Matthew Sorrels

ACID Pro 9 is very good. They really did fix most of the problems version 8 had. I was happy enough with it I actually took them up on one of the sales for ACID Pro Next. Its additional features turned out to be sort of worthless though. Odd it looks like those features are going to be part of ACID Pro 10

Fixed that for you.

Workspaces hide menu items. Your early screenshots are using Basic and the last one is using Advanced.

I went looking and couldn't find any TVEC2 instruments in my KH Diamond. I have a bunch of TVEC1 and TVEC3 and TVEC4 but I couldn't actually find a TVEC2 instruments. I'm not sure this compatibility problem is that big a deal. The TVEC1,3,4 instruments seemed to work, though the details of the scripting could mean it looks fine but little things don't work right. Even with 80% off I don't think this closeout sale is all that great a deal really. The two instruments not on sale are (of course) the most interesting, and also very overpriced.

Any of the Kirk Hunter TVEC 2 instruments won't work on Kontakt 6. See this post for details: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/kirk-hunter-studios-20th-year-anniversary-sale-80-off-storewide.89803/

Flowstone is not Synthedit. They are in a similar class but different companies/developers. I think we have to wait for it to be available to know what it is, but I don't think I'd get excited about it just yet.

Software and virtual instruments, like games, songs, books, movies and any media really, are always at risk of becoming discontinued and unavailable. At least they are telling people in advance and giving you a chance to get them. Though I think they could be a lot more specific about their plans.

To be fair, if you are willing to wait for Christmas I'd imagine a Black Friday deal is possible. It may not be much better to this, but I'd bet it would be at least equal. If you really are short on cash and willing to wait 9-10 months this deal will come around again. But that's true for almost all deals these days, the age of the once in a lifetime deals may have passed.

From the email they sent out: "our entire store catalogue will officially be discontinued and no longer available"

KvR thread says it's Synthedit and not some new 64-bit version either, old buggy crashy 32-bit Synthedit. 1 Euro seems a bit high if that's true. https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=535754&start=150 Not sure why this is getting all this press right now...

While APD Shop pricing can vary a bit, as a rule when deals end they only sometimes move to the shop and when they do the lowest price (using shop credit) is equal to or higher than the deal. Nothing I've seen that has moved over has offered a better deal. You can't game the system with the shop. And most deals don't move over at all. I also suspect Sugar Bytes won't move over to the shop at all, they don't have anything in the shop already. Considering they sell through multiple retailers having an on-going deal at the APD shop would seem very unlikely. Retailers don't like selling products one of their competitors has a on-going better deal on. Developers try hard to not burn their retail channel.

I'm only missing Masala 2. I wonder if you wait to redeem if you could hold onto this until new releases show up?

Cubase's 30th Anniversary sale (which included updates) was Mid-May last year and ran for 2 weeks. So I'd suspect the next sale will be sometime around then.

Plugins hosting plugins are always going to be big piles of problems. Might have better luck sending Obscurium's MIDI output to the instrument in your DAW rather than trying to host another plugin inside it.

Cubase 10.5.10 Available February 3, 2020 The Cubase 10.5.10 maintenance update resolves a macOS performance issue that many users encountered, plus also including more than 35 enhancements that will make life easier. We recommend especially our customers on Mac computers to install this update for Cubase 10.5. https://www.steinberg.net/en/support/downloads/cubase_105.html Note the Windows download link for the 10.5.0 to 10.5.10 update on this page appears to download a 1.3 gig file (very slowly). If you use the Steinberg Download manager you can get the much smaller 10.5.0 to 10.5.10 update. I think they have some links wrong on that page. Use the Download Manager to avoid these problems. Has a large list of fixes: http://download.steinberg.net/downloads_software/Cubase_10.5/10.5.10/Cubase_10.5.10_Version_History.pdf

Most of it's sales are around $69 Black Friday)/59 Euro. A few times it goes on sale for $79. This was low enough I decided to grab it. Though I really should just buy the bundle upgrade in my account and be done with it. Not really sure how useful it is though. That FM synth sound is a bit limiting. And it's UI is so strange I'm not really sure how to use it at all. Which on the Sugar Bytes scale means it's pretty awesome. ?

I don't think I've ever seen anything to fix NI install issues on the Mac. And I'm pretty sure there are issues. ?

