Carl Ewing

Tried the Retro Fi demo. It's a HUGE miss imo. Much better alternatives in Sketch Cassette or RC-20. And do they have an AI program spitting out all these artist / producer testimonial quotes? It's sad how many of these artist will just shill literally anything on the market, even if they're giving terrible advice...likely influencing people with not a lot of money, who likely trust some of these names. It's shameful. Watch that Focus video of him trying to use it. He knows it's awful, and 100% he tossed in the trash can once cameras were off. This is straight out of a Chappelle Show skit: "These were clean drums that I programmed myself." Other guy is like "Maybe you could hire a guy for that?"

Man - the vocals in that Shymer Youtube demo are super pitchy. Might be a decent sounding library with a week of Melodyne work.

Objective is to create a list of $25,000 worth of software I want, then spend $100 on something I don't want (omg, 60GB of ambient drones for $5.99! That's ten cents a drone! Amazing deal!), and then next week realize I should have bought something I needed, cause now I need it and it's full price.

This might be the worst reverb I've ever heard. I like it.

Babelson Bogo? Okay - I don't believe half of these sales are real anymore. Goba Babble Boozles (3 mic positions) 30% off. Free boozle vintage valves with purchase over $45

Those Omnisphere extensions are absurdly over priced. Might have been reasonably priced in 2005 when there was less competition. As they are priced now, they are asking the price of Komplete 13....for a pack of essentially 4 Omnisphere preset packs. Most of which will be so overused in a year they'll have to release even more expansions. I would pay $99 for all 4. Maybe. Also seems like a cash grab. Should have just updated Omnisphere to a new version which included those packs with a reasonable upgrade price. Noticed they are now offering "exclusive" FX with those extensions, so good to see they are following the gaming business model of developing core features and offloading them to "expansions".

So curious if this means the Lass 3.0 upgrades will be reduced tomorrow as well? Currently says: ...on this page: https://www.audiobro.com/la-scoring-strings-3/

Okay - that's a crazy deal. There's some very good stuff in those packs. $20 for all 20 is insane.

Totally agree. I want that Collection, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. Learned my lesson overpaying for Spitfire libraries that I end up not using as much as I thought I would. I could upgrade my Komplete 12 CE for $400 and get WAY more usable stuff (Noir, Cremona, Mysteria, Raum, Play Series, Pharlight, Straylight and on and on.) Seems a bit absurd.

Like I said - IF you specifically want those libraries. Even with all of them individually on sale, it's still $250 cheaper as a bundle. So when are you going to get all of them on sale at the same time, with the freebie, which will be $200+ after Black Friday? So you'd be waiting for all 4 to be discounted. You'd basically have to wait till each of them individually went on super sale, or wait for an even better overall discount. OP asked for once a year deals, and this would be it. Again, if you want these specific libraries. Could be argued they are all over priced in the first place, but hey, I'm just going by the regular price vs. waiting an eternity for Spitfire to discount all of them even further in the future.

The only deal (so far) that I think is exceptional is Arturia's FX Collection 2 for $100 or less. But you only get that price IF you already own something of theirs. I only own one thing (Rev Plate 140) and qualified. That's like 30 quality plugins for $100. Everything else so far seems like the usual bi-annual sale that we'll see again in the spring. Although that Spitfire Black Weekend Collection (Albion Neo, Bernard Hermann, Alternative Strings and Aperture) for $700 seems quite good in my opinion, IF you want those specific instruments. I wish their was a steeper discount for those that already own other Albion stuff though.

I own all the Albions except Neo, and I also get 699. Actually, it's the same price logged in or logged out, so they aren't giving any discounts to owners of any Albion products...even though I get a decent discount buying Neo separately ("complete your collection"). And, when checking "how is this price calculated" on the Black Friday Collection it mentions that 'complete you collection' discounts are also applied to Black Friday bundles, even when it's bundles of unrelated products - the bundle only has to include a product that will help you 'complete a collection'. Weird! Also - the "sold separately" price of $1247 is without everything in the bundle also on sale. But since they are all on sale individually, the total would actually be $934. So the savings are $234, not $548.

