Magic Russ

Added: New ICM Amp:  Fire Seeker

On 6/16/2023 at 11:32 AM, PavlovsCat said:

I have the original version of SampleTron, but never updated to SampleTron 2 after picking up M-Tron Pro -- plus I have tons of Tron sample libraries for KONTAKT and UVI's Mello. Does anyone here who has SampleTron 2 and M-Tron Pro think it's worth picking up SampleTron 2? 

SampleTron 2 has a good sampling of classic sounds from Mellotrons, Chamberlins, Optigans and such, but doesn't offer the complete selection of original tapes.  

IK added a couple of unique free expansions.  The first is the Lost String Quartet which is a nice sounding string quartet including individual instruments.  The other is the Grunge expansion, which has some roughed up lo fi sounds.  Some of them sound like tron tapes run through the laundry, some are digital synths recorded on cheap cassettes.  

I don't know if M-Tron has the ability to import your own samples, but SampleTron 2 will allow you to do that.   In case you want to tronify something like a Casio synth.

If you have M-Tron Pro you probably don't need SampleTron 2, but it does have a few sounds you won't get from M-Tron.

19 hours ago, OutrageProductions said:

Could it be possible that they were actually Reaktor 5 instances?

Not at all.  In most cases these tracks originated with track templates I made for Reaktor 6, or Cakewalk renamed the track with "Reaktor 6" when I performed a Replace Synth operation on the track.  Cakewalk says it is loading Reaktor 6 when loading the track, the plugin window says Reaktor 6 and the interface looks like Reaktor 6.

I haven't seen a problem with older projects where I still have Reaktor 5 on tracks. 

Two months ago NI added a VST3 version with auto migration from VST2.  I wonder if it is possible that that confused Cakewalk.  

The problem with AAS demos is that Thiago could make your mom's old fan organ with a broken F# key sound like anything from a choir of angels to the sound of the apocalypse.  The packs never can live up to those expectations.

21 hours ago, Jonathan Sasor said:

I tested the VST3 version and verified that it retains all the patch information correctly on project reload. If you have any further details, we can look into it. 

I have retested with some recent files and they appear to be pulling up patch information correctly.  The issue I have seems to be mostly with some files from about 2 years ago.

I was going through some projects and noticed that in all of the instances of Reaktor 6 I could find, the state of the plugin was either not saved or not loading correctly.  Every time I tried to open an instance of R6 in an existing project, it was empty with no ensemble loaded.  Is this a known issue?

So how is it I go away for a couple of days and half the posts are "Not a Deal..."?

1 minute ago, Will. said:

Where can one signup for some panic? 🥴

Just turn on the news.

Sorry, just had to ask because there wasn't one with P5.

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Next is a completely new DAW designed from the ground up by us over the last five years. It was developed to be cross platform and works equally well on Mac and PC with full AU and VST support.
The focus so far has been on creation centric features as opposed to the more production centric features that Sonar has.
For example, it has very intuitive lyrics entry and song arrangements, a built in sampler and pad controller which is quite powerful, allowing you to set up sampler or instrument pads. 
While Next might look visually similar to the online web based BandLab Studio that's only because we followed branding guidelines. It has full integration with the BandLab ecosystem with integrated browsing of BandLab loops as well as upload and download to the BandLab library. The product itself is quite deep and includes many of the bells and whistles Cakewalk users have come to expect, like multiprocessor support, background plugin scanning and flexible routing. Routing is very simplified and elegant in Next and can all be done via track folders (unlike Sonar). There are many more exciting features coming in future roadmaps. I'm sure in the upcoming weeks Jesse will post more information about Next.

Since you are describing Next as a creation environment and Sonar as a production environment, it seems that you might have a number of users who decide to do creation work in Next and move production work to another environment, such as Sonar.   Can we expect that Next will include appropriate export options?

2 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

"Rent-to-buy" is just another term for a payment plan. What you're describing is a subscription plan which only applies to updates.

They actually had both back in the day.

5 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Yeh, you just missed it. There have been many pleas, not for new plugins, but for the return of old favorites. Some that come to mind from recent posts (as recent as last month) are CA2A, Dimension Pro, Adaptive Limiter, Z3ta and LP-64. Most of us old-timers still have them, but the user base has expanded greatly since the demise of classic Sonar.

Some of the old bundled plugins were licensed from third parties (e.g. PerfectSpace, Pantheon, Breverb). Couldn't sustain that with a free DAW. Some of the old favorites were made by now-defunct companies (e.g. VC-64), so they're out. However, Cakewalk actually owned the code for some of them, or they were developed in-house. Those are the ones most likely to return, now that Cakewalk's hiring. Cakewalk, I believe, outright owns the Sonitus suite (having bought Ultrafunc, its developer). It'd be nice to see those great plugins spiffed up with bigger UIs and a few bugs ironed out.

Oddly, no one has asked for Guitar Rig LE. (C'mon, it wasn't that bad!)

A legitimate argument can be made that nobody really needs those, given the cornucopia of free and cheap plugins out in the world today. But they were a good value for someone just getting started.

