Carl Ewing

It seems these recent demos are just for Vista II, but no indication they will be sold separately. Pacific Strings (also Performance Samples) has a solo expansion coming as well, but I don't believe there are demos yet, or indications if it will be sold separately. But I love Pacific Strings ensemble, and hoping the solo strings have a similar tone. I'm also not a fan of Blakus. I am a fan of Cinesamples Tina Guo Acoustic Cello Legato - it's one of the only virtual solo cellos I've ever liked. But it is very limited in what you can do with it - just two articulations (legato & sustain). Definitely more for live performance - especially slow melodies - than programming. I think you can test it out with the free Musio trial. This would also allow you to try CineStrings Solo Cello, which is also supposed to be excellent (have not tried). Virhamonic's Bohemian Cello is considered one of the best - tone wise and playability. May want to check that out. I have not tried it yet though.

Speaking of Performance Samples - noticed someone on VI-Control posted this Legato demo for the upcoming Vista II. Was posted yesterday: I f******* love this developer. I love how they take customers through the entire development process. And have never regretted a single purchase. Just gorgeous libraries. And that's got to be the best damn legato (and possibly solo cello tone) I've ever heard in a sample library to date. By a mile.

They make some exceptional libraries (eg. percussion, choirs, solo vox, orchestra, hybrid, world), that are used in very high end productions. Perhaps stop buying the $5 phrase libraries thinking they'll auto-write you a masterpiece? lol. If you can't make incredible music with their products than it ain't the product's fault. It's like blaming the joystick.

Unfortunately no. However, I think Pro-Q 3 has so many features that are beneficial across the board that it would be worth having regardless. With something like Sooth 2 being an addition to cover specific use cases. I think the question is, how often would you need the specialized features of S2? Versus the almost-every-single-situation features of Pro-Q 3. Interesting though - if Pro-Q 4 introduces some of these AI tracking features of these other plugins they are going to obliterate the market. I'm sure they are looking at them for subsequent updates - and Pro-Q 3 has already been out for about 5 years.

^^ This is what you want to do. You don't need a specialized plugin like Soothe to do it. Just any EQ that has a "match" function and sidechain - and there are plenty on the market. The great thing about the above video's technique is that, once you have the EQ signature, you can apply it to reverb, eq, delay, distortion, compression...anything. Much more useful.

It is a faster process, but an EQ with dynamics (eg. Pro Q 3) works just fine. Harshness & resonant frequencies are not difficult to tame. Been done for a 100 years without automated wizardry. But ya, if you have $200 lying around, it does save time. But relying on it, without understanding how to do it without the plugin is a definite handicap in the "learn how to mix" long run.

The list is extensive when it comes to Hollywood scoring: Hans Zimmer, Ludwig Goransson, Benjamin Wallfisch, Junkie XL, Alan Silverstri, etc. So everything from Avengers to Bladerunner to Mad Max to Top Gun to Tenet were composed in Cubase. There's a good reason for that - particularly composers with strong hybrid styles that use enormous templates. Check JXL's Youtube videos for how his templates and macros / touchscreens are setup for stuff like Wonder Woman, Mad Max, Alita Battle Angel (similar process to Zimmer). IMO Cubase is the most sophisticated / versatile DAW on the market. But it has an enormous learning curve to make use of it's deeper features (eg. logical editor, midi features, visibility macros, etc.). Lots of great tutorials around though.

Only interested in bundled deals from Spitfire & Orchestral Tools. Everything else is covered by PA & Composer Cloud sub, Musio and Komplete CE 14. From OT and Spitfire hoping for a good deal on completing my Albion collection, and hoping for a similar type bundle as last year from Orchestral Tools (BF 2022 they did the entire 0-5 Metropolis Ark bundle for $799). Hoping for an OT bundle that covers their more specialized orchestra libraries like Modus and Salu. And although it's doubtful, have my eye on a significant Keepforest Evolution deal that completes the collection I already have. Musio really surprised me though. Eliminated a huge spectrum of sounds I was budgeting for. Only effect I'm looking at is LiquidSonics reverbs, specifically a heavily discounted bundle that includes Cinematic Rooms Pro, 7th Heaven and TaiChi. Picked up an Axe FX III Mark II this year, so I'll busy with that for a while anyway. That machine is god like.

