has caused a reaction in the developer community. To be candid, I've actually spoke to Mike Greene about it and his habit of using the forum to attack competitors and how much it deeply concerns developers. I don't know if it fell on deaf ears, but it sure felt like it. Add to that, VI-C has always been pretty toxic, and Frederck and I had a lot of talks about that and he cared about that (he talked with me because he was trying to get me to persuade devs to spend money advertising at VI-C), but he never had consistent policies or enforcement, because he felt that some of the most toxic community members were also big draws for the forum. So Frederick very famously used to ban some of the top offenders, like a guy named re-peat, that Frederick banned at least 10 times and I famously did try to rally the community that he should be permanently banned after he made some absolutely terrible remarks about a developer who is a personal friend of mine (okay, Kirk Hunter). Unfortunately, that crowd is friends with Mike and Mike thinks very differently about cyberbullying and the bad behavior Frederick cared about addressing. Hence, why Mike often publicly mocks Frederick's efforts to make VI-C less toxic. I really don't think it's possible for a small sample developer to run VI-C, a forum focused on sample library buyers researching sample libraries, with his competitors all vying for their money, and remain neutral. The current case is, IMO, just one more big example of why that's a bad idea. IMO, VI-Control might as well be renamed future Northern Sounds. As this forum shows, with good policy and good enforcement, a DAW developer can be a very good steward of an online forum, but I think the odds are against any small sample developer running a forum where his competitors are there and being charged to participate and advertise. It's too great of a conflict of interest and 99% of developers are going to end up showing their bias and doing things that aren't in the best interest of the community over time as is the present case at VI-C.

Wow, that's a very cool post. All of us make mistakes, but having the integrity to admit a mistake, that's far too rare and you've earned my respect with that post. Thanks for making it. We're good. (Related fact that might surprise you. I've led an affiliate marketing and referral program at a major global brand and advised on them as a consultant. I'm good with affiliate marketing and referral programs, just doing it where there's full disclosures and it's permitted by forum policy. )

Thanks for the recommendations. I should probably have some time on Sunday to give the preamp a try. I'm not proud to admit it, but I don't know much about mixing and rely heavily on AI tools from Izotope and Sonnible when it comes to limiters. Although, it's pretty hard to pass up a respected dev charging only $14.50 for a nice preamp or a limiter, so who knows.

Just a quick, simple thought. I'm not a fan of some of Toontrack's practices. I find things like their limited-time upgrade of SD2 to SD3 and forever taking away an upgrade discount very customer-unfriendly and just plain terrible idea from customer loyalty and brand image perspectives. On a much lesser scale, I find their lack of offering upgrade pricing from EZX to the related SDX is disappointing and also a missed promotional opportunity for Toontrack to upsell customers. Instead, Toontrack released a $15 per title resale fee. I would bet that nearly 100% of SD3 customers who own EZXs that have contemplated buying the related SDXs would agree with me that getting a discount on the related SDX would make them more inclined to upgrade and would also result in them feeling better about the brand. Agree or disagree?

Thanks for that insight. I have owned Custom & Vintage since it came out, which I'm guessing is more than a decade ago. I think Chris Whitten was involved in that one (Chris and I used to chat a bit at a drummers forum years ago, super cool guy who's played drums with a lot of artists I am fond of, like Paul McCartney). My honest take is that it includes a lot of drums I love in real life, but some of the recordings aren't great and the mixes can be dull and uninspired. When it came out, I was pretty excited about it. But with other Toontrack libraries to compare, I don't think it's in the same ballpark. The mixes are really meh to me and a couple, to my ears, are just plain bad (one preset named after a band used for the demos sounds downright awful to me; but of course, everything is subjective). Listen closely to the demos and the preset walkthroughs. I've ended up creating a lot of my own kits and tweaking mixes, but I often just take snares from C&V into other SDx and EZx I like a lot better.

I wish we had a permanent section in this forum that featured the reviews from the regulars here, like you, like Carl, like kitkrazy, giving their honest reviews. That is why I started doing it, because except for Cory Pellazari -- who I regret to say is no longer with us -- influencers are a terrible outlet to research sample libraries. They're influenced by free products, developer sponsorships and direct cash from the developers whose products they review. Even when nano-influencers review libraries, they're getting free product and hoping to get more free product in the future, so they're not going to trash a library they know isn't very good from a developer they have a relationship with. Whereas we're going to be honest. I've written some pretty savage reviews on libraries at this forum and you just shared your honest disappointment with a library. You'd never see that from an influencer for a product from a developer given them NFRs, sponsorship money or direct cash -- even when they're not getting cash payments, because going that far and saying that a library was a flat out disappointment will damage their relationship with a developer (the standard influencer grift is stating a couple of things about a library you're not crazy about, to create the appearance of honesty and build trust with followers). The best source of honest reviews are people right here. And while we don't really know one another, I think an indicator of someone's objectivity is often revealed when they don't praise everything. When they find some libraries that they feel were disappointments.

That's a very useful list, Bad Penguin or should I say Good Penguin? I bought EZX Custom Shop yesterday through Thomann and shared a link in an earlier Toontrack sales thread where someone mentioned that if you use BestService you can use their rewards (which I'm sure I have and didn't think of before his post) to bring the price down. So, I'm 90% sure that I'm going to buy SDX Indiepdendent before the weekend is over and will be comparing the two stores. I'm guessing the difference will be pretty small, but I'm still going to opt for the best deal.

They put Indiependent on sale. That's what I was waiting for. I bought Custom Shop EZX yesterday. I think that gives me all the drums I need for the rest of 2023, except for some KONTAKT kits from Analogue Drums. Thanks again, Larry. While I get Toontrack emails, I rarely pay attention to marketing emails.

I realize when I make a post like that, the person I've called out will be sure to troll me or make a nasty post about me in the future. Still think it's worth it. The reality is, most people don't want to confront bad behavior in forums, I don't either, but if we want it to stop and discourage future bad behavior, someone has to take action. Keep that in mind when you see that guy trolling me / ripping on me in the future, because it almost certainly will happen.