Carl Ewing

They were all on sale from $14.99 - $19.99 each on ADSR last month. Entire bundle for like $130. Clusterflux was a freebie w/purhcase the month prior. Now a $9.99 sale for another this month. Safe to say these are dirt cheap, sub $20 plugins, and will be on sale regularly going forward.

Considering they basically sell 1 plugin now - and that plugin isn't really competitive in 2023, and they haven't really done proper updates of their other plugins in a decade + (some of these date back to 1st Gen DirectX), and the dev is basically gone / MIA, it's safe to assume this is all abandonware now.

Received a lot of free shit from from Audient, Soundcloud Pro, Focusrite and Loopcloud sub the past year. It's wonderful. Soundcloud Pro was a surprise - 40% off Arcade annual sub, 2 months free Splice, 4 months Sonarworks, 2 months Loopcloud, 10% off waves (haven't tried to stack on sales yet), 2 months Serato Studio, Gobbler plugin deal (12 months of Eventide Micropitch, Instant Phaser, XILS PolyKB, XILS PolyM, Relab LX480, SSL Drumstrip), and a whole bunch of other shit. Supposedly Adobe discount is coming as well. Gotta love oversaturated market and everyone fighting for new customers.

Pfft. No Waves Abbey Road Vinyl? Clearly you don't really care about your vinyl collection. Hipster level 0. Next you'll say you don't have at least 8 vintage tape cassette emulators. Poser.

What does that even mean? "Winnner". Took me over 10 years to find a mastering engineer I liked. It's not about good or bad, or winning or losing, it's whether the mastering suits the music and improves it (this can mean many things to every artist). On a large project - like a soundtrack or album - it's also whether the mastering engineer can find the through-line of all the tracks and either correct inconsistency problems, or find a cohesion that brings everything together. Particularly across large projects that have been produced and mixed in various states of exhaustion, mood, conditions, and sometimes with different gear / monitors. A mastering engineer should be commenting on the mix and overall project, and there should be a back and forth if there are issues that can be corrected in the mix. This isn't expensive - mastering is relatively cheap. I paid for mastering on my first album on a bus boy salary making $2 / hour. You can find exceptional human mastering today for $60 a track. Mastering is extraordinarily important. There's a huge range of philosophies and techniques - you can give a track or album to 20 different mastering engineers and get 20 totally different results, that all have a strong impact on the final sound. And these are differences that are obvious to even the most casual listener - especially on long projects, like a soundtrack, where a listener may be listening to that project for an hour +. Poor mastering can make something exhausting to listen to. Like the endless submission I get of people mastering through Ozone presets - this shit is awful to listen to. Or like any of Arcade Fire's releases - possibly the worst mastering I've heard in popular music in my life -- and they paid a lot of money to have great mixes rammed through tape and vinyl to give it whatever BS "warm" characterstics they thought they would get, which basically meant "smashed to shit and unlistenable on high quality monitors". Seriously listen to this sonic awfulness: But, digressing. It's so strange to have this critical step in the music process reduced down to some kind of "final sheen" or whatever weird thing people view it as today. This shit can't be automated, unless the music so damn generic and dull that it likely gains nothing with or without mastering. I've put my music through these AI programs - they are terrible, treating the music like some kind of product in an assembly line that can either have a blue or red or yellow filter placed on it to make it "mastered". Every algorithm, every single service I've tried sounds like shit. Period. Which isn't surprising, when it completely misses the whole damn point of mastering. Stop treating your music like a product on an assembly line. Your listeners will thank you for it.

Nice! My upgrade price is $1500, and I own 24 plugins in the collection + Sound Design Suite (40 plugins, many of them in Mercury). Only $1500! What a deal.

What's the 75% off nonsense? It's $199 reg. This is $50 off sale. And same deal at Sweetwater and a bunch of other retailers. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/CompCloudPlus--eastwest-composer-cloud-plus-annual-subscription-automatic-renewal

Umm. Is this on sale? I will buy immediately. Sounds like it could make my tracks better. I could also use a Bass Hibachi to complement my Hibachi Saturator (M/S Pro version of course).

I swear to god it's the same "Industry Review" people saying the same shit on every plugin. And how many frickin' producers does Rihanna have? Honestly - there needs to be some kind of pillaging of the shameless testimonials in this industry.

