Matthew Sorrels

I'd love to hear what people think about this. The full version is way too expensive and this compact version seems too cheap by comparison. How does it compare to Broadway Lites and NI Session Horns Pro? I think perhaps what I really want is a really good solo trumpet (and not a full bass/wind section). Thinking about getting the Realitone one. I don't have any Chris Hein instruments but they do seem to be well liked, even if the GUI seems a bit dated.

Have you read this thread: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8390-NVMe-SSD-install-issue/td-p/5765334 Sure seems like your problem as well (the model number is different though).

The Superior line has never gotten a lot of sales/deals, just a few from time to time. And of course any new products will be at least a year before we see a discount of any kind. Looks like they are releasing a separate EzKeys MIDI and a drum MIDI on the 24th to go with this dual release (Big Band EZX is based on Decades SDX).

They have a playable demo on their website, might want to try it before you buy. On this page (hard to find on their site) https://www.designmybeat.com/products/virtual-instruments/tomorrowland-2-elixir-of-stars-complete-2-0-0 Click the "Download Preview" button, you do have to give your email address.

I'm pretty sure they understand exactly what they have done and how well it's working. The real problems with what they have done will take a bit over a year to show up though. A year from now if the subscription thing is awesome for them, we'll see some big/great new products being released. If it's not working so well they will have scaled down new product development and lost partners, and the new releases added will be lackluster at best. I don't have a problem with subscription software but I evaluate everything on a cost/benefit basis. For what PA offers I'm not willing to consider a subscription. Same goes with Slate too. No audio mixing/mastering plugins are worth that kind of cost to me. I've had been thinking about trying the Roland Cloud but when they killed off the permanent license bonus and never seem to have a sale, I decided it wasn't for me. I had EastWests's Composer Cloud for a year back in 2016 and felt it was a fair deal, but wasn't something I wanted to continue on. Oddly enough their new releases then had slowed down and were pretty weak, recently it's picked up a bit though but not enough to get me back on board.

Yep, if you used a $50 personal monthly voucher already (your own or someone else's) you can't use a second one. Same is true for a $25 and a $75.

Glad I saved my $50 Voucher, just got this for free. Though I've got so many SSL-type plugins this is actually the least appealing of the bunch. But I've wanted one of the console plugins and the price was right.

Did they ever update the Cakewalk/SONAR ones with the fix for sample rates other than 44,100? I have the Integral Studio Pack so it doesn't effect me, but I'm not sure the Cakewalk version of these got that fix. I vaguely remember something about the timing being wrong if you were using anything other than 44.1k. So anything with a time component would be off (delays/etc).

I got the email too. Funny how much it looks like a ATH-M50X.

Was it the first time you used the coupon? I suspect they track coupon usage by account and it won't work a second time.

I have both Sundog and ChordPotion. I really like Sundog. Has very active development, they have been adding new features pretty often. I was using the beta for this for a while and was impressed with how stable it was and the changes they made. It's a lot of fun to use. It's not a plugin (drag and drops MIDI very easily), so using it within a DAW is kind of a mess (virtual MIDI cables). I'm pretty sure I bought it on sale. I do think it's worth having, though at full price I might hold off a bit. ChordPotion I haven't used very much, it kind of confuses me to be honest. I think it has potential but I really haven't fully groked how to work with it. I've not looked at Melodic Flow though it looks interesting too (even if I have a few other chord/scale keyboard plugins). I also recommend people check out the chord education stuff they offer up, some nice stuff for free. https://feelyoursound.com/chordsguide/ https://feelyoursound.com/scale-chords/

No the discount is only for you first order, I don't think you can use it twice.

I think if it was based on the price when you signed up it would work better for me. So if you sign up for the rent-to-own during the 50% off sales (which Melda does a few of) then your "total" to own is the 50% off value. If you stop/pause your sub and later restart, the goal price is reset to whatever the current price is (so you'd need to wait for another 50% off sale) but you still get credit for what you have paid so far. Of course they can't do this because everyone would pause/stop during a 50% off sale and then restart to get the lower goal price. So rent to own would become rent to own at 50% off. It's possible there just isn't any reasonable fair way to do rent to own. Rent to own may be better than a subscription, but still isn't so awesome. Melda's economic policies is what lead to me just biting the bullet during the last 50% off sale and upgrading to the MCompleteBundle. The credit you get for upgrading is definitely not as good as just jumping to the finish line. You can't win buying the smaller bundles and/or single plugins with Melda if you end up deciding to get it all.

