Zolton

I could be mistaken, but I think this description is for Gongster's Paradise, a different (and also nifty) Bunker Samples freebie that's been gratis for a while (and looks like it'll remain so, same as the Scary Viola Pizz further down the freebie page). The new and limited-time action appears to be the "free teaser instrument", described thusly on the page: Emphasis Bunker's.

I don't have prior experience with similar tools, but I was pretty impressed with the separation on a couple of songs I threw at it that are decidedly not the rock/pop style that the "Vocal/Drums/Bass/Piano/Other" categories imply it's looking for. The results weren't perfect, but it was really good at teasing out bass and vocals in particular, and pretty good with drums. (So, the bits it seems it was expecting, unsurprisingly.) I can imagine a bunch of fun tricks to try with it. Playback within the tool and the GUI itself is a little fiddly for me, but for a freebie, it's a chicken dinner in my book.

For a bit of context (and frankly, pretty solid entertainment) on this particular product, there's a recent thread over at VI-C on the SM Cello: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/i-bought-soundmagic-cello-for-10-ama.127347/

This is an intriguing little doodad -- and one SoundIron created multiple videos to showcase, so it seems they're rightly proud of their effort. The walkthrough in particular pointed out some features I wouldn't have expected in a near-freebie. Speaking of which, besides Best Service, this appears to be available on a number of other sites, including SoundIron -- and also including Loot Audio, where it's on sale at its intro discount price of three dollars (until the 25th, I think), and comes with a couple of freebies in the cart, to boot. At the price of... uh, what even costs three bucks these days -- a Tic Tac? Two paper clips? Nine milliliters of unleaded gasoline? Anyway, at that price, I'll most likely take a flier to see what's what. Thanks, Larry.

For those interested, there seem to be a couple of exceptions to the "all instruments / no bundles" discount code applicability. Specifically, as far as I can tell: Cluster, Pendleonium4 and Prepared Pianet libraries and Omni Cello patches don't appear to recognize the code (though "Cluster for Zebra 2 does). The Wonky Piano Bundle apparently does. I thought the excluded set might be recently released, but the code does work with the brand spanking shiny Plankton lib, so I'm not sure. To browse discounts at a glance (though you can't easily get to each app's details from here), add any product from the Fastspring shop to your cart and apply the code. Even if you take the item back out, the shop prices should reflect the code, where applicable. I dunno whether the exclusions are a glitch or intended, but so far it's saving me a bit of scratch. I fear the will to resist Pendleonium would evaporate at 40% off. And Plankton may snatch me, regardless.

It's hard to believe that such an important and innovative plugin -- available for free, no less! -- has so far escaped notice, but for those looking for the purrfect ensemble sound, the Bongo Cat Band is now available from Audio Fusion Bureau. VST2/3 for Windows and Mac, they say. The rendition of Thriller in the demo video on that page is... um, definitely a thing that exists now. Yup. What a time to be alive.

FYI for anyone interested: I've seen this announced in a couple of places today, without total clarity, but to the best of my knowledge this is a standalone synth, and not a plugin. Looks pretty cool, either way. But just so's you know.

Ah, sorry, then -- it must be some different bit of magic. I did a bit of forum spelunking and it seems RCM and/or Concerto have a rich and storied history with where to put the libraries. Evidently, as of about v4.1.2, the libs went here (on Windows) and preferences be damned: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Roland Cloud\Instruments\ (The first lib I installed yesterday created uninstallers there -- but I must have done something special I don't recall to convince all the libs [including that one] and all their uninstallers to live on my external drive instead.) In some later version, it seems a helper app installed with RCM to allow people to move libs -- but that was no longer the case after v4.1.8 or so., and presumably replaced with some other solution in the current version. But I haven't seen exactly when, or what it is. Somehow, in my setup, everything is installed on the F:\ drive and confirmed working in the (VST3) Concerto plugin. As far as I can recall, though, I didn't change (or even see) any configurable preferences to make it happen.

