Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

That's a neat collection of amp sims. Probably part of the answer to your question is in the answers to these others - Which ones let you tweak at component-level? (e.g, replace a "virtual tube" with a slightly different model) and is that something you'd like to be able to do?

I just remembered @Reid Rosefelt mentioning that the most cost-effective way to get the more comprehensive editions is to buy the Pro version from Joanne Cooper and the corresponding upgrade from pgmusic. I just checked and yes, that is indeed the case. E.g., $96 (Pro) + $179 (Ultra Pak+ upgrade) = $275

Looks like I was lucky. For me it did take a few tries but it worked in the end, about 15 minutes before midnight in Italy.

$96 (Pro) to $350 (w/Ultra Pak) from Joanne Cooper at https://joannecooper.co.za/band-in-a-box

I had never heard before about Numa player and it looks reasonably interesting https://www.studiologic-music.com/support/numaplayer/

Now this brings back the question - If you got v1 from CM and upgraded it to v2 at www.tone2.com, would that count as purchasing Icarus2 and qualify you for a free upgrade when v3 is out? Edit - I found the thread at KVR and the answer is yes [...] the Icarus2 upgrade with extra discount for €59. This upgrade still did not include the Icarus3 license. But we'll take care of you and send you the license manually for free. Send an email to info[at]tone2[dot]com with a reference to this. https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=530373&hilit=tone2+icarus&start=1815

I use it often. In particular I love the Songmaker feature, which is unique to Musicmaker (meaning, it is not available in Musicmaker's "big brother" Samplitude). This video shows what the workflow for songmaker looks like Musicmaker has a free version that provides the basic DAW and then you can buy "feature unlocks" for it (examples of features are: Songmaker, VST support, support for unlimited tracks, track exporting capabilities, etc). When you register the 2022 premium version what you're really gettng is a bundle of feature unlocks plus a few Soundpools (non-commercial licenses, unfortunately) and a few virtual instruments. The good thing is that you can (and generally should) upgrade your base DAW to the latest version (MusicMaker 2023) and just apply all the same feature unlocks that you previously had, effectively giving you MusicMaker 2023 As a DAW in general, it is just the "younger sibling" in the Samplitude family and it uses the same clip-oriented approach (e.g., settings like tempo are clip specific and if you want to change the tempo of the song you have to select all the clips and then change their tempo, which can be very flexible, e.g., if you want to unselect specific clips, like sound effects, so that the tempo change doesn't modify them). If you have Samplitude you can import MusicMaker projects into it. Personally, besides using it for Songmaker, I find it pretty unusable as a DAW (e.g., it has a bug that when you have many VSTs, the menu for selecting them just goes off the screen, which in my case it means that I cannot access the vast majority of the VSTs I want to use) so, after running songmaker I just export the tracks to wav's and import them in Pro Tools where I can work much more comfortably. One "catch" to be aware of - once you start using Songmaker you'll probably want to get more soundpools (my collection now has hundreds of them...)

That advent calendar is interesting, $50 off the Zoom P4 (although it only works at zoom-europe.com, not at zoomcorp.com)

