MusicMan

9 hours ago, Walter Cruz said:

VST3 already available! (plus license moved to ilok)

 

PSP Xenon
Version History

***************
**** 1.6.0 ****
03 FEB 2022

That's so good to see! I knew it was going to be around that time and checked right before posting and it still wasn't up yet. Just got the email from them today and installing now ?

An oldie, but a goodie ?

VST3 should be very close for this one too ?

57 minutes ago, Kurre said:

Ok. Thanks for the info about it being crippleware.

Don't see the need for hording plugins that's not "really" fully functional when there's so much good freeware around.

I thought what they were saying is that these are being given away for free, as they're older versions, but prior to that and also with their current versions, the demos are a perpetual trial.

3 minutes ago, LAGinz said:

Would be nice to get a 20th anniversary CPU fix.

It would be nice, but then it's the internal oversampling that causes that from my understanding, so if they dropped that, the aliasing police and Plugindoctor brigade would be up in arms, so either way they'll get a hard time ?

7 hours ago, mibby said:

+1  This is great. They had Autoformer as a freebie at PB which I snapped up. I had been watching for a sale on it because I like FrontDAW so well.  Now if Autoformer just had a filter section...   ?

I picked up Autoformer for free too and really should go back and spend some more time checking that one out. Thanks for the reminder! Most of their plugins are quite decent ?

I got this free a while back, but I really like this one! Holds its own against many of the popular choices. Very underrated ?

On 2/12/2022 at 11:23 AM, Fleer said:

That said, I’d never WUP. Evah. 

If everyone stops paying them, they will stop charging for them.. bad PR for no WUP income is an even worse business model than they already have  ?

That's how I got my copy of Vertigo VSM-3 too.. it was the bundle on a deeper discount than normal and then loyalty voucher.. a ridiculously good deal  ?

This stacked with a loyalty, or survey voucher is a no brainer.

1 hour ago, Fleer said:

Should be $49. Should be $49. Should be $49. 
 

 

 

Is it $49 yet?

I picked it up from Plugin Boutique for $95 and got Audiority Polycomp multiband compressor free. It was the cheapest I'd ever seen it. Not by much and was a pricing mistake they corrected a few hours later.. I do wish they made more of a mistake and it was $49 though ?

22 minutes ago, mibby said:

 

What is it that you guys like so much about this compressor?  It's certainly NOT its clean easy to use interface. 

It's a Swiss army knife of a compressor with mid/side, built in clipper and some controls for shaping the tone. It can be really transparent, but also allow you to modify the overall sound quite heavily in a direction you choose. The workflow is fluid.

I do get your point about the interface! Haha.. for me this in ways reminds me of Tokyo Dawn Labs TDR Kotelnikov.. these two are probably the only compressors where I've felt I need to read the manual.. and maybe watch a tutorial ?

And not everyone gets mid/side either.. but spend the time learning this one and it's got great power and versatility and of course the most important.. great sound ?

They've released so many flashy compressors since this one, yet whenever I test them, this still holds its own and I often reach for it in preference to many of their others ?

Great synth. Surprised the latest version is still only VST2.

3 hours ago, Michael Vovel (MUDGEL) said:

As the title suggest- Can anyone  recommend a dealer offering a good discount on (WUP) Waves Update Plan? Any help appreciated.

 

Thanks.

Is there a particular reason you're needing WUP and how many plugins are you looking at covering?

Sometimes it's cheaper to just buy the plugs again, or upgrade to a bundle ?

On 2/5/2022 at 5:19 AM, abacab said:

Live 11 allows one defined VST2 folder path, and also allows you to select a custom VST3 path. I leave the VST3 at the default location.

For an extra VST2 path, what you can do is place a Windows shortcut in Live's defined VST2 path that points to another folder, such as the Cakewalk VST2 path in Program files. That works for me here. Then they show up in Live's Plug-ins browser as VST listed under "Cakewalk VSTPlugins - shortcut".

