PavlovsCat

What? Compose something??? This is November, with deals galore, you could be spending that valuable time buying more sample libraries and plugins instead of wasting time composing music. I kid. I kid.

Welcome back, Larry! I hope everything went well on your trip. It's obvious, but I'll write it anyhow. It's nice to have you back. We missed you.

Watching the videos, this sounds really interesting. I think some forum members have posted positive comments about Cube in the past. For $10USD, this looks like it could be fun. I'd love to hear from Cube and Cube Mini owners.

In the end, you still posted a great deal, so thanks. Plus, you also gave us some entertainment to go along with it, which, personally, I enjoy! With regards to your coffee reference, I remember when someone posted a coffee deal in the forum earlier this year. After seeing that post, I thought it made sense to add coffee deals to the forum! A lot of times when I'm recording music I have a cup nearby. While I'm not recording right now, I have a late night cup of decaf nearby. Coffee addicts unite and add coffee deals to the forum!

I debated many, many times about getting Fab Four, but ended up not getting it, largely because I figured I had very Beatle-esque sounding drums, Trons, guitars, pianos and other instruments in KONTAKT format. Okay, somebody get this thread back on track and post about Kirk's library! I actually don't have this library, but I've I've seen very positive posts about this and his other libraries in the series (just take a look at some of the composer testimonials on the landing page).

Yeah, I realized after I went to the site it's not a quartet (which doesn't make sense anyhow, considering it's samples of cellis --not a solo cello, violins, violas and double bass, my bad)! I'm on my phone, but it's definitely the library I'm thinking of and I love it. I'm prettty sure that I used it in my cover of Strawberry Fields (so anyone listening knows, when I record a song, I don't practice it, because I have very bad tendonitis and I am quickly in pain after playing, so I pretty much either Google chords and lyrics for a song and start playing with record or I spend a little time with a section and then press record; so my playing is definitely far from smooth, but I am improving in the almost two years since I've started playing, around 20 years after an injury stopped me from playing professionally or even as a hobbyist, so until recently, everything I've recorded and shared is basically me playing something for the first time and improvising arrangements and any ideas that pop into my head when playing).

I'm a bit of a sucker for Abbey Road sounding instruments and effects when they go after anything that captures the sound from the Fab Four. Back when I was playing professionally, I really didn't spend much time playing Beatles covers. But as a hobbyist, and now that physically, I can't even play anything complex anymore, I love playing Beatles songs. 60s Abbey Road Drums, Waves Abbey Road plugins, M-Tron Pro, Orange Tree Samples Rick 12 String and Vintage Violin bass....Fleer, if you love that sound like me, there's a string library from Impact Soundworks that often goes on sale for around $29 or $39 USD that I just love. I can't recall it's name and I've never seen anyone post about it, but it really gets that kind of George Martin string sound and the sale price is a steal. EDIT: This is the library. The demos don't really convey what the library sounds like dry -- which I think is wonderful. https://impactsoundworks.com/product/rhapsody-orchestral-colors/

Obviously, I've worked with Orange Tree Samples and use their guitar and bass libraries in nearly every production for, but I also use pianos and string libraries in the KONTAKT format in nearly every production too. I have pianos in other formats, like ezKeys that I love, Addictive Keys (I find meh) and UVI (nice but I don't enjoy the UVI user experience), but 90% of projects, I'm largely using KONTAKT with a drum plugin, although sometimes I used KONTAKT drum libraries. So if I had to give up every non-effects plugin but one, I would easily choose KONTAKT. But to the point some have made, I've bought a bunch of synth libraries for KONTAKT and it takes up far too much data. I think I'm done doing that and will stick with synth VSTs.

It's worth noting that daveiv is a software engineer sharing these views on software. I think that's particularly significant in this case when we're discussing software. EDIT: Okay, I'm from Chicago, where we pride ourselves on being upfront. So I'll just come right out and say what I really meant with that last sentence: I think that's particularly significant in this case when we're discussing software that sucks.

Oops, wrong thread.

It's worth noting that daveiv is a software engineer sharing these views on software. I think that's significant in this case.