UI has become sluggish af with the 7.5 update, at least on 2 of my systems. Hoping that's on a list somewhere.

If you can wait, AI sales are almost always SIGNIFICANTLY better in November / December. Best to wait until all these major orchestral library companies are competing with each other for sales at the same time. The bundle sales last year were pretty great.

I have a large budget for purchases if I need them. Most of it goes to hardware. But I think I probably buy less than most amateur / semi-pro peeps I see on forums, which is always funny to me. Although I've ran into a lot of amateur musicians, especially guitarists, who have better equipment than the pros I know. Most of my colleagues, and myself included, use subscriptions where possible. $1000 / year for instrument / plugin subscriptions would give you almost anything you need to do excellent work. That's about $100 a month. Composer Cloud, PA Annual plans, etc. are the smartest way to a) have fixed annual costs, no update costs and b) try out expensive software for long periods of time to see if you even use them. Same goes for bundles like Komplete. These are no brainers, especially on sale. You can tell someone doesn't run a business when they complain about fixed costs like subscriptions provide. Audio / music work doesn't have to be expensive. There are excellent, absolutely excellent free plugins and instruments. There are excellent subscription options. And routinely excellent sales across the industry. This applies to software and hardware. I tend to do 90% of my purchases during Black Friday sales, and follow sales (to see what something should actually cost) and releases over the year to create a large list of what I want. And then wait (usually). 20 years ago, software budgets could go well into $10s of thousands per year. A single string library could be $1000+, and rarely ever go on sale. For that same price, you could get 5 years of composer cloud today - and 5 years is about the lifetime of a competitive sample library. Libraries will either be discontinued, lose compatibility, or require paid upgrades in that time. Economic downturn or not, this is the THE cheapest time in history to get into music / audio production. There are way too many cheap paths to excellent quality stuff. Unless you pirate, then every year is the cheapest year I guess. Haha. But I think people really have to become more disciplined. There is no need to have 10 tape emulations. 14 reverbs and 8 LA-2A emulations. Imagine running any other business where you're constantly just buying more and more shit because it's on sale. Like a construction company that has 80 types of a hammers because of "flash sales". Haha. Excessive software also creates legacy / compatibility nightmares over time, and just adds tons of logistical headaches (i.e. total wastes of time) trying to keep track of it all, or doing new system installs or troubleshooting.

Ah. This is a Mac problem. So paying for over priced hardware AND having to deal with that nonsense? My condolences.

You need timely updates on EQs and comps? Are you waiting for them add Photoshop capability? And I've never had a single problem / bug with any PA plugins in over a decade of using them. And yes, they should add ADC1 to PA. It would be added to my subscription, since I would never actually buy a comp / limiter for $60, let alone $129 regular price. It's 2023, max price for any plugin is now $29.99.

It's amazing he's one of the few that produces string libraries that actually sound like strings we hear in film scores. I.E. Warm, dark and full...when used quitely or loud. It's amazing so many larger developers don't understand this tone, considering they are all trying to create "cinematic" libraries. A funny example is LASS, where all the EQ preset options are "Dark Knight", "Shawshank", "Road To Predition", when you cannot just magically EQ you're way out of really thin and bright sounding recordings. It must be done at the recording stage. Much easier to brighten and thin out strings - than try to manufacture warmth / darkness. Always hoped there would be a library - perhaps in a few years, since it would be enormous - that's not just multiple mic positions, but multiple microphone options with entirely different tonal characteristics in the source recordings. There are some percussion libraries that do this and it's wonderful.

I've always had problems with these programs - Loopcloud, Arcade, etc. Anything that requires significant internet communication inside the DAW, has extensive e-commerce functionality, and / or has absurdly bloated UI like Arcade, seems to cause endless problems for me. Arcade is far worse than most (images are loaded through internet-browser loads in the background...i.e. you'll notice 10 or so internet browser processes in task manager when it's running, and many calls to the GPU), but Loopcloud has given me so many problems. They've constantly said that performance issues (especially regarding online previewing) would be improved, but it's always buggy af. I noticed ADSR manager also has default nonsense like frequency colored stereo wav images - I can only imagine the bloated code behind that program as well. Just give me an elegant, but simple UI, with an excellent database search, and optional image display (ideally there would be none or just a greyscale .wav form a la Cubase mediabay), and keep the e-commerce aspects as minimal and easy as possible. This can be done and look excellent. The Standalone loopcloud app is already a bloated POS (and the search is now worse than ever, with database searching split over THREE tabs now...Search (which is mostly useless), Explore (which is 100% useless), and Library (which has 99% useless negative space on a large monitor), with most of that bloated code going into the native DAW program. Just want siiiiimple. I swear these designers take lessons from 90s era Geocities websites.

