Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

6 hours ago, MrFigg said:

This is great. I already have a million amp sims inc.everything Kuassa, AmpliTube5, load of Softube, Audio Assault Amp Locker, HoRNetGuitarKit, Melda Guitar Architect, Hotone VStomp Amp, Klevgrand Stark, Muramasa Electrum and even Guitar Rig 6 Le.

Question is...do I n**d it? We all know the answer right?

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/

8 hours ago, satya said:

Only those who purchased Icarus2 through our own website (www.tone2.com) after November the 1st 2023 will get the upgrade to Icarus3 for free.
The upgrade will not be free for licenses purchased from 3rd party resellers or those who got Icarus1 for free with CM magazine .

-FROM KVR

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

3 hours ago, aidan o driscoll said:

BTW - MAGIX MUSIC MAKER 2022 PREMIUM is also included. I will have to fess up and say I have never used it and have not heard of anyone else using/trying it. Anyone here had a go at it? I realise its starter type thing, but even at that, any good??

 

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.

1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

Considering all of that, what do you guys think are the best choices? Is it still Vegas? 

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)

9 hours ago, Doug Rintoul said:

I can't find this link on the site. All the links I have found bring me to the more expensive option. I wonder of the link you found is an old link that should have been changed to the new link. I think I would be hesistent to use the cheaper link since there is no mention of v3 in the cart.

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

4 hours ago, Mark B said:

There seems to be 2 different upgrade links one seems cheaper than other

Maybe magazine subscribers get cheaper deal I'll check later as an subscribed to Computer Muisc

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

15 hours ago, Kirean said:

Magazine is out. No serial provided for Icarus, only a direct download. Not sure if there's any upgrade path yet.

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

Is there some way to use the GROUP discount and get Inspirata Lite or is it a "choose either discount or freebie"?

My suggestion for Arturia bundle upgrades (and other upgrades, e.g., WUP for Mercury):

1. Make list of what has been added compared to what you have
2. Assign a "no brainer" price to each addition (e.g., "yes, I'd definitely buy it for $25", "I'm not terribly interested but, if it were on sale for $10...". If it's something I'd really get only if it were a freebie, then assign zero)
3. Add them up and compare to the price of the upgrade.
4. If the price is good then buy, otherwise wait for the next version or the next sale and do the numbers again.

3 days left

https://producerplanet.com/us/article/black-weeks-bundle-29447/

Soundpool collection for $29.99:

• The Phonk Phenomena
• French House - Part 2
• Indie Rock
• Organic Soul
• Metal Machine
• Up North
• Infinity
• Trance International - Part 2
• High School Rock - Part 2
• Time and Space
• Midnight Chill
• Nostalgia Drive
• Homecoming
• Dilogy: Cathastrophe
• Burning Sun
• A Fantasy Tale
• 90s R'n'B
• Good ol' Trap
• EDM Bangerz - Part 2
• Action Cuts

Commercial (royalty free) licensing only (maybe Magix is starting to move away from their non-commercial licensing practices? Kudos to them if this is the case)

Over 1000 unique loops, most of them with ABCDEFG pitch variations (that's how they get to "over 7000 loops"). If you have any of the editions of MusicMaker that include Songmaker AI, these soundpools can provide a good amount of of musicmaking entertainment

For this BF, I first sold a few PA F29 codes, which gave me some money to use on other plugins

• Melda MComplete Bundle (I added a few individual plugins and then simply wow! for upgrade prices)
• Zynaptiq Unfilter
• Chickensys Translator
• Xils
  • LX122 Premium
  • De-esser
• WA Production
  • Loop Engine 2 Upgrade
  • Instacomposer 2 upgrade
• United Plugins QuickMuse
• Magix
  • White Sands Beach House Soundpool
  • Quest for Skillz Soundpool
  • Hard Rock Heroes Soundpool
• Bagpipe by Image Sounds
• Ghosthack MIDI Construction Kits Volume 4
• Roundel Sounds Guitar Massive Bundle
• Cartel Loops Ultimate Guitar Bundle

For those cases where the non-MB is not free, if you buy the MB version, does it include the license for the non-MB version?

I crossed off this company from my purchases list when they forcibly converted "perpetual" licenses into subscriptions ("Sorry, we are turning off the servers that the product depends on. Your xtract stems  version will no longer function. As compensation we have added a 1-year subscription to your account").

8 minutes ago, GoncaloL said:

Producer edition is $134.98 right now on Audiodeluxe with FRIDAY coupon.

So it is something to be aware of if you are getting the bundle to get FL producer edition

Good point, I was just looking at image-line's website and didn't check other stores, it would be $24 for "the rest" then (which may still be a deal, but not as good)

Note that with FL upgrades being on sale, this could be a good deal if you're considering larger editions of FL (and are interested in some of the other items in the bundle)

E.g.,

Bundle $35

Fruity Edition - $99 - 25% = $74

Producer Edition Upgrade $50

Total $159, you get "the rest of the bundle" for $9

It's included in Mercury, Pro Show and the Vocal Production bundle. If you have one of them you probably don't want to register the code they'll send. Use the "Get Latest Version" option instead (and then resell or give away the code)

Oooh, I don't have enough compressors yet! Installed.