When I select "Download" for any item within the RCM app, it asks me to "Select destination folder for hardware" (whether the download is labeled "Hardware" or "Software" doesn't seem to matter). That just downloads the (usually large) installer, but the installers I've run have put the final instrument file in the same directory as the download (which happens to be what I want). I can't say whether that first choice locks something in somehow, or if each installer puts the data in the current directory by default (or something else entirely), but that's how it worked in my little corner of the universe. If the RCM app somehow informs the Concerto app where the libs are expected, it might mean going back to the download step to set the lib location. That would be an awfully weird way to manage things, but it's sort of an unusual handshake-y system to begin with.

...according to this announcement: https://rekkerd.org/roland-cloud-discontinues-concerto-anthology-series-more-now-free/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=roland-cloud-discontinues-concerto-anthology-series-more-now-free I don't see the news on the Roland site, and I had to go through a series of Roland Cloud Manager app updates (I'd dabbled, but hadn't used it in quite a while), but with the latest RCM installed (and not before), I see the goodies mentioned in the article, and possibly others, available for download. I'm on the "freeloader" tier, so if they're unlocked for me, it would seem any Jane or Joe off the street can also have a go, if you're game.

I had trouble using the code yesterday and sent ZeroG a message via their website help app. I got a message back overnight saying they'd reset my account, and the code worked for me this afternoon. Not sure exactly what the connection is, or if the same would be true for others, but it's worth a try if you're getting a "code unavailable to you" error.

One nice wrinkle, if Sonic Art indeed floats someone's boat, is that it's available in the first tier for the grand total of $1. Not bad, if there's some meat there. I'm currently on the fence, after looking the book up on Amazon for more info. The top review (4-star, generally positive) gives a nice overview, but describes it as "not very hands-on". I'm mulling whether it's up my alley, but for the price, it (and four other books, which may all fully be filler) to tough to beat.

It appears that they are working on them -- but that progress is pretty slow. The most recent post on their FB page (from mid-April 2022) has these comments from P&M as replies to people asking about updates: Which sounds great! But here's their reply to a similar update inquiry on a post from October 2020: So the devs are still devving, evidently. But the timeframe for updates seems to be up in the air a bit.

In case the news hasn't otherwise trickled down here yet, Peter from IK posted this earlier this afternoon over at KVR: Looks like the new (interim) goal is 2k to get the extra time. Tick tick tick.

For those interested in the differences between lite and not-so-lite (according to the PB product page):

I was a fan of an older version of Loopcloud that let you index your own files without an active subscription. I think I may have mangled my library location somewhere along the way, but for tagging and some quick searching, it was pretty great. Sadly, later versions only tag and index downloaded clips, so the app is less useful without a sub. I've since moved to Sononym, which has the sort of "musicality comparisons" -- by brightness, harmonicity and noisiness (all app-defined), among others -- you mentioned. It's also a bit slow to initially index a large collection, but nothing so sluggish as Cosmos or ADSR. (Older versions of ADSR, at least -- I haven't tried that one in a while, but I had performance issues in the past.) Incremental updates are pretty quick, and Sononym also browses folders without full "library" indexing -- you lose the ability to compare in those, but browsing is quick and converting to a library is a single click. For real (eventual) convenience, I'm slowly sorting through the more interesting sample sets in my library using Sononym to browse and explore, and using symlinks to group similar subsets (hand percussion, hits and stabs, etc.). I plan to run the full "categorized" set back through Sononym and my DAW for quick browsing through, e.g., all the ambient drones or perc loops, and also hand various sets of one shot percs/drums to Atlas to make more focused maps.

Interestingly (for personal reasons, at least), both sale codes work for Ethera Sahara Voices, as expected/advertised -- but the $15 off first-order / newsletter code doesn't. That newsletter code works for other products, like Ethera Gold 2.5, etc., though. Sahara Voices seems to be a consistent exception for the newsletter code, though it meets all of the listed criteria (>$40, not a Vocaloid, ~1 year old and no longer labeled as "new"). That said, the difference with one code vs. another for SV is, like, three bucks. It's just an interesting maze of codes and qualifiers, is all.

For Novation peeps, Capsule appears to be the shiny toy du jour for the Novation Sound Collective, as well. The semi-fine print over there reads: "Sound Collective members can download Capsule's Neon sound library for free from their Novation account from 14th April to 22nd June (4pm GMT). Access the 30-day free trial to have all the capsules at your disposal." My impression from this thread about Capsule's launch is that you (eventually) have to pay for packs to use the player, so maybe this is effectively a 30-day trial? Or possibly more, but it's not entirely clear.

Yeah, that's my concern. I missed the discount angle -- stupid quick-twitch freebie reflexes! -- but I own a couple of plugins that provide codes to get Tails or Bass-Mint super-cheap, which would otherwise be tempting. I see that registering the Shadow Hills Compressor gives you access to a $99 coupon for Class A, which reduces to ~$30 with the second login trick. In the recent past, I might have thought that's an unintentional loophole they'd brick over quick -- but with any single plugin effectively available for $31 for the foreseeable future, maybe it's all anticipated at this point.

Yeah, this looks like a fairly nice version of what it is -- a rompler of glass/bell plinks with a few handy settings and extras in the player. There are around a dozen preset variations with various effects laid on, plus layers of birdsong and water sounds, if you prefer your plinkage on the woodsy side. Quiet Music seems to snuggle into a niche of meditative/ambient/low-key tools and the free ones (plus Healing; who says no to Tibetan singing bowls on sale?) I've snagged all have nice interfaces, clear functions and a few extra bells and whistles (sometimes literally) to make them interesting. Definitely niche, but I dig their style.

For anyone chasing down *alltehfreethangs4eva!!!1!*, it may be worth noting that there's also a free Classic British '73 emulation plugin in the WavDSP Analog Creator series on the site. Two possibly less encouraging things, from a logistics standpoint: 1. As the download page states: b. As one of their help pages states: Li'l messy, if such things unfloat your particular personal boat.

Ten dollah, according to the site.

As someone who literally learned what a DAW is around this time two years ago, I don't qualify to answer the original question. But if the experience of a fellow "not-knower" helps at all, I did try out the Dr. Device filter plugin for the first time on a track this week. It was pretty intuitive, comes with some nifty presets (some extreme-ish, others not) and a lot of fun to play with. I dialed what I was looking for in, more or less, without too much drama. The little balls in the XY interface were really cool to fiddle with, though one small word of warning (unless there's an easier path in the manual I admittedly didn't read, if it exists): you can "grab" each ball with a mouse click, then send it off at a desired direction and speed with a click release. But if you accidentally send it off at *lightning* speed, it's very difficult to grab again. And all your audio will sound like woo-woo cross-panning ambulance sirens in the meantime, if you have any modulation hooked up to the axes while you're desperately trying to recapture the bouncing ball. Your mileage will probably vary. I'm just not very bright.

An excellent point! I did just that with Battery 4 a few times, which opened up a large swath of sounds without any fancy effort. Probably the better way to go, for sane people who don't dream of converting a whole Sononym or Atlas 2 database into arcane XML for nerdy (but possibly wildly impractical) reasons.

I'm a big fan of Liquid Rhythm and sincerely hope WaveDNA is able to continue developing and improving on the ideas, though losing David Beckford obviously puts that into question. Based on the news from their site, Liquid Music v1.7.0 was released in late 2019, before his death in mid-2020. I'm not sure whether the company has stated any specific plans for the future, but the software has some pretty cool and unique aspects, if you "click" with them. For anyone interested in Liquid Rhythm, its greatest pain (for me) could turn out to be a huge advantage (again for me, or others who code a little). The software has a nice but smallish library of drum samples, with the ability to add your own. I tried that one at a time via the interface for a couple hundred (i.e., the "pain"), and it works okay, but is pretty tedious. Eventually, I discovered that these "instruments" you set up are stored in a pretty simple XML file, with the path info to the samples. I haven't tried it yet, but with a bit of creative fiddling, I suspect one could pretty easily drop in any number of samples with a list of file locations and a few lines of code to mimic the XML tags. I happened to catch a wild Black Friday sale at BestService to get LiquidMusic for ~$35. At the time, I wondered if that was a final "unload the merchandise" sale for WaveDNA, so I'm happy to see they're still up and running, at least in some form. Unfortunately, while the sale was "can't resist" for me, I also had a few things I'd planned to bu around BF, and I haven't had much time to explore LM yet. It does work in a similar way as LR, at least superficially with the instruments and patterns, but there's definitely more to it. I'm looking forward to having a deep rabbit-hole dive into it one day soon.