CA-2 is still pretty good, as were the Linear Phase plugins and Adaptive Limiter.  The original Z3TA+ was pretty groundbreaking.   Triangle II has an ob9 patch that I prefer to a number of current Oberheim emulations.  I'd love to see them make a few tweaks to Pentagon to make it a little more stable and take standard wav files.

Rapture is still a fairly powerful synth, and while Dimension doesn't have the power of Kontakt, it has a pretty solid library.  While I will be the first to say they made some really dumb missteps with Rapture Pro (especially releasing a 32 bit version when a not insignificant portion of the content would not load in memory),  if you take it as a version of Sound Center instead of the next iteration of Rapture,  it actually is a mostly worthwhile product.

And obviously nobody has asked for Guitar Rig LE because the version of TH3 is much better.

I have fond memories of these because I had a tighter budget when starting and plugins were much more expensive in the early days.  If I had to spend a month with only plugins included with versions of Cakewalk I purchased I could do alright.

I think at this point any reasonable person has discerned that outside of an official announcement, anything more said on pricing and licensing will be nothing more than FUD, venting,  ranting, or possibly virtue signalling.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the direction these products are going in.  "Less work, more flow" is an awesome slogan, but what's in the pipeline to actually achieve that?

What is Next?  Is it just a port of BandLab software or something more?  Is it going to be competing with FL, Ableton, and Bitwig?

What else is in store for Sonar?  The change to vector graphics might not be enough to open everyone's wallet.

What about the instruments?  What gets included, outdated, updated?

1 minute ago, Teksonik said:

That's obvious but the company has had the lifetime free updates plan for over two decades and they're going really strong. One of the most popular DAWs based on the number of users.   Of course no business is 100% bulletproof but if they go under then it's likely the industry as a whole is in big trouble.

They make their money by attracting new users instead of milking old ones like Bitwig does for example. Cakewalk tried something similar to Bitwig's update plan in the past and well we all know how that worked out. 

I'm more worried about Sonar's long term viability than the other DAW.  

I don't think it's fair to blame Cakewalk's demise on the update plan.  I recall having read that they were losing money as early as the Roland days.  Besides, if it's such a terrible idea, why did Bitwig take it up and why are they having success with it?

8 minutes ago, GreenLight said:

I think the model you mentioned is great.

But I think it's important to consider why many people misunderstood the message. I think it is/was due to semantics. "Annual" feels like a very ambiguous word for what it is, it implicitly implies an annual subscription payment. If you'd call it "including 12 months of updates", that's immediately a lot clearer even if it refers to the same thing.

I think you may be giving many of the people who misunderstood the message a bit too much credit.

19 minutes ago, kitekrazy said:

Everyone trying the Adobe model but many have moved on to alternatives.

Like I said in the upstairs thread, I don't think anyone in the DAW world can get away with that.   Those who have tried have been shown the errors of their ways.  I would be shocked to see that happen.

1 hour ago, bluzdog said:

This thread and the one upstairs is like "Nextdoor" on steroids. People bitching about hypotheticals and other people bitching about the first bitchers. 😁

Thank you for reminding me why I don't spend time on Nextdoor.

10 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

Without all the money "we" spent on Sonar to get it to the mature product it was, bandlab wouldn't have a product to aquire.  And the short lived lifetime update purchases I have to imagine added value to to business beyond the minor development work during that period.  

I appreciate the dev work the bandlab team has done over the last 5 years but the product is by and large more similar than it is dissimilar.  

Hoping the pricing model is a non issue when they announce it.  Time will tell.

Come on, you know the pricing model is going to be an issue for someone, even if it is free.

4 minutes ago, craigb said:

I keep wondering if I was the only one seeing the prices on their website...

 

[Ok, it wasn't on their website, but on KVR's...

https://www.kvraudio.com/news/bandlab-technologies-reveals-new-brand-vision-for-cakewalk-57991

]

The entry for Sonar on the KVR site is $99-499 for Sonar X3, not the resurrected version.

I used to use vi back in the days of doing Pro*C on UNIX.  I had half a dozen perl scripts that would automate a lot of the drudgier stuff like doing the cursor and statement creation for embedded Oracle.

4 hours ago, Jesse Jost said:

 

As someone who worked very closely on Project 5... I can say that much of the philosophy that went into the design of Project 5 has guided the development of Next. 😉 

That may be one of the more interesting things I have heard today.

I see that Next offers tagged browsing of plugins.  Is this something coming to Sonar as well?

Will Sonar import files from Next?

I get the impression that where they are going is similar to how things worked at the tail end of Cakewalk where you choose from

a) Buy the software plus 12 months of updates (which Bitwig does now) and you keep software at last updated version covered under the plan.

b) A rent-to-own plan.

It seems to me the DAW market is competitive enough that nobody can get away with a pay-or-quit subscription model anyway.

It would have been cool if Next was a revival of Project 5....

That will probably be me as well.

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Start dragging from the browser,  then hold SHIFT down while you're dropping on the FX bin.  This will extract the FX from the FX Chain container before dropping them in the FX bin.

Thanks for clarifying that.  I remember some time back someone telling me that you could shift-drag to do this, but that wasn't working.  I didn't realize you had to click shift after you started dragging.