Another great thing about Composer Cloud. I likely would not have tried this otherwise, but Fantasy Series has become one of my favorite orchestra libraries. What a beast of a library.

As long as this pushes us further to having Tik Tok streams in the DAW I'm all for it. I'm glad Steinberg added a feature that plays the Taylor Swift movie inside Halion.

As an 80s punk & industrial fan I am triggered by this comment.

Oops - mistake duplicate post.

It's not so much about laziness - it's that 100% of their resources are dedicated to the next shiny thing. They are not interested in putting resources into older products that only need support from legacy users. This is clearly viewed as 'waste of money'. They want you buying something new, not maintaining something that has limited or no revenue streams, or requires resources to make "compatible" with other product lines. And they won't really bother trying to improve sales (or improve generally) older products that have flatlined - much easier to put out a new product that is easy to sell, than trying to upgrade and re-market Absynth 6 which has dwindling users and is difficult to market. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, it's just a corporate strategy where most profit is made selling an endless stream of new hyped products that follow music trends with high precision - and only supporting legacy products that are generating significant revenue and new customers. Actually, I think it is a bad strategy long term, because it forces their product line to get more and more generic and less innovative, which may negatively affect their brand name over time. But their marketing is almost second to none, so if they can keep that up they'll be fine even they're selling Komplete Garbage. But it means customers should assume any product they're using will be quickly abandoned if it's not in that "must be generating consistent or growing revenue" high-bar threshold... or if continuing to support that product impacts their ability to evolve other newer products. For example, having legacy support for MKII synths may impact their plans for MKIII or MKIV hardware, especially if those older hardware interfaces compromise evolutions of NKS / Komplete software suite. Remember, as those synths evolve, the backend and UX change significantly, with evolving hardware specs, screen resolutions / visual complexity, which means devoting a lot of resources to make older models compatible. That's an expense budget that gets smaller every year I'm sure. If they eventually move to larger displays with touchscreen and much more demanding on-board processing you'll probably see that support window of older hardware getting smaller and smaller.

$79.99 upgrade from 1. Facepalm. I sometimes wonder what these companies are thinking. Back to forgetting I own this ancient plugin because a bunch of other ones have already replaced it. And for context, the entire ShaperBox 3 bundle is $99 retail. Same with Devious Machine Infiltrator 2. TugGlitcento 3 is free. Glitch 2 is $50. FXModulator comes with Cubase. But $80 for an upgrade. Ha.

Did exactly the same thing. That card was bigger than my current Nvidia GPU. It was enormous! Example: Remember having to move HDD drive bays to get it to fit lol. Luckily sold it before it lost all value. That photo is from a Reverb listing where it sold for $69!

Also Big Fish Grindhouse: https://www.bigfishaudio.com/Grindhouse Has whistling instrument, solo pipes / ocarina / mariachi trumpet, guitars, harmonica, etc But much of the library is heavily processed for that spaghetti western / grindhouse style. But I actually like a few of the patches more than other libraries (for example the whistling patch), but everything has some heavy processing.

TC Native Reverb Plus - came with the TC Native Bundle. https://www.tcelectronic.com/product.html?modelCode=HE120 Basically impossible to find now - was circa 2002 / 2003, only 32-bit if you can find an installer, but listening back to very old tracks from that era, I really liked that reverb. It had a tone that just isn't available in the subsequent TC plugins (tried them all).