Exactly. You know, it's been a while, but yeah, as I recall, they didn't respond to my official support tickets so I made numerous forum posts and finally got a response in a public forum and then saw that someone with the identical issues posted about them several months prior to my experience and they gave that person the identical response they gave me that they would soon have the problems resolved, which of course, made it clear to me that they were not working at a reasonable pace. I would say that their lack of reasonable, timely support is at the point where I don't find them even a respectable software developer. Their brand has what we call in the industry a negative brand image with me. When I see InMusic owns a software company, I generally will run or won't buy it without A LOT of forum users posting that it's working on Windows 10 and a machine similar to mine. I own BFD Eco and they've offered the upgrade to BFD3 for Eco users for $49USD for at least a couple years now and when I've posted about contemplating it, I see responses from people who don't own it stating things like, "It's 50 bucks for a some really nice drum libraries, just buy it!" But if it is anything like the year I spent after installing one of their AIR plugins on my computer that took me two days and roll back or reinstallation of Windows (it's been a while, that was a year and a half ago) to work again, that kind of pain isn't worth it. I can say without hesitation that InMusic is not a company I want to work with again. Terrible. About as bad as it gets for a well known brand in this business.

I had to roll back Windows after one of their plugins caused massive problems on my Windows PC. When I reported it to the company, they acknowledged they were aware of the problem and were working on it. When I went to KVR, I found that someone reported the identical problem more than a half a year earlier and one of their customer support employees wrote the same thing to them that was written to me several months later. As I recall, it took the better part of a year after that before they resolved the problems -- and people posted about them at every music forum I know of. InMusic, relative to the size of most plugin developers, has A LOT more resources. The company has a habit of buying software companies with long neglected software (like the AIR plugins and BFD) and creating new problems to the point where when I see that InMusic is the owner of a plugin, I would have a hard time justifying buying it. IK on the other hand isn't perfect, but they are in no way comparable to InMusic software, which has provided me with the worst experiences I've ever had with any kind of software and I've worked in tech and with software companies for three decades. With IK, when there's a problem, their support is responsive -- Peter T is a good man (okay, we go back two decades, so I'm certainly biased about him personally, not IK) -- IK puts people on resolving it. I have never had IK software cause problems that caused be to reinstall or roll back Windows, their support has always been fairly prompt and they resolve software problems in a timely manner. So really, no comparison. IK is a decent company with dependably decent software, InMusic literally buys companies with long neglected software and has made that software A LOT worse in the case of AIR plugins and BFD3 (one of our very tech savvy regular forum members posted this week that he uses a pre-InMusic version of BFD on his machine -- which is wrote runs well; something people who've had post-InMusic versions of BF3 since the company purchased BFD3 rarely say),

Sorry, man, you know I like you, but we're not a good crowd to hang with when you're trying to save money. I mean, really, you're talking about three days of not spending money during November with massive sales be announced every few hours. Be honest with yourself. That's a long time from now. Think about the stuff people have accomplished in three days. But being a deals forum regular and not spending money, that's really hard. My three hard drives on my DAW PC have been near capacity for a couple of months and I've bought nearly a TB worth of samples in the last few weeks (for those counting, that's like one and half utlra-intensely-massively-deep 8Dio sample libraries worth of storage space). #PrayForAbacab

He posts in a forum exclusively focused on buying stuff. Anyone reading this, if you're here and you think you're trying to cut back on your spending -- which I've posted in several threads, so that's me too (as I posted that I was trying to cut back on my sample and plugin spending in a multiple threads focused on sample libraries I was considering and then bought sample libraries and plugins afterwards) -- you're lying to yourself. Just an idea, maybe our signatures should contain a count of how many sample libraries and plugins we've purchased to date per year. Of course, I'm sure sample and plugin developers would hate that idea.

The demoed instruments sound nice, but they're not in the same league as what the better developers are doing with KONTAKT and InMusic has a horrific track record. I've never had worse problems with any software than theirs and they knew about the problems that caused issues with Windows users for more than a year and didn't resolve it. I have to side with Abacab on this one.

While they've been discounting pretty heavily, I still wouldn't count on NI doing the exact promotions they did prior to the company being acquired. But the odds look good, based on what they've been doing and their sales promotions over at Izotope.

I heard the NI folks were doing a bunch of things differently lately regarding working with developers. I should have prefaced my statement with "historically." NI has had a change of ownership since the days of Pop/Rock Strings. Hopefully they're still gong to run a 50% off KOMPLETE update many of us have gotten used to.