Uggh. I predict at least 4 dudes in black turtlenecks yammering on about felt pianos and atmospheric cello harmonics. Just brings on the sale ffs.

Everything?? Holy moses. Some very cool libraries from this company. Especially if you want to make a Tarantino-spaghetti-western-dub-jazz-fusion-surf-action-movie soundtrack.

Yep. Got the big voucher from subscription - just sitting and waiting for the big sale. I believe someone asked about Black Friday sale on Twitter and they responded "It's not Black Friday yet."

This is a pretty good deal if you're into electronic stuff. VYBZ, Tape Piano 2 and Brain are pretty fun and would be worth the $40 I think. Not much experience with the other 3, although 'Underwater' seems like something easily done with stock plugins. X-Eight seems to be reviewed well by some trap / hip-hop guys on Youtube. But for $40, this bundle seems like a no brainer. EDIT: I often prefer VYBZ over RC-20 for lo-fi stuff.

Did you register it? I bought outside of that date too, but had not registered the serial. Registered today and got the bundle.

Ya - have had many problems with them in the past. They had a massive "server crash" a few years back and lost all registrations. They split the site into two (old and new site), and it became a disaster for updated versions of the plugin (available on the new site) that required old versions in order to update (on the old site). They had non-existent customer support, so I ended up abandoning a couple plugins until they FINALLY responded like many months later. And they seemed annoyed that they had to help me. Click on "support" and you'll see them addressing the "server catastrophe" at the top, and promising a solution. That message has been up for YEARS. Will never buy from them again. Can't trust plugins in a project from a company that poorly managed. Boggles my mind how some companies can't get the bare minimum customer service together.

Nice. This means I'm 1 year closer to upgrading to Collectors Edition v14! And by then it'll probably be called "Native iZotope Collectors Total Bundle Music Production, Restoration and Instrument Suite with free license of BreakTweaker Expanded and Kontakt v7 Premium Subscription Edition 2022."

If a $1600 tree in the forest falls to $49, was it really ever worth $1600? Perhaps, when sales are over they should announced that prices have been jacked 30x. "We've increased our prices 3000% temporarily."

Have both, have used both extensively the past couple months. They have very different sounds and use cases. Vocal Bender is MUCH cleaner, and contrary to what you said, Little Alter Boy is MUCH dirtier...with a few features for more harsh sound design (i.e. the 3 modes + drive). However, Vocal Bender's modulation panel (+ waveform display) and note specific features make it far superior when doing pitch / formant automation. If I need to automate pitch- say C to F to G# - it takes 2 seconds in Vocal Bender because you can automate using notes (with root key), whereas Little Alter Boy you have to automate the pitch wheel, which can be a huge pain in the *****. For example - this entire feature set doesn't exist in Little Alter Boy, and is extremely useful (timestamped): https://youtu.be/v50kOeJBTdQ?t=296 I like the sound of Little Alter Boy better (has a much grittier low fi sound...even in default mode), but much prefer Vocal Bender for complex automation. I really wish these plugins could be combined together, because they both have very useful features, and sometimes I want the sound of Little Alter Boy with the features of Vocal Bender (like amp modulation), and vice versa.

$20 rolling bar stool with padded seat. No complaints. These high end fancy chairs look like they're made for slackers!

Considering the power of Amplitube 5, they are seriously missing an opportunity not releasing preset series targeting stuff like EDM or sound design or non bass / guitar instruments. A5 is an amazing sound design plugin - so much potential to show it off in other ways than Rock. I've used it on synths, vocals, sound scape shit, strings, speaker emulations for post. But rarely ever use presets, because they are quite limited in genre scope.

Haha. Ya, I'm trying to find the catch. I had $140 in plugins in my cart, saw the bundle and realized for $10 more they send me a voucher for $200 - which I can use to buy what's in my cart + $60 extra + access to everything else in the bundle for a year. What the? I guess it doesn't look as temping when the giant sale isn't on, because what's in my cart would normally be over $600.

Does anyone use the yearly bundles? It seems like a no-brainer to me. You sign up for a year, say for the Mix & Master bundle, they send you a huge voucher (like $200 worth), you buy a bunch of plugins on sale with the voucher, and you still have year of using all the other stuff you don't buy? Am I missing something here??