Matthew Sorrels

I'd love to see a video of this before I buy it. The UI seems to lack features I think I'd want, makes me leery about how useful it would be. I'd love to hear some details after you look at it @Grem

Not only are your limited to what video formats Cakewalk will support, it has frame timing issues as well. Doesn't seem to handle being frame accurate correctly (rewinding/looping often has the second playback start 1 frame late). I've made a bunch of test videos with frame numbers burned into the video and the results aren't so great. I gave up on getting CbB to do video, it's a lost cause. As a rule Quicktime movies aren't going to work very well at all. Some AVI codecs will work, but which ones depends on what you have installed on your computer since CbB uses Window's video for support.

I like NX when using headphones, even without the tracker it helps give the audio some space/depth. It works well with Sonarworks headphone plugin as well (if NX/AR doesn't support your headphone model). And just in case you were wondering it doesn't matter which order you put the two plugins in, I did extensive tests. Output is the same regardless of order. At least for my ATH-M50X the Sonarworks EQ is better than the Wave's one. The head tracker popup though really should be an option, still not sure why they haven't changed that.

Don't be silly. Pretty much every company in the virtual instrument/music software business runs the knife edge of bankruptcy on a daily basis. Don't assume every company is rolling in it just because their prices are high and they aren't discounting. When Spitfire quit using the retail channel they pretty much gave up any chance of breaking into the big time in terms of sales numbers. If they are careful, smart and lucky they will manage to pay their staff and partners a decent amount. Just like pretty much every content business it is a lot harder to make it all work than most consumers think. If you see some content (VI/software/movie/book/album) you want it's a good idea to plan to get it soon, because there is a higher than zero percent chance you won't be able to. Lots of books and movies go out of print and become unavailable every day. Software/virtual instruments are all in the same boat. If we are lucky there will be some sort of heads up. I don't think I'd call Spitfire greedy, expensive and overpriced yes, but that's not greedy.

They have done 50% on products they are about to discontinue. Which they then release a new version of and the upgrade price works out so that you pay full price if you bought the discount version. There is no winning the price war with Spitfire. Ever since they moved all sales to their own store (no 3rd party retailers) they have had a lot more 30% off sales but rarely do they approach reasonable.

Session Strings non-Pro is kind of weak https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/cinematic/session-strings/comparison-chart/ Session Strings Pro is pretty decent (and Session Strings Pro 2 is really decent). All of them are more likely better fits for Pop/Rock than Hyperion Elements. While this sale (and the coupon for Micro purchasers) is a pretty good deal, I think it's fair to bet an offer this good will come again. You might have to wait a while but this isn't a one time, once in a lifetime, never to be repeated, not to be missed deal. They will be releasing more Hyperion String libraries, so there will be no end to deals anytime soon. Given you already have micro, I'd say you don't have to get this. Micro does cover a lot of basic ground. Take the time and use Session Strings and Hyperion Micro and work out what your missing. When you know what you really need, deciding on Hyperion Elements won't be that hard. On the other hand if you need/want a Kontakt Player string library and don't require crazy articulations/features this is about the best price/value I've seen. For me it's biggest problem is that it doesn't do anything vastly different or better than every other string library I have does. I have so many string libraries that this one just doesn't shine above the rest for any task. It has potential though and is nice enough to work with it might be a good choice for "I just want a string library, nothing fancy".

The head tracker is a separate exe. If it's not there, NX won't/can't launch it. But every time you update NX it comes back (so you have to keep either deleting it or renaming it). The plugin is completely separate from the head tracker (which starts up every time you load it and is very annoying if you don't own the tracker)

To fix this for NX you need to rename the app's folder. I think I've posted about this before (perhaps on the old forum). Not sure it would work on the AR version or not. I renamed "C:\Program Files (x86)\Waves\Plug-Ins V10\WavesHeadTracker" to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Waves\Plug-Ins V10\WavesHeadTrackerOFF" I think. Been a while since I did this.

After I installed the pre-release and started CbB and it did the scan of plugins (I have it scan on startup) I got this dialog that I haven't seen before Didn't seem to stop it from starting and it only happened that once. I'm pretty sure I had installed a few new plugins since the last time I ran CbB, so it's most likely related to one of them. I tried connecting a debugger to it but wasn't able to get anything on the stack traces (my fault most likely I've been changing my Visual Studio settings to load less symbols and may have went too far). Wish this error was more expansive and listed what returned the improper argument so I'd have a clue as to which plugin was causing the problem.

These kinds of offers don't apply to upgrades, never have. If you wait long enough they may discount the upgrade. I haven't seen anything about Waves repeating this offer and I keep every email they have sent me.

Yes better menu scrolling would be nice. And yes Cakewalk COULD fix it/change it. But doing so may not be all that simple or easy. I do this kind of development work for a living and I fully understand them going "MFC doesn't natively do mouse support on popup menus" instead of "Yeah I can spend the next couple of weeks writing a custom/subclass popup menu that supports mouse scrolling". Might not even take a couple of weeks but it's not something they can get "for free". Truthfully they need a plugin picker window with not only scrolling, but also a text search/filter option and recategorization options (so you can show the list by Manufacturer or by Category or just alphabetical). They already have something like it in the Browser, they just need to expand its functionality to cover these effect selector situations. But again it's work, lots and lots of work. They also need to do that same work in replacing the whole plug-in manager system. It's really under UI powered given the volume of plugins the average user has these days. Again, more work. Work that doesn't even lead to more sales. So it's easy to see why it's never going to happen.