Melda's rent-to-own is always based on the full retail price of the product which has made it seem like a bad deal to me. 0% interest on something with double the price is kind of bad math.

MIDI FX plugins are a Cakewalk/DirectX thing, not VST. There are very few (almost none) 3rd party plugins that work that way. The only way to do MIDI effects with VST plugins is by making them into synths. These MIDI FX synths process MIDI in (like a synth) and then send MIDI out. They usually have no sounds (but must have an audio channel assigned to work). The way you set them up is add them as a synth, enable MIDI output on it. Add a real synth that you want to use for the sounds. Set the input to the real synth to the output from the MIDI FX synth. Turn on the track echo. Then when you play notes on the MIDI FX synth's MIDI track, it gets processed by the MIDI FX synth and sent to the "real synth".

It's only 50 pages with a fairly white space friendly layout/font. No real content to speak of, it's more like a giant ad for Sonarworks Reference. It's not a detailed guide to doing anything. Only two chapters. At the end of each is a Key Takeaways page. Those two pages tell you everything you need to know.

It all depends on what synth you are using. Cakewalk has no native MIDI players. I can't remember very well but I think Sonar 3 may have come with Roland's Sound Canvas for general MIDI files. But that version was a 32-bit DX only plugin that won't work in 64-bit Cakewalk. With CbB I think you get TTS-1 as the default GM synth. In theory if you load the same exact synth you were using in Sonar 3 into CbB you'll get the same sound. But only you can tell us what synth you were using and what you are using now. There aren't a lot of great General MIDI synths anymore but there are some choices much better than TTS-1. Sadly Sound Canvas is a subscription only product now I think (or is crazy expensive).

Is that a photo of Armin Van Buuren in the walkthrough video? This product looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. At 3:50 in the video

It seems pretty clear with these micro-subscriptions focused on a single developer they are dealing with some issues for how to pay all their partners fairly based on the in coming subscription amounts. Why exactly they would think offering single developer subscriptions would be something customers would want is kind of beyond me though. Next move will see a few of their partners offering products that aren't included in the main subscription but only in their own micro-subscription or products not included in any subscription. That or/and they add some sort of usage monitoring to the subscription plugins so they can divvy up the pot to their partners based on usage. The Spotify payment system doesn't work for music artists very and I think the same thing may apply here.

NI has had update subscriptions before actually, long long ago. But they only did it for a year or so. You basically pre-paid for the a year of upgrades to Komplete. I don't think they are going subscriptions on software anytime soon. The Loop Loft stuff (sounds.com) maybe, the Machine expansions, maybe, but not the rest. In past things like this (NI has done this a few times actually) what usually happens is they kill off a bunch of amazing and great products in favor of some stuff you have no interest in. Most likely this means more hardware/mobile phone nonsense and less improve Kontakt so it doesn't suck.

I guess I'm glad I jumped on the 25% coupon and bought the mega bundle before they turned it off. ?

If you are running Windows 7 you are most likely going to have to sort out the TLS support one way or another, no matter how much developers do. I think the easy fix will do the registry stuff for you, the download button is kind of hidden on that web page and not very clear (look for the download button after the section labeled Easy Fix). The actual OS update patch download should have been installed with normal Windows updates (unless you didn't apply them, or turned the updates off). I've had to fix a bunch of IIS servers with TLS support and vaguely remember some nice utility app that let you see/configure everything but I did this years ago. This may not be the last time you have issues with TLS support on Windows 7 though.

Now having played with it for a while, I think it just kind of falls short of being useful. A new beta of Sundog was made available yesterday. Just playing around with it for a few minutes I got far more interesting music than anything I could get out of Harvest. But it's not a plugin so that might be more of an issue. I'm pretty fond of the Captain Chord plugin set if you must have a plugin. And I still think Rapid Composer is hands down the most "pro" (but very hard to fully understand) MIDI composer out there. Orb Composer and I still aren't getting along all that well, but it's later releases have been better. Harvest has potential but it needs to step up a lot to make it in my regular toolbox.

Previous releases (for example Sampletank 3) the updates and sound add ons were added to the Resources download section rather than the sounds download section, so they would be available to everyone.

I don't think there is any effect due to competition among orchestra sample libraries. It's not like normal businesses in that way. Companies really aren't one uping each other for our benefit. Otherwise prices would be a lot lower. I don't like their player, it's not very good really. If this were a Kontakt instrument I might have to think about it, but I'm punting any of their own sampler based libraries for now.