mister_tea

wishing them the best for the next years, and hoping the "new era" is not a subscription model

I received an email earlier today, before the Green Ultra announcement. Loyalty Discount plus 10%. A free Green 5 update was released too; it looks like Ultra is considered a separate product. Edit for addition: there's a thread over on another forum including the company: https://gearspace.com/board/new-product-alert/1425631-acustica-intros-green5-ultra-us-crafted-suite-interactive-eq-display.html

Oh, nice. I hadn't installed Trash 2 on a new machine since IIRC it wasn't going to be updated for Apple M1 and would eventually stop working. Glad they're updating it... but I haven't even watched the product video yet. $25 is a good upgrade offer too. But I know that in of six months or a year it's likely to be bundled in an MPS bundle upgrade or similar... upgrade pricing is tough I suppose. For YouTube recommendations, I might suggest the reason for suddenly suggesting the v1 video might be that 1) Trash 2.0 was some of the biggest audio news on Monday, 2) other people who watch music production videos watched that v1 video, and it was highly-rated from before, so 3) YouTube will quickly start suggesting it to others who watch music production videos

after promotional period it goes to $15/month or $149/year

UAD Signature upgrade. It was an interesting road to get there - those $49 pultec, la2a, 1167 collections plus a couple single plugins, discount upgrade to the short-lived diamond bundle, then the black friday piece was the $150 "users are complaining" upgrade offer. A small sting that I could have gone "free LA2A then signature upgrade" but overall I'm happy and almost surprised to have 44 UAD plugins with perpetual native licenses at around $12 per. I liked their work but never invested into their DSP hardware. Upgraded the Fabfilter bundle to pick up Twin3 and R2, maybe one more I am forgetting Redeemed a serial for toontrack's new Area 33 Origin SDX. Considering Musio 1 which has introductory pricing through end of year.

over on the official forums they announced what the bundle to bundle upgrade offer will be edit: this is only bundle to bundle, not anything like "complete your bundle" it should show up sometime in the future, no date yet

thanks for mentioning Larry, I received a code unique for Ash as well, and it's a little higher than the loyalty discount level I am at.

I have gotten some good deals from PA this year but think this sort of marketing can be funny - both definitions of the word. "Up to 90% off" means a single plugin is 90% off and everything else is less than 90% off, right? Yes, that seems to be the case here unless I missed one. I expected it to be the distortion pedals but the winner is crispytuner, sale price $39.99, MSRP... $399.99?! Pre-PA the developer had their MSRP at $69.99 and discounted off that.

thanks! yes it's a very large space and I left plenty out, the three I mentioned are sort of the "skeumorphic eurorack-inspired modular synthesizers with third-party module extensions" subgenre.

that's a good point especially for bass For users who want more presets the MAX versions of IK Tonex or Amplitube 5 are each on sale for 79.99 this month. The Neural stuff sounds good but gets expensive if you start collecting.

What type of music does your friend play? These are good tools but target modern, heavy rock and metal sounds. If your friend is mostly into jazz, pop/rock, or singer/songwriter stuff they may want to look into something like an Ampeg amp emulation. I was going to suggest a free one from Plugin Alliance but it's no longer free. I'm sure we'll see an excellent deal on one of the several on the market this month, maybe even see one for free. For Neural: Parallax is probably more versatile and more powerful, especially if the goal is to make it easier to get to finished tracks. It performs the 3-band split signal, distorted mids and distorted highs bass processing commonly used in harder modern music, inside one plugin. The Darkglass plugin emulates the analog B7K pedal, which definitely "has a sound." It's a unique and good sound, but make sure it's one they want. Edit: the plugin actually cleans up pretty well. So if they're using it to practice or record demos etc. it's fairly versatile and simpler than the Parallax. I might still recommend an Ampeg sim or Tonex as Brian suggests below for versatility. It looks like Neural themselves made a video comparing the two. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfX2DUjLaZ0

searching around on google results (UAD forum, gearspace, etc) it sounds like they will give a "generous" offer to users who already had bundles. No specifics yet.

did a clear winner emerge among Voltage Modular, VCV Rack, Softube Modular, something else?

nice, I will add this thread to my list of the coolest lists of lists of black friday deals. Gearnews is searchable: https://www.gearnews.com/black-friday-and-cyber-monday-deals-2023-dont-miss-out/ A thread at vi-control categorizes: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/live-now-nov-dec-early-black-friday-cyber-monday-christmas-deals-2023-edition.145156/

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One little thing that ticks some little neurosis for me is on their subscription page (https://slatedigital.com/#subscribe) the subscription is advertised in big print as $9.99/month, "best value" -- but it's only $9.99 for six months and you lock into a full year with a price increase to $14.99 for the back half, so the listed price isn't really true! And even then, the total price for the year is $149.88, whereas the upfront yearly plan is $149, technically the best deal. Eighty-eight cents of marketing lies! I guess if you invest $100 into a money market fund...