The licensing costs for KONTAKT Player HAS HISTORICALLY been pretty high for small developers. I used the username edrummist back then. I still do at KVR, but rarely post anywhere but here lately, when it comes to music forums.

If you go all the way back to 2010, I was responsible for the idea and name of Pop/Rock Strings and even helped Kirk with a few group buys back in the 2010s. I could be wrong, but I think you might have been around back then. That was here, KVR and VI Control. The product idea I had was a smaller, affordable package of very dry strings aimed at people who do pop and rock music. Basically it could have been called George Martin, Eleanor Rigby Strings -- well except for the massive trademark issues -- because that was essentially the sound I had in mind.

I wrote my thoughts on page 1. Now, I've ran digital marketing -- including corporate and e-commerce at major brands and I founded my own dot com that came out of my writing on marketing strategy (my readers were largely marketing, PR and tech execs), so I have led a web-based business and spent more than a decade doing it for large global companies, so I have a lot of opinions on how things should work. When the business makes a mistake like this and runs a promo too long, the solution is simple, you honor your mistake. I own a marketing, PR, social media, SEM/SEO career portal, job board today that Money Magazine ranked at the top of their list for job boards for marketing and advertising pros a few years ago. We get job posts from companies that were subscribers of my publication (Google, Cisco, 3M, Microsoft, Intel, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.) , a lot of the big tech companies, ad agencies, b-schools, etc. because their CMOs know me as a business thinker/writer/speaker. Sometimes a customer will do make a mistake on a job post and be upset about it and want a refund or extension and we also get some small companies that are looking for a very specialized skill set for a job in a less than ideal location that maybe also has a less than ideal salary range that don't feel they got enough job candidates or the right candidates and they ask for a refund (it doesn't happen often, maybe a handful of times over the course of a year. So even though I can see the problem was made on their end, I'm focused on the relationship and I have a partner company that has to agree to my decisions -- and in more than 15 years of our relationship, my main business partner (that is a much, much larger company that I partner with) has never once questioned my doing this; they're perfectly good with it -- so having a great, really upstanding partner is really important if you have a partner. But the result of doing this over the years? The companies that have an issue and want a refund or to redo a job listen (and even though I don't have a stated policy, I want to turn around their bad experience into one where they say, "Wow, when I thought they might give me a hard time, they were awesome!") trust my company and will use us again and write up a positive review. They feel good about us when they may have otherwise not felt good about us and that matters. They feel we have their back -- and we do -- and it's in the long term interest of my business to do that, but I also do that for ethical reasons and because of my strong belief in treating others as you want to be treated (the golden rule, I suppose). It doesn't relate to this, but probably the most mind blowing experience from my business and customer service style (and, FTR, 99% of the time, the customer support team interacts with customers, not me directly and they're super nice people and they'll come to me and ask me what I want to do, probably already realizing that I'm going to make the customer happy, even if they're the one making a mistake -- our customers are almost always employees and employees who make a mistake that costs their company money, especially when it's their fault, can be worried about the implications of their boss knowing they made a mistake; so that's also a factor in how we treat customers; we always try to think of what is best for our long-term relationship and NEVER focus on making a quick buck)? One of my most loyal customers is a former competitor of my business partner who they threatened to sue using my company's name as one of the parties to the suit around a decade ago. The CEO of the company threatened with the suit called me up, because he had known me and tried to work with my company, asking me if I was going to sue. I told him absolutely not, never. You have my word. He asked me if I could put that in an email -- because the courts do consider them valid in the US, where our businesses are based. I did. When he later sold his company that competed with my business partner and founded a new company that did recruitment advertising, he immediately became one of my most loyal customers. Now, I operate the way I do both out of my passion for ethics and my experience as a strategy and marketing director at various companies prior to founding my company. The bottom line is simple, always think about the long term relationship and treat people the way you want to be treated. A sample developer that screws up and extends a freebie offer too long merely should be extending that freebie to the folks that used the system -- as long as they weren't scamming the system, which clearly wasn't the case here. The Karanyi dev should be thinking about how much it costs to acquire customers and how he just had a bunch of new customers that looked like excellent future paying customers. Of course, there were existing customers like me that took advantage of the offer too, but it means the opportunity to upsell current customers to the extended version "Pro" of the synth in future upsell promos. Acquiring new customers is pretