Craig N

They've been saying VST3 is coming soon on their Facebook page for a while. It was supposed to be available in Q1 2023.

So tempting. Anyone got this as well as Aly James OB-xtreme 2 or Sonic Projects OP-X Pro-II and have any recommendations between them? My name is Craig and I'm a plugaholic.

It costs nothing up front to join, so it's well worth doing so. If you don't join before the initial end date, you miss out. But be warned... The savings are so great you will want to buy a lot 😉 And unlike other companies who do group buys (not naming any names) you won't see a significantly better deal a month later causing you to question your life choices, and you won't find everything obsolete in short order and be hounded for upgrades and nickel and dime add-ons every time you use the instruments. But not naming any names, If you Know what i Mean.

Phoscyon 2's upgrade price ($29) was about the max I think I'm willing to pay to upgrade a single instrument. I don't plan to use a sizeable portion of my income just to upgrade synths, plugins and DAWs. At some point I might just stick with the stuff that doesn't need to be paid to upgraded, other than the DAW and essential platforms like Kontakt.

It's not a bad synth, but the UI was always pretty quirky, and U-He and Softube don't charge usurious upgrade fees for things like resizable UI. I say resizable UI purely as a guess because I actually have no idea what's new in V2.

Is online authorisation such a big deal?

I have to admit I'm pretty happy they finally added zoom to it. In a way that seems compatible with the existing library scripting. I can appreciate the complexity of testing that would have been necessary.

There's an icon that shows three grey panels for the UI, side panel, instrument window and quick load. Click that to access the zoom options and also there's quality / performance preference for the scaling.

It looks like hardly anything has changed. They need to try a lot harder to sell an upgrade at that price.

Yep that's how I ended up with as many bundles as I have haha. Didn't realise how over the top it was until it came time to install them all on my new PC.

Ultimate owners qualify as well. Makes sense to give people another reason to upgrade to Ultimate from Komplete.

Haha... there is no way I'm paying 29.99 for any of those!!! You can get most of those for $20 or less during a sale these days. It's very much like the $25 NI voucher no one ever uses. An apparent extra gift that turns out to merely be an enticement to spend more money at a price you wouldn't otherwise have bought at. Ok I guess there's no reason to buy through NI instead of a reseller then. Great to know!

On the compare page on the NI site it says with std you get 1 PA voucher, with Ultimate 2x, and with CE 3x. The terms and conditions says they are buy any plugin for 29 vouchers.

So am I reading some of the commentary here correctly in that you only get the plugin alliance but any plugin for $29 vouchers if you buy direct from NI? I'm keen to go from 12 to 14 Ultimate and I wouldn't mind being able to pick up maybe The Oven and Kirchoff for $29 each.

Huh, for some reason I thought it was more like 4-600 or something to update CE to CE.

The increased update pricing is what puts me off upgrading from vanilla Komplete.

Haha you'd think so wouldn't you. Then Triaz comes along.

Haha as an owner of EastWest Spaces II, I guess I should take consolation that it might only take 4 years after the release of EastWest Spaces III before an affordable upgrade path appears. Huzzah! $184 upgrade price vs $149 purchase - never fear. Just wait 4 years. https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/topic/16570-eastwest-spaces-to-spaces-ii-upgrade-116/#:~:text=Spaces I owners can upgrade to Spaces II,II outright for a 60% discount%2C just %24149. If I see East West Spaces III in the next 6 months, I'm going to take a very unfavourable view of the company. Very unfavourable.

That's a crazy bargain! Wow

Plate is my favourite plate reverb - love it. And you don't get access to it for free in Falcon, unlike some of the other effects.

I'm not sure if you're saying it makes your throat hurt sympathetically or if you actually listen to any of this kind of music, but as someone who has had a great fondness for death metal and some of the less extreme black metal bands like Samael, it makes my throat hurt too. When I was in my teens through my thirties I could sing along (growl along?) with death or black metal, but now that I'm nearing 50, my voice just can't tolerate it for more than a few seconds - probably not a good sign for the health of the vocal cords. Just as well I don't listen to that kind of music anymore really.

This is what I'm getting back to now. It took letting go of obsessing about plugin deals to get there though.

I had my own uncomfortable realization recently. I added up how much I've spent on music software, sound ware, hardware and DAWs since 2020 when I decided to get back into music. It was a lot more than I thought I'd spent. Like 4x more than I thought I'd spent.

I loved Ableton Live (10 then 11 Std) for a while, coming from Reason then Reaper then FL Studio and briefly trying Cubase Pro. Eventually certain annoyances with Live got to me and I decided to try Bitwig. It was as if they specifically decided to fix the things that were broken in Ableton while keeping most of the rest the same. The only thing I miss is built in retrospective recording.

They don't need to charge WUP. They ask you to buy the plugin again if they do major work rewriting it. And they keep adding new things to their bundles to get you to upgrade the bundles every year or two. Next up they might start emulating drum machines and have a drum bundle. Three analog drum machines you will actually use. Three digital drum machines... you get the picture. I reckon I'd buy that bundle too, lol.