For me, DaVinci Resolve is a better tool regardless of price. If Vegas, Cyberlink and Premiere were free too, I'd still choose DaVinci Resolve. For a video that combines a few clips with images and a voiceover, if you just skip 4 out of 7 pages in the UI it's actually quite fast and easy: (1) Skip "Media" and "Cut" and go straight into "Edit". Drag-and-drop clips and images into the timeline and tweak there the starting and ending point (e.g., make your still images be displayed longer or shorter). Drop them into the same track for clean cuts, or onto a new track if you want to be able to overlap them e.g., for transitions. Drag the little white markers at the track corners for creating fade-in and fade-outs. Drag effects into the fade-in/out if you want something other than a simple fade. When tracks overlap, the one "above" will generally cover the one below unless transparency is used (fades, effect clips with transparent backgrounds, etc). This means that for crossfades you generally want to overlap and add fades in the tracks above, not in both tracks like you'd do for audio. (2) Skip "Fusion" and "Color" and go straight to "Fairlight" for recording your voiceover. (3) go to "Deliver", choose your options (e.g, YouTube video), add the job to the render queue and click "render all" Why am I calling this "less intuitive"? (same as many reviewers saying the same thing) Because as a beginner there are too many choices and pages. For me, until my friend (and watching a couple of tutorials) convinced me to start by ignoring half of the pages, I was getting into "choice paralysis". It also has details clearly designed for a professional workflow where e.g., using jobs and render queues makes sense. For a small project and if you're new to the product, after selecting all the delivery options and clicking the button for adding it to the render queue, you would expect it to start rendering, and would probably get annoyed that instead nothing happens (until maybe minutes later, when you finally notice "that render all button" on the right hand side of the page) It's not that many details and once you've seen them, it's not complicated at all and they won't slow you down significantly. It's simply a collection of little annoyances that can trip you up when you're new (and, as we tend to do nowadays, we want to start using software without reading anything or even watching a tutorial). After the initial "speed bump" I actually find it better and faster to use than the alternatives or even some DAWs (I wish dragging the scrubber cursor forwards and backwards worked in Pro Tools as well as it does in DaVinci Resolve) Anyway. I've been writing too much. If you end up spending 5~10 min trying the steps outlined, to find out if it works well for you, that's great, but if you aren't really interested and would rather not spend time on it, I won't insist.

I was a Vegas user for a long time, and used other similar editors from time to time. A friend who used to work in Pro Moviemaking & TV Commercials told me to forget about "Prosumer" level, and switch to DaVinci Resolve. I first tried it on my PC which had a "decent" graphics card and I couldn't get it to work reliably. Then I got a new PC with a better graphics card. Resolve started working well and I haven't looked back. The free version is generally more than enough for personal use. It has a pretty sizable amount of options and at first I did find the UI slightly less intuitive compared to Vegas, etc., but it was very easy finding tutorials on YouTube for pretty much everything I've wanted to do. In general it felt like the prosumer/consumer oriented products made things easier by putting the common operations at the forefront (at the expense of having to dig through more menus for less commonly used options). DaVinci Resolve feels "flatter" and in general I don't need to "dig" much, but there are so many options that it took me a little learning until I knew where to do the common tasks. I understand being cautions about free products and the "you get what you pay for" principle, but DaVinci Resolve is one of the exceptions. Blackmagic Design makes its money elsewhere (if you look at their main webpage, the vast majority is not about DaVinci Resolve). You could argue that the model is not free but freemium, but set up so that the free part is really powerful. My suggestion is: if you have a machine that meets or slightly exceeds the recommended requirements for DaVinci Resolve, then give it a serious try, otherwise look into Vegas, etc.

Yes, now it does, which clears the confusion (maybe they're reading this forum or a reader asked or notified them)

The link is not difficult to find, just go to https://www.tone2.com/icarus-update.html, search the page for "upgrade to icarus v3.x" and click it. Is it an old link that should have been changed to the new link? Is it that they were thinking about a grace period and then it will change? I don't know. Sure, this kind of confusion causes hesitation, kills my impulse buy, and makes me take a harder look at the price

The magazine just says Which is what I did, and then I found the links I posted above. Yes, it is confusing that the link for "Upgrade to Icarus v3.x or v2.5" adds a product to the cart that does not mention v3, and there is a different link that adds a more expensive one that does mention v3 explicitly I'm in the same boat as Kirean - "Do I even need to upgrade?". At these prices I don't think I do

Upgrade link (66.35 US$ + tax) https://order.mycommerce.com/cart/add?vendorid=200028120&PRODUCT[300973239]=1 This link is from https://www.tone2.com/icarus-update.html and the text says "Upgrade to Icarus v3.x or v2.5", so it looks like the upcoming version is included in the upgrade