You have chosen. Poorly.

https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001024029-License-Transfer-Why-Is-My-Product-Not-Transferable- Your product has been registered during the last 60 days For technical reasons, serial numbers are automatically excluded from license transfer for 60 days after registration. In case you wish to resell the product before the 60 days transfer block, please contact our support team. If you wish to do so, you can include the NI username and email address of the new owner, so that we can transfer the serial numbers directly to the new account.

Usually this is because the file path is too long. It looks like you are installing it into D:\Synth Samples\Komplete 9\Session Horns\ Which seems like a really bad directory to install the Mosaic Voices library (inside another library). Native Access also does this crazy thing where it downloads an ISO file and then mounts it as a drive and runs the installer from there. That causes all sorts of crazy things to happen since Windows "loves" to autoplay CD/DVD drives which is what this looks like. I had to turn off some options in some ISO mounting and backup software I run so that it wouldn't try and fight with Native Access when it did the drive mount. I can't remember all the hoops I ended up going through to sort that out. One thing that you might also have to deal with is Kontakt 6.2.1 has some problem with doing a batch resave. Can crash and/or corrupt a library. They claim they are fixing it in a 6.2.2 release that hasn't happened yet. It's messed up at least one or two libraries on me now. As a result I only batch resave things I have the zip/install files for (or I make a backup) just in case the batch resave goes bad. Though in this case I think you just need to configure the install directory for Mosaic Voices to be a much, much shorter path. Once it's downloaded you can move it then use Native Access to point to the new location. I think it's just the install/download part that cares about the path length.

It may have to do with how many audio effects you have. I seem to remember they changed this, but it was a long, long (years) ago. Because the popup menu didn't work very well with 1000+ plugins. I haven't seen pull off arrows for audio effects for a long time.

Lately I've been using the brass in Metropolis Ark 1-4 (mix and match for "epic") and Cinesamples 90's Retro Trumpets. But to be honest neither are making me happy. I've also been using NI's Symphony Brass (the full version, both solo and ensemble). Truth is when I want a generic all purpose brass I'm usually ending up there and later I swap it out. Forzo is definitely in the mix too. It does some things really well (the designer is very cool). The new Junkie XL Brass looks very interesting (you can listen to individual parts in the SINE player) but the pricing is way off for me. I listened and gave a punt on the new 8DIO Century Brass. It's price isn't bad though, but it doesn't seem like they fixed all the issues the first release had. I may regret this call at some point though, but 8DIO will have another sale sooner or later. I've tried very hard to work with Spitfire's BBCSO and it's brass. I had hoped it would become my standard orchestra. But the player and it's headaches have pretty much driven it out. If it were a Kontakt library I might say it's a good brass answer. It does have the sound/instrumentation/articulations I want. I don't regret getting Forzo (or Novo) I just wish Forzo had a bit more. Lack of solo instruments is also another factor. While I have all the Albions I don't think I used the brass in any of them. I suspect with brass you may just have to settle for a lot of mix-and-match.

You might need to be specific on what doesn't work properly. Guitar Pro 7.5 has decent MIDI export (in earlier versions the MIDI export were pretty bad for guitar parts), but you will always have to deal with conversion issues (as well as filtering out any of the crazy MIDI control messages as @scook points out). What it thinks is a kick drum or a snare (the note number) and what the software (or hardware) synth you are trying to use that file on can be vastly different. I don't think Guitar Pro uses "perfect" GM MIDI drum mappings. And even if it did, your synth might not.

Forzo's lack of legato kind of kills it for me. When I first got it I don't think I cared so much. But over time it has pushed it further down my goto brass list.

Yes. A rompler is a sampler with a fixed set of sounds (used to be stored in ROM, read-only-memory) hence the name. Early versions of Sampletank actually allowed a user to make their own instruments, but that was dropped a while back. Which changed it more into a classic sound module/rompler. It's not exactly a term of endearment. By and large early sound modules for keyboard workstations had pretty weak sound libraries. They would take one sample and stretch it across the whole keyboard by pitch shifting it and that would be the flute or sax instrument for example. They did this because the storage space on the ROMs was very limited. Sampletank's very early libraries were often of that class. It's not so true for Sampletank 4 though, the sample library included with it is a bit more complicated (which is why the download is now so large). Even still, many Sampletank instruments still only have a small number of samples for an instrument, instead of many samples at every pitch and velocity. And the playback engine is fairly limited, unlike things like Kontakt and UVI which can have scripts that determine when and how to play back a sample. How a software instrument is made -- the samples, how they were recorded, how they are played back are really important for how well any specific instrument works. One problem with rompler class instruments is they tend to focus more on breath and quantity of instruments, rather than quality.