Damn. Had to do a double take on that 4TB number. Wish these prices would come to my continent. Could fit 12TB in my mobile rig for $500. Uggggggh.

Not a compressor. No threshold setting for a reason. Honestly - what is your problem man? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Perhaps stay out of the conversation until you get some experience?

Do you often read about audio related things instead of just...listening with your ears? My experience on heavily reverbed percussion is that the plugin greatly reduces that reverb, while the body of the drum remains in tact. That after years of using it lol.

Use De-Verb a lot. It's very qood at quickly controlling baked-in reverb in a lot of orchestral and percussion libraries. Other tools will do the job (other transient designers, de-reverb plugins), but De-verb is basically a one knob 2 second job, and does what it does very very well. And it's not just "decay of a sound". These type plugins will ideally reduce the background ambient / reverb WITHOUT affecting the overall envelope of the sound. For example, I use de-verb a lot of older 8Dio percussion libraries that have enormous amounts of baked in reverb. De-Verb (as well as iZotope's De-Verb, and some other transient designers...Smack Attack from Waves is very unnderated imo) all have a bit different sound / feature sets, but de-verb generally does the job well. What's great about these type plugins is that after de-verbing a sound (especially percussion), you then have a more controlled sound, and can apply compression, saturation, etc. to bring out more of the washed out body that was getting lost in reverb. Some sounds are un-fixable, but I've used de-verb extensively for years to get more life out of dated percussion libraries that clearly had great source recordings, but just waaaaay too much of the room mic in the mix (before mic options were a thing). I have also been able to get something like 8Dio's Epic Taikos & Epic Dohl to sit with Spitfire's HZ Pro close mics, and Damage 2 close mics, and not be able to hear the original reverb from Epic Taikos, but still get all of the body of the sound, which I've always liked (quite similar to Action Strikes taikos, but better velocity control).

No way it's the same filters. CPU hit alone will tell you that. Or, just listening to them. There is not a single filter in Pigments that comes anywhere remotely close to their MS-20, mini or M12. The filters in Pigments sound like *****. Worse than ***** compared to anything U-He, or Serum, or Knif Audio, or Massive X, or hell even Omnisphere, although Omnisphere's filter options are absurdly deep. If you want to test how bad it sounds - build a simple saw bass patch in Pigments. Then build one in Repro-1. There is no reason to use Pigments for literally any synth purpose, unless it's the only synth one has, and it's just for very average jack-of-all-trades utility sounds. Which seems to be what it's made for.

Pigments is my most regretted purchase lately. That thing sounds like $%#@ (in my opinion of course). I don't understand the hype, and I don't understand how Arturia can make a synth that sounds so lifeless (filters, effects section, etc.)

Ya - they need the instruments included - Modo Bass 2.0 / Drums 1.5 upgrades (which many people have not upgraded to from last group buys), Hammond, etc. will draw a lot more people in. The best one they had was the one last year (I think?) that included hardware purchases - i.e. if you bought a pair of MTMs or an interface, if gave you 3 (i think) free software items at equal / lesser price. Not sure why they don't push hardmore more - their iLoud and Precision series monitors are exceptional, and I'm seeing them in studios all over the damn place these days. They could get a lot more hobbyists into that hardware with group buys that include MAX software - like some of their guitar hardware group buyed into Aplitube Max, etc.

Ah - thank you. I thought 500GB seemed suuuper excessive.

Normally joke about OT being absurdly overpriced. But this is actually an excellent, excellent deal. These libraries are pretty incredible, and that's a great price for all of them together. Some great diversity across this bundle. And it's like $150 more than a single Spitfire Albion library. However - it's 500GB of content. But for $600, that's an insane amount of useable content for like a gazillion genres. EDIT: Sale goes till July 24th, so lots of time to check out walkthroughs. Wish I could swap out Loire for Umbra or Khasso, but I guess they got South / Middle America covered with Andea.