You can use RX 7's Connect with CbB. Here's how: Right click an audio clip in the timeline and choose Process Effect->Audio Effect In the list of effects find RX 7 Connect. It will come up like this: Make sure Repair is selected and press the Ok button. RX 7 will now open with the audio. Edit it. When you are done press Send Back. Back in CbB (while RX7 is waiting for Connect) right click the audio clip again and again choose Process Effect->Audio Effect and find RX 7 Connect. The dialog will now look a little different: Press the OK button to commit the changes. I think the Utilities menu is a bit easier, but it's not your only option. The Process Effect clip option works the way RX Connect wants to run (unlike adding it a clip effect/track effect which doesn't process the whole file)

Music for Broadcast is very different than radio/CD/streaming. One thing meters like WLM are good for is helping you measure the loudness of a section of music. That averaging can be very useful even for music. I usually use a meter like WLM (normally iZotyope Insight 2 these days) so I can match the loudness of something after I've added plugins to it. You can also run it against sections of songs you want to be "like" and then adjust your song's volume to match. Don't worry so much about all the standards, just use it to dial things in. Take a metal track you like, find a section like one of your songs and see how loud it actually is. Then match that level with your song/section of song. I think you'll find no CD music is even close to the low levels of all the broadcast standards.

While I have the Wave WLM Loudness Meter I never use it, so can't really be much help there. But a while back I did find the TC Electronics site very useful at getting a understanding on what these loudness meters are measuring and how/why people are using it. https://www.tcelectronic.com/brand/tcelectronic/loudness#googtrans(en|en) Click the links along the top Loudness Explained and Broadcast Standards. Unless you are making film/video I'm not sure I'd let any loudness plugin adjust my volume. Use it just as a meter and you adjust your own volume. I think the tools in WLM are more for engineers that have to meet strict requirements and thus bring in a serious hammer. You will always be better off doing it yourself, using better limiters/fader changes/EQ/what ever.

Up to 50%, not everything 50% https://mailchi.mp/heavyocity/heavyocitys-summer-sale-starts-now

The downloads are going to kill me. 7 new instruments and 11 instruments with updates. I'd really love a download manager right now.

Nice thing about PA, all your invoices are online and their products can't be bought at stores. So it wasn't hard for me to figure out what I've been spending there. Since 2015, I've averaged spending $108/year with them. But that's only because last month I bought DearVR Pro. You factor that out and my yearly average drops to about $73. I was thinking about getting the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor, but didn't want to try the trial until they released the pricing. I installed the trial this morning. It's nice but not $199 nice. I might have picked it up at $99 (after vouchers) but at $150 (I have a $50 voucher this month, first time it's been that high) it just isn't worth it to me. Oh well, I guess I'm going to have to decide between Broadway Lites and Swing/Swing More.

One bad thing about the mixed subscription and full purchase model is that in order to justify the subscription costs they pretty much have to stop offering serious discounts on the purchase prices. This is the big factor in me pretty much ignoring EastWest/Quantum Leap and spending way more money on Kontakt libraries. It's also why I haven't bought any Slate plugins. There is no way to offer reasonable discounts on purchases and still keep the subscription value high. I wish they would just pick one or the other and not try and make both work, even if that means subscription only. I own everything I actually want from PA (more or less) so $180 for a year of the new plugins doesn't seem like a great deal to me. We will have to see how this plays out, but I suspect to make the sub work they will pretty much kill serious discounts on purchases.

I know lets lets roll out a giant epic sale and price structure change on Amazon Prime Day. Brilliant!

I guess Fume Music is some how connected to Rast Sounds (partner/spin-off). These two (actually 3 with some bonus thing) are a bunch of wave loops/one-shots with very bare bone Kontakt instruments (full version of Kontakt required). The instruments are pretty much just mapping the loops to keys. Not very useful. The loops are pretty much un-interesting. Not very useful. I like Rast's vocal libraries but these two libraries aren't going to convince me to sign up for any Fume subscription. Last time I checked they had no audio samples for their Originals collection or the loop subscription. I guess these are the "demo". If you need a loop subscription I think Noiiz is a better choice.

Your right, I (of course) read VI and it came up there and then watching the videos they always start on the chord patches, which are kind of phrases. But watching more of it you can see it's really normal instruments. ProjectSAM libraries aren't really deep sampled though, but that's not actually all that bad. Not sure I really need every note sampled at 10 velocity levels.

It was my understanding that new AR plugins could be added to the AR Collection at a (small) discount by using the upgrade option on the Waves site. But that only works if the plugin is part of the collection (which this isn't, at least not yet). WUP on the AR Collection is worthless in that it won't get you any more plugins, but owning the AR plugins can get you a discount upgrading to the collection. In this case the email I got from Waves gave me a coupon code for a discount ($69) because I own NX, it didn't mention AR at all. I think I'm going to pass on this one though. I don't have the NX hardware and don't really see the need to feel like I'm sitting in AR Studio 3.

Interesting that right after this thread came up Broadway Lites is back on sale at VSTBuzz. I punted on the last 77% off sale a year or so ago because I thought it looked a little dated and with no real way to upgrade. I'm not paying $2k for any single library and even at 50% off it's still way outside reasonable. I start running out of interest when a library crosses the $300 mark. But Broadway Lites does look interesting, might be worth it at this price. Still trying to decide if I want Swing/Swing More though. I have Symphobia 1 and 3, not sure about getting 2.

Doesn't look like it's in the AR bundle at all yet.

The notes don't have to overlay, but they do have to be perfectly aligned. Exactly on the grid.