long post! I own and enjoy using some slate plugins (VTM, VMR, VCC, FGX) from before they went subscription. They're good stuff. But I'd be hesitant to get into the brand at this point with the huge number of alternatives available. Biggest concern is the future -- Slate Digital was founded by Steven Slate and Fabrice Gabriel, who Steven hyped up as a DSP genius responsible for lots of technical magic. But the founders are no longer there. The Audiotonix team and Slate alumni are probably awesome people but at least to me the future seems less certain. I don't like subs in general but especially those where you basically lose playback on old projects if you forgot to freeze. Feels like ransom though I'm not an anti-capitalist. Some vendors handle this well, like Plugin Alliance giving you vouchers to spend on perpetual licenses at the end of a year, as well as having deep sales on those perpetual licenses a year or so after release. When the Slate subscription was released, they promised don't worry, they'll still develop lots of high-quality Slate plugins. They promised don't worry, they'll still have sales. The pace of new first-party releases seems to have drastically slowed down, the new stuff seems different than the old stuff, and discounts seem to have evaporated. I haven't been watching super close though. The pricing on new products is well above what competitors charge... $249 for their LA2A and custom variant for example. It feels like when PA backed down from their brief "some future products are subscription only" stance, by pricing perpetual licenses super high, like setting MSRP at $449 for that first Amek console and saying "you wanted a perpetual license, we listened, here you go!" The Slate sub has plenty of third-party content which could make it a good deal for some. I already had those that I was interested in, also purchased on sales over time. That's all not to say I don't like or use my Slate plugins. I do! In 2023 though, there are so many options compared to re-spending $150 every year. Black Friday is coming up and with a couple years of subscription money you could get a whole collection of PA plugins. Or most of IK's range in a group buy. I can't believe we now have UAD plugins, running natively, in the $30 range with coupons.

that's a lot of toms on origin 33! in the spirit of metal month, using the dark arts (view page source) to see what the future holds, metal month may have: progressive drum midi industrial EZX industrial EKX future is more cloudy on one, possibly ezkeys midi ezmix expansion

Same $129 offer here, with paid-for FXC3 in the account.

MCompleteBundle is under $19.99 per plugin... you just have to buy all 113 of them at once, for $2225+ . Note this is a joke, there probably wouldn't be a reason to have the normal and Turbo versions of applicable things. I think their perpetual license bundles do go on sale for 50% every once in a while. I'm not a fan of subscriptions and not affiliated with Melda but have been impressed with some of their consumer-friendly practices. This subscription gives you perpetual licenses to the complete bundle once your subscription payments reach its price, then the shackles of infinitely recurring payments can be removed, so it's sort of rent to own. Though given the bundle is currently full price and the sub is discounted, this will take 9 years at the moment. Their bundles also include new plugins as they're released, there aren't update or maintenance fees, and "Complete" really does mean "Complete," no yearly new versions, no maintenance fees, no adding on more deluxe tiers with new element names. I really need to use my Melda stuff more. I haven't tried MSoundFactory though I think I have it for "free" as a previous bundle purchaser.

another +1 to signing code. It's the right thing to do for users. And if the bean-counters say that's not worth the cost of EV certs (like Simon mentions, $hundreds, approximately three Pianoverse pianos), it will save the company the cost of support calls for "are you sure you want to run this downloaded thing?" dialogs you get for unsigned installers, and some SmartScreen false positives.

wow there were threads here 10 years ago on these files, as well as unanswered on the IK forum (https://cgi.ikmultimedia.com/ikforum/viewtopic.php?t=30901) IMO it's not great for programs to install files outside their directories unless absolutely needed, especially to system paths, and not great to leave files after uninstallation, but is it true that 1) it's not actually a DLL or executable, and 2) it's just named that way and placed outside of their product folder, possibly so users think it's an official OS file and leave it alone? if so, it's not ideal but I'd have followup questions if Windows does have a "real" msregsvv.dll

Hi Peter, How does this interact with multiple licenses? Could they each be made to contribute 5 activations to the pool? Or listed twice? I'd purchased multiple Amplitube licenses over time to be a responsible EULA-follower in case I am using plugin gridder on a secondary machine, or have a laptop open,. However registering multiples of a product, or Total Studio on top of single products, doesn't seem to increase activations or show duplicates in the product manager. Native Instruments seems to be this way as well, you can just register another serial for an owned product and it looks like it goes poof. I imagine you are not in contact with their dev team though

The MacOS one seems signed. The Windows installer is not signed at all? Peter, would you consider escalating to your developer team? There is a cost for a certificate but it is worth it for your users and probably for your company in reduced support costs; for example you get a smartscreen reputation boost with an EV cert.

Pianoverse is being offered as individual pianos for $130 each (current sale 99) or a monthly $14.99/yearly $149.99 subscription.