This should be the country-genre-specific libraries available on Loopcloud: https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/141-Country I see the same libraries on Loopcloud under the genre tag, and there's probably more crossover with their blues libraries: https://www.loopmasters.com/genres/120-Blues I find it easier to genre search on the Loopmasters site, audition the sample pack demos, and if it's the right vibe, then go search for a specific library in Loopcloud. Also - don't underestimate how many genre-type sounds / loops will be hidden in unexpected collections. You'll find a lot of cool country / blues sounds in Trap, Hip-hop, EDM or even World / Roots music libraries. But that takes some specific instrument searching, and potentially auditioning hundreds and hundreds of sounds. Might even be some spaghetti western / rockabilly / psychobilly stuff under Cinematic or Rock.

When - in any business, anywhere in the world, at any point in history, was it possible to find success by just putting **** somewhere and hoping people will find it? This is playing the 1 in a million lottery. There are SO many bitter businesses around that just expect people to find their amazing stuff, while doing really nothing at all to draw attention. The quote from that film is "If you build it, he will come", not "they". People - and I mean almost an entire generation of business 'people', used that misquote as a life mantra. And the misquote was intentional. Changing one word meant "omg, the message of this movie means I don't have to do **** except just make something. I just made a ceramic pot. I'll just leave it on this table and "they" will come buy it." The movie is about religious faith, not about selling albums on Bandcamp. So. Yesterday, on October 2nd, how much time did you spend randomly searching for music you've never heard of, and stumble on something brand new that you liked by accident, and threw down cash to buy it? Zero time? Okay. Now multiply that by 8 billion people on the planet. This would be the equivalent of releasing a CD or Vinyl to 1000 stores back in the 80s and waiting for somebody to randomly find it (among the 100,000 other albums), love it, buy it, hopefully spread the news. This isn't a business strategy. Making money from music is business. The art is making the music. Selling music is no different than selling vacuum cleaners. Also, there are ways to play this non-marketing "hope and pray" lottery game and make the odds better. That includes understand search engines, how to correctly tag / categorize / describe music for better ranking / results, knowing your audience and making sure those random accidents happen where that audience is. I do actually spend a lot of time randomly searching for music (there are a few of us around). It's amazing how little effort many artists put into making their music easy to find, or prioritizing platforms that don't cater to their genre. For example - edm artists who just post to Soundcloud and not Beatport. And on the Bandcamp subject. I still find it funny that Soundcloud has incredible technical infrastructure / UX (both front end & backend) for streaming globally, but terrible content & merch support , and Bandcamp has incredible content & merch support but terrible technical infrastructure / UX (both front end & backend). It's like both companies understand only one side of the business and can't figure out the other. Just need to get these two companies in a room.

It's exactly the opposite. I run a studio. Subscriptions are a fixed cost. They go right into the annual budget. They save enormous amounts of money in being able to trial products for an entire year to see what is / isn't used, and never having to worry about buying something at off-sale times, never having to worry about version upgrade cost or compatibility, never wasting money on products that become discontinued / obsolete, or wasting time (money) waiting for sales, worrying about flash sales, or other nonsense. I have access to every product new / old from a company 365 days a year. No stress. Access to everything. One fee, budgeted 1 year in advance. Currently have 17 software-related annual subscriptions for studio. Those include everything from Creative Cloud, Composer Cloud, Loopcloud, Plugin Alliance to Office 365, Arcade, VPN, Spotify, some web services like Dropbox for clients, etc. They total around $2000 per year. It is a relatively fixed cost (goes up a bit each year of course, but some things also get removed / added, so stays about the same.) It covers almost all core software needs, from graphic design to music / audio production, networking, web hosting, cloud hosting, for 3 networked systems in 2 rooms. On top of that, there's a capped budget for additional software like upgrades and sample libraries. This budget cannot be exceeded, and purchases sit in an itemized list until Winter sales season (with few exceptions), and very rarely are products purchased without a full year of trialing, or a substantial review history on Youtube (if the product can't be trialed). You know what budget stresses me out the most? It isn't the subscription one. The day Native Instruments or Spitfire Audio or Orchestral Tools offers something like Creative Cloud (that covers their entire catalog) it will be purchased on day 1. I would much rather have $5K in subscriptions that cover way more than I'd ever need, than half my annual budget assigned to "hope and pray that Black Friday sales allow me to buy what I need". With these subscriptions, it is quite normal for software expenses to remain below $5000 per year. I don't know how long some of you have been around, but for a professional studio, that is ABSURDLY low. 10 years ago, it would not be uncommon to spend well over $1000 just on a handful of UAD plugins, or over $1000 on a single string library. You know what I spend on plugins last year, including PA subscripton? $400. See a difference here? The amount I spent on libraries & plugins between, say, 2005 and 2015 is likely (i have the figure somewhere) worth 30 years of my current annual subscription budget. And almost all those products are now obsolete / abandoned. Shelf life of these products are maybe a few years, unless there's a substantial fee for upgrading to newer versions. You want to talk about waste of money? Buying software is a waste of money. I have a legacy system that has a ton of abandonware worth $1000s of dollars so that projects from 10+ years ago can still be opened if needed. And most of that **** doesn't open. Most of the software can't even be authorized. It's almost entirely pointless to keep the system running. It's like a $10,000 brick of garbage. So much for "owning" software.

