antler

I've used iZotope products for years and have never had a problem with their copy protection system. (I don't use iLok.)

Minor-key synthy sounds with sub-bass drops, whooshes, and slams? (Just a guess)

The thing is, I get the impression that you're after libraries of realistic sounding playable instruments; Saxophone Explorations looks more like an abstract soundscape library. I don't think it's the frivolous bits of a sampled saxophone emulation - it's a different category of library.

Sorry for being OT, but what effect/filter did you use to mangle the codes in that screenshot? It looks like a pixelation, but not.

The channel strips are pretty good. I quite like the Focusrite one, but I've seen the AMEK get lots of praise (I personally haven't tried it). The Shadow Hills are pretty good on the master bus (make sure you activate the sidechain to let the lows go thorough if its pumping). I've seen praise for the elysia alpha compressor too.

Not sure where you're seeing that; presumably on GitHub? Regardless, it just means that the code/binary available there is licensed under GPLv3. As the copyright owner, Jatin owns the code and can do what he wants with it; he is allowed to license it to anyone under any license he chooses. I'm fairly sure that if anyone contacted him and asked for a non-copyleft licence, and offered an amount of compensation he deems appropriate, he would happily grant them a licence that supersedes the publicly available one. That's one of the perks of owning the IP.

Giving this a bump as this is (apparently) the last time Omnidrums will be available for purchase.

For anyone still waiting for their PA vouchers, NI are probably just inundated right now. I just received an email from NI with my PA vouchers; I bought from Best Service a week ago.

That sucks. I think when you see that dialogue, the setup program will still be running. You can probably find its path by looking in Task Manager and finding its .exe location. Make a copy, and then you should be able to run it separately.

I think that's an iZotope installer bug that's been there forever. I'm guessing your install path has spaces in it. It's not expecting any and interpreting anything after a space character as a command line switch. Try checking to make sure your install path doesn't have any spaces.

Fair enough. I just didn't want people who've never looked at Komplete before to get the wrong idea - there are some companies where you have to download your purchase fully or pay for download costs after a certain amount of time.

They only take up as much space as is needed: you can choose to install what you want, when you want. You can also remove it and re-install later if your project requirements change.

UI reminds me of Cakewalk Pro Audio 8

Too bad - I was looking forward to a free backup drive.

Baby Audio... oh wait, that's already taken...

I didn't mean the loop library itself so much. More like Artist A publishes a song that uses a (melodic) guitar riff loop. Then Artist B uses the same loop in a different song and tries to publish it. And then some (possibly AI powered) algorithm matches Artist B's song to sound the same as Artist A's. Edit: but yes - I guess there's some threshold, otherwise there'd be a huge number of claims.

No doubt these are good, but they're pretty pricy. I wonder how they'd compare with SWAM Saxophones, where you could get the whole bundle for less than the price of 2 from MOJO.

Is there any danger about getting flagged for copyright infringement (e.g. on YouTube) when using loops and your song sounds identical to someone else's?

Having been a barbarian for much of his life, David had an epiphany one day and decided to take an increased interest in cultural arts. He discovered that he subconsciously loved the sound of a cello playing its slow, heartfelt, and poignant melodies. Hearing it in the distance during one of his hunts triggered something deep; something primal to his core. He yearned to become as one with something that could simultaneously be so beautiful and soul-destroying to hear. Oh wait... We're not talking about a former barbarian are we? ???

I'm probably not the best person to ask about that now, as I migrated to Studio One (to integrate with my Faderport) when Sonar went shaky. However, based on what I remember, I'd say go with it unless you find a reason to not. I thought it sounded pretty good, and there were four different modes that you can use to configure the EQ curves (based on EQ curves of different consoles). Reasons that you might not want to use it include: You want an EQ that imparts a special 'colour'. You're using a channel strip (e.g. one of the PA ones/Neutron/other) that already has an EQ and you'd rather use that as your mixing (mini) ecosystem (along with its matching compressor, etc). You have another EQ that fits your workflow better.

Interesting. This gave me pause for thought. I took a recent project that I had the bounces for during the (raw) finished-mix and master stages. I dragged them both into a new project - one on each track - and put an instance of Tonal Balance Control on both. During a full section of the song, I did a screen capture and overlayed the two to see the difference. This is the result: With some post-image colour manipulation, the raw mix is shown in the original white colour (slightly blue from the overlay), and the mastered version is yellow. Though bear in mind my typical mastering chain isn't too heavy either:

Isn't QuadCurve the EQ that's built into the Pro-Channel?

Right; I understand. To be honest, I hadn't thought of it that way. Personally, I wouldn't use this type of tool at the mixing stage. At mixing, the main aim is to make sure that all parts of the song are as balanced and audible as they should be (e.g. muffled backing vocals probably shouldn't be made clear enough such that they compete with the main vocals). And that's it. I don't really see a point in measuring levels at mix time. The only thing I would do level wise is make sure that nothing is clipped. I'd even say don't put a compressor on the master bus at mix time (but if some pro says otherwise, feel free to go with their advice). Mix-wide (potential multiband) compression, EQ, stereo width adjustment, and limiting belong in the mastering stage. As they'll modify the frequency distribution, the graphs will look quite different pre and post mastering. All of this is to say that these types of tools might not be that useful at the mixing stage. I definitely use them when mastering though. But that's just a reflection of how I use them.

IIRC, Insight is just a metering suite - I don't think it makes comparisons to anything. Possibly you might mean Tonal Balance Control, where you can choose different genres and see a relative frequency curve? I'm not sure I follow. If we're using mastering tools to master our unmastered tracks, I don't understand why we'd not want to compare against a mastered track. It's true that we probably wouldn't want an exact match to the reference curve - every song is unique and different instruments/arrangements lead to different frequency distributions - it's useful to know if we're approximately there. For example, an EDM track would probably sound quite strange if it had the same relative frequency distribution as a violin concerto. But while we wouldn't want it to have the exact distribution as <insert the name of an EDM track here>, it's nice to know if it sounds roughly the same.

It's new (and came out after KCE 14); it'll (most probably) be in 15. I think NI have figured out they have two types of customers: the more studio-experienced ones, and the newcomers to music. I think their subscriptions are targeting the latter. Unlike other subscriptions that include every product in their catalogue for a recurring fee, the NI one is different. It includes instruments more towards the 'instant gratification' end of the scale. It doesn't include Kontakt, and I think someone who Komplete Now is targeted at wouldn't fully appreciate it. To be clear, I'm not saying any one group is 'better' than the other; just that there are different types of users and that NI are trying to cover all the bases.