Arturia V Collection 8 Deal

[Tim Smith]

Cool. Thanks @abacab

[abacab]

47 minutes ago, Tim Smith said:

I will see if V collection is integrated into the lab.

It is integrated. You will get ALL of the V Collection presets available in Analog Lab, more presets than you would get from just Analog Lab by itself.

Analog Lab makes an excellent front end for the V Collection, because it combines all of the presets from the collection into a single preset browser. You can then use the filter, tagging, and search system to locate the type of sounds from the entire collection that are needed at the moment. Plus you have access to the macro controls from Lab to tweak the sound in performance mode. Then if you wish, you can open up the full instrument GUI for advanced preset editing with one click.

Edited April 7, 2022 by abacab

[Billy86]

49 minutes ago, abacab said:

To answer the question, I don't recall seeing the individual V instruments going on sale. If you want to buy an Arturia synth, you may as well just buy the whole collection when on sale for nearly the same price.  You may get a special discount based on Arturia products that you already own.

Thanks for the reply. I see people on the thread are getting the V Collection for half price? I go the the website at it's $599 for the collection. I don't own any Arturia products at this point, so maybe I don't get the discount? I did sign up for the newsletter hoping to get an introductory offer of some sort. But it's been a week and no love.

[Fleer]

Check the Native Instruments half price offer.  Runs until April 19. 

[abacab]

5 hours ago, abacab said:

It is integrated. You will get ALL of the V Collection presets available in Analog Lab, more presets than you would get from just Analog Lab by itself.

Analog Lab makes an excellent front end for the V Collection, because it combines all of the presets from the collection into a single preset browser. You can then use the filter, tagging, and search system to locate the type of sounds from the entire collection that are needed at the moment. Plus you have access to the macro controls from Lab to tweak the sound in performance mode. Then if you wish, you can open up the full instrument GUI for advanced preset editing with one click.

I just took a look at Analog Lab V to see how many presets I have access to with that. It currently stands at 12,902.

That includes V Collection 8, Pigments, plus a few extra preset banks that I purchased for Pigments and a select few V Collection instruments.  That's a helluva lot of presets to be able to access from one preset browser, all tagged and ready to roll!

[Fleer]

The V Collection upgrade adds two huge preset banks: Patchworks (700) & Synthopedia (800). 

[Tim Smith]

20 hours ago, Billy86 said:

Thanks for the reply. I see people on the thread are getting the V Collection for half price? I go the the website at it's $599 for the collection. I don't own any Arturia products at this point, so maybe I don't get the discount? I did sign up for the newsletter hoping to get an introductory offer of some sort. But it's been a week and no love.

For me, I already had the Arturia license manager installed prior to this. I only had a few free plugins in it, but I was on their mailing list. Getting your foot into their door like this might help in the future. I think my break was I had the free software that came with MKII which were older versions of V lab. Those versions were registered before the sale. This saved me 350.00 and qualified me for their offer. Still a far cry from 99.00 or 149.99. but I'll take 249.00 . From now on any updates shouldn't cost me anywhere near this amount. If they do I won't buy. If the window hasn't closed on the sale, buying even their 49 key controller isn't a bad deal if you were looking for something like that. Keylab Essentials boards aren't as well made but you can land an 88 key that gets the job done ok for under 4 bills US and I'm pretty sure it carries the same software offer. I would make sure before I bought one and look at when this window closes.

[abacab]

42 minutes ago, Tim Smith said:

I think my break was I had the free software that came with MKII which were older versions of V lab. Those versions were registered before the sale. This saved me 350.00 and qualified me for their offer. Still a far cry from 99.00 or 149.99. but I'll take 249.00 .

Sounds like we took the same path with our Mk II's.

I got into VC8 for $249, and consider it was worth every penny!

And yes, those KeyLab Essentials are budget friendly, but definitely not as well made. Heard from another forum member here that had a bad experience with one. His retailer returned it to Arturia under warranty for repair, but when he got it back was still broken. Refunded it, and switched him to another brand. But I can vouch for the KeyLab 61 Mk II ... it's built like a tank, and with a great synth keybed! You get what you pay for. If you cannot afford one now, it's well worth saving up for,  just skip a few plugin purchases if necessary!

[Tim Smith]

58 minutes ago, abacab said:

Sounds like we took the same path with our Mk II's.

I got into VC8 for $249, and consider it was worth every penny!

And yes, those KeyLab Essentials are budget friendly, but definitely not as well made. Heard from another forum member here that had a bad experience with one. His retailer returned it to Arturia under warranty for repair, but when he got it back was still broken. Refunded it, and switched him to another brand. But I can vouch for the KeyLab 61 Mk II ... it's built like a tank, and with a great synth keybed! You get what you pay for. If you cannot afford one now, it's well worth saving up for,  just skip a few plugin purchases if necessary!

I miss my old CME 88 key controller and wish I had never sold it because it had lots of knobs and sliders. The MKII seems to be about as close to a unified DAW/synth controller as anyone is likely to find unless you go the Mackie route or similar and it's going to cost a lot more money. I had some growing pains with the MKII in figuring some of it out on different DAWS. I now have it working well in Ableton and Cubase. I have the keys working in Cakewalk and right now that's good enough for me since I know most of the keystrokes on Cakewalk already and can probably work faster that way. I would like to get the sliders working in Cakewalk. I diddled with different modes last night trying to do it, but it appears ACT is probably going to be my answer in Cakewalk. Cakewalk seems to rely more on MMC otherwise. 

If anyonewants to share how they got it working in Cakewalk I would appreciate it. Arturia will let you map to their user mode as well basically tying anything to anything else. This is probably ok as long as midi cc isn't chosen that overlaps with more important rudimentary functions like the basic keys, mod wheel etc. I don't claim to be a midi guru.

[InstrEd]

1 hour ago, abacab said:

f you cannot afford one now, it's well worth saving up for,  just skip a few plugin purchases if necessary!

What are you saying!  I'm going to report you to King Larry   🤪

[Billy86]

2 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

For me, I already had the Arturia license manager installed prior to this. I only had a few free plugins in it, but I was on their mailing list. Getting your foot into their door like this might help in the future. I think my break was I had the free software that came with MKII which were older versions of V lab. Those versions were registered before the sale. This saved me 350.00 and qualified me for their offer. Still a far cry from 99.00 or 149.99. but I'll take 249.00 . From now on any updates shouldn't cost me anywhere near this amount. If they do I won't buy. If the window hasn't closed on the sale, buying even their 49 key controller isn't a bad deal if you were looking for something like that. Keylab Essentials boards aren't as well made but you can land an 88 key that gets the job done ok for under 4 bills US and I'm pretty sure it carries the same software offer. I would make sure before I bought one and look at when this window closes.

Hey. Thanks for the strategic insight. @Fleer pointed out it's half price via Native Instruments. So, $299 instead of the $599. Nice!

[John Bradley]

3 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

I miss my old CME 88 key controller and wish I had never sold it because it had lots of knobs and sliders.

I've still got a 49 key version of same in my basement, waiting to someday be torn down for parts. 

IIRC, and I probably don't, they never made a Win7 driver, let alone anything for Win10. 

Currently using an Akai MPK261, which has All The Features I'll never ever use, as well as a keybed with too-strong springs for my taste. 

[abacab]

2 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

The MKII seems to be about as close to a unified DAW/synth controller as anyone is likely to find unless you go the Mackie route or similar and it's going to cost a lot more money. I had some growing pains with the MKII in figuring some of it out on different DAWS. I now have it working well in Ableton and Cubase. I have the keys working in Cakewalk and right now that's good enough for me since I know most of the keystrokes on Cakewalk already and can probably work faster that way. I would like to get the sliders working in Cakewalk. I diddled with different modes last night trying to do it, but it appears ACT is probably going to be my answer in Cakewalk. Cakewalk seems to rely more on MMC otherwise. 

If anyonewants to share how they got it working in Cakewalk I would appreciate it.

I got the KeyLab Mk II working plug and play with Ableton out-of-the-box.

For Studio One and Reaper I had to set the control surface up. In Reaper as a "Mackie Control Universal" with the "MIDIIN2" and "MIDIOUT2" ports assigned. Same thing with Studio One. All 3 DAWs now seem fully compatible, just change the DAW selection on the keyboard and it's good to go.

Now Cakewalk is a problem child...

I tried using the Mackie Control as a control surface with the "MIDIIN2" and "MIDIOUT2" ports assigned, handshake disabled, and it worked briefly, sort of. As I was testing, it sort of glitched so I turned the Mk II off and back on to reset, but then lost all communication with the keyboard after that. Tried restarting Cakewalk, but then all I could get from that point forward was a splash screen, followed by an appcrash! 😧

Long story, short version: I ended up doing a full system image restore from the previous day's image. All good now again, but am over trying to control the Cakewalk DAW with this thing. I'll stick to virtual instruments via CC.

Long story, long version: I uninstalled/reinstalled Cakewalk, but it still would not start up without crashing. Obviously some permanent error had been created, most likely in a file or the registry.  Sonar Platinum still started up just fine. Since I knew I had a very recent full system image, I began to perform a clean uninstall of everything Cakewalk to get to the bottom of this. First I uninstalled EVERY Cakewalk program on my PC using the uninstallers, including Sonar, then deleted all remaining Cakewalk related folders. Rebooted and just installed Cakewalk by BandLab. First run, same crash.

Then I just assumed the error was buried somewhere deep in the registry. So I decided to punt, and restored the system image from the previous day. That only took about 45 mins... much better than reinstalling everything!

Here is the old Cakewalk thread that I had tried to follow for the KeyLab setup suggestions. > >>

 

[Tim Smith]

18 hours ago, John Bradley said:

've still got a 49 key version of same in my basement, waiting to someday be torn down for parts. 

IIRC, and I probably don't, they never made a Win7 driver, let alone anything for Win10. 

If it's the model I'm thinking of it has old school midi out/in.  I would look at that route before I threw it away! Midi I/O  into your interface would communicate with DAW learn. Or you could send it to me 😁

@abacab Thanks for sharing this info. I have had some frustration with MKII and Cake . I'm not finished trying yet. I'll let you know how it goes. @msmcleod has some helpful advice. Still digging to figure this out. I won't spend a huge amount of time messing about with it though.

[Tim Smith]

For anyone who wants to know more about using Kelab 61 MKII and Cakewalk, I'm going to take further response over to the gear section as a new thread in a few minutes so as not to clutter up the Arturia sale thread.. The same things should work for 49 and 88 key versions

Edited April 9, 2022 by Tim Smith