What is this? A sample collection for ants? I surpassed Gigabytes in 1998 with my Future Music freebies. Let's talk terrabytes. I think I have at least 1/4 terrabytes of bwwaaaaaams. At least a 100GB of house kick boom-tiss loops I've never even opened. At least 1/4 terrabyte of "Xmas Freebies!" and "Retro-Neo-Soul-Garage" guitar riffs and "Rasta Shouts" in a folder somewhere.

Every one of these I've seen in studios has burned out colored LED lights, at least one wonky key, and some problem with the display. (usually one side has color issues). And the keybeds are all dog**** compared to the competion. ****, the SL88 Studio (let alone the Grand) has a better keybed than the S88 MKII and it's like 1/3 the price lol. I doubt this will be an improvement. And there's no point in comparing what keybed this uses vs. a competitor - the exact same keybed can feel totally different on different controllers depending on the housing. People throw around these "Fatar" and "full weighted hammer action!" terms like they mean anything without context. Believe it or not, there are actual real pianos that play like crap too. Never underestimate a consumers ability to spend money on useless features / eye candy over durability & usability of core components (i.e. the actual keybed!). You know they're all about durability and efficiency when they wire LED lights onto the pitch and mod wheels when a paint stripe has worked fine for decades. These things have "will be broken in a year and have no resale value" written all over it. And they'll sell a gazillion of them. Haha.

I like Warble, but only on mono material. It doesn't something weird to stereo tracks imo - like it collapses the stereo image. Have to spend more time with it, might just be something missing. But I prefer it for subtle degradation effects over some of the competition, just only in mono so far.

I have fallen in love with the Neold U2A. Been on subscription for years, but that I'll be picking that up with the sub vouchers. Absolutely unique LA-2A emulation. That aging knob is like magic on low end, as is the R37 / Drive combination for some instruments. Need more Neold releases, one of my favorite developers now.

These aren't even the same thing. Did you not notice the Mod & Wear modules in the Lifeline Console plugin? It's a multi-effect that can do significant (or subtle) signal degradation / lofi tape / vinyl / cassette effects, pitch modulation and could easily be categorized under "sound design". It has more in common with RC-20, and is basically a fill-in-gaps partner to their Lifeline Expanse plugin which does reamping, speaker emulation, reverb, imaging, more extensive distortion / saturation. No way you've used InfinitStrip Wind and Console and thought "ya, these are comparable". Lol. And no way you used Console and thought "doesn't have enough of anything for me". That plugin has a gazillion features that are totally useable in countless contexts. Although, perhaps you didn't like the sound of it, which is understandable. But imo, it's an extremely useful plugin.