Oh that is what I was thinking of! I do remember vaguely there was a workaround. Seemed odd they wouldn't just allow people to add more paths, but at least the workarounds were pretty effective.

4 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

I recently bought Waves' lofi plugin and just  demoed the RC-20. There's no comparison. The RC-20 sounds incredibly better than the Waves plugin to my ears. It's hard to believe the RC-20 is this cheap. I bought it. 

I'm sure we've advised people enough times not to buy Waves plugins ??

19 minutes ago, Craig N said:

I prefer VST2 for the simple reason that Ableton Live has an absolutely rubbish means of organising plugins, you can't reorganise VST3 at all. VST2 you can at least organise into a custom folder tree, which I do. 

I tend to forget about the VST3 only plugins I own, because I hardly ever look outside of my VST2 folders. 

It's unfortunate. I wish they'd allow a unified organisation of plugins somehow, like other DAWs seem to manage to. 

That's a good point. For me where they sit inside the VST folder on the hard drive shouldn't matter, as all DAWs should allow for custom groups/folders. Some plugins aren't just a compressor, or just a saturator, they could be looked at as both, or more, so I might want them in multiple categories.

For some reason ages ago, I seem to remember Live only allowing me to configure one VST folder path.. doesn't sound right though, so I may be remembering that incorrectly ?

2 hours ago, simon said:

at the risk of derailing the thread (sorry) - I'm not sure I totally agree with your analysis.

VST3 isn't 'better' in every regards...actually lots of developers find it much worse than VST2.   And VST3 is nearly as old as VST2, you could say it's just as. 'legacy'...there are good reasons that many devs failed or refused to move over to it.

There were other factors in dropping DX/32bit plugs that don't apply here (IMO)...but even then, SB created a wrapper in Cubase (up to version 8?) to run 32 bit plugins to ease the transition.

I don't treat audio/studio software or technology to be 'disposable' in the way people treat cell phones and other modern technology.   In my view there needs to be a very compelling reason to change a good working standard that is universally adopted and works well....MIDI 1.0 would be a good example of this.  It's not perfect but it works well in practice.    Steinberg should have open sourced VST2 when it was released - they should NOT be the guardians of the format...it's a conflict of interest.  Imagine if Yamaha owned the MIDI standard and told people companies they couldn't use it any more or made it difficult for them to develop products using the technology.  

Don't be fooled - Steinberg are not dropping VST2 because they can't make it work - there are other political and business reasons for this.  Essentially forcing developers (check the T+C of the VST3 SDK) to move  to VST3 are 100% to benefit Steinberg as a business NOT to help or support the 3rd party developers, the users or customer.   

I'm an early adopter and welcome positive change but this is a cynical and unpleasant move worthy of Apple not Steinberg.

I say this a very, very, very long term and loyal Steinberg customer. 

(apologies for the rant ! - promise not to whinge about it any more)

 

Haha.. no apologies needed for the rant ?

It's good to look at all sides. I think you somewhat misinterpreted me there. I in no way said that VST3 is better in every regard. There are definitely some benefits though beyond the VST2 standard. But I'm more saying adopting a single standard makes more sense. I also don't think SB is doing it to make the lives of other Devs easier, that's just an incidental benefit that comes with it.

Incidentally, VST2 was released in 1999, while VST3 was 2008, so it really is quite a bit older.

I definitely agree it should be an open standard. Maybe that would also help adoption in Protools etc. Having multiple standards in general, makes little sense and just leads to extra coding, testing and disk space.

I did have a good laugh at the Apple comment too ? That is somewhat something they would do!

I also agree they shouldn't be commodity, but that's the nature of computers, software and tech. Analogue hardware wins that battle for sure.

I do half wonder if they might have fired it off as a threat to get some of the Devs moving and then there could be an extension, but I guess we'll have to see ?

14 minutes ago, simon said:

very true

although I don't want to lose Altiverb XL (or Indoor) or the Gforce stuff  ...or Jamstix....or Addictive drums...or Superior Drummer...etc

I'm sure some will get a PAID (?) update and I'd probably update anyway but still very poor show by Steinberg (and it's 99% political NOT technical, trust me I've spoken to people with much more inside knowledge than me).   Bear in mind VST2 working well in other hosts...including M1 native.

I could rant much more about some of SB decisions - and it's not the developers fault, but I'll just leave it there

In the meantime I'm avoiding non-VST3 plugs...which is exactly what SB wants me to do ?

 

Some valid points for sure and I definitely won't be happy losing access to some, but VST3 has been around since about 2008 I think, so that's plenty of time for developers to pull their finger out.

SB stopped issuing licences for the SDK for VST2 in 2018(?)

If they don't do it, they will need to support them for the next 20 years! It was the same as dropping support for Windows XP that many developers eventually did, almost some 20 years after its release as well ?

Same with dropping 32bit plugins.

There's some annoyance to get there, but once everything is just x64/VST3 (and some other formats for those other crappy DAWs (Jokes!), then it will be so much less work for all of the Devs and they can focus on core compatibilities. Probably even release new Mac compatible updates faster as they don't need to dev and test VST2, VST3, etc.

It will also stop Devs installing VST2 plugins by default that I end up having to delete as I only use VST3 if they've got it! It will reduce the myriad of random folders around my hard drive that these guys install into as well, as there's only one file path for the standard (two if you include 32bit) ?

So yep, it sucks a little, but will actually be a lot better in so many ways ?

Just now, ZincT said:

Yeah, it's not ideal but I think of it as a workaround if worse comes to worse.

Even at this price I'm wondering if I really need it as I have Vybz which does similar things.

Completely agreed and a good workaround especially for some of those great plugins we already own and will never get updated.

Im going to go out on a limb here and guess that almost none of us really need any more plugins.. of course that doesn't seem to be stopping us though! Haha..

I have plenty in this space and if it was VST3, I suspect I probably would have bought it anyway at that price ?

41 minutes ago, ZincT said:

You would also still be able to run VST2s in a VST3 wrapper app, something like Kushview Element, DDMF Metaplugin or PG Unify (assuming that they carried on supporting VST2). 

I've thought about this as an option too, but of course your existing projects won't open up with them, so you would lose all your settings. Unless you started saving a preset for every instance of RC-20 ?

Apart from that not a bad option.

I think this might only be VST2 which I'm starting to pay a little more attention to now, given Steinberg's announced they're discontinuing support for it and other DAWs will eventually start to follow.

I'd almost consider this one, but pretty sure there's no VST3 and has a smell of abandonware, so it's possibly never coming, or might be a paid update.

It's listed above and on the site, but some Mac users might want to pay particular attention to this point:

*Minimonsta DOES NOT WORK with macOS 11 (Big Sur).

54 minutes ago, Fleer said:

Well …

I said I wasn’t going to get another SSL plug. 
I said the one by SSL would have to suffice. 
 

Hell no. 
Just got another SSL plug. 
The SSL to end SSL: the new Slate FG-DYN. 

Simply wonderful. Even includes a gate. 

 

If that wasn't Slate I might consider it ?

Actually I shouldn't consider it anyway... I own plenty of channel strips, some of which I've barely used!

I did buy this 9000J semi recently though for a similar price and I do like that one ?

1 hour ago, telecode 101 said:

now i need to look for vouchers.. ?

The $25 voucher is generic and there's a survey voucher too ?

45 minutes ago, Nick Blanc said:

At some point I think support would have me make a latency mon (or whatever the application is called) report. Which I cannot understand. But I recognise DPC. I already disabled everything I don't need. I'm running a clean ship.

Latency Mon is pretty easy so you'll be fine. I normally leave it run for about half an hour and then look at what is causing the most interrupts/latency.

It's often a driver.

Did you change OS, DAW version, Sample Rates, buffer sizes or anything at the same time as the upgrade?

Do you have a USB wireless card? Have you tried unplugging any peripherals that aren't essential to test?

I suspect you're already aware of these by the sound, but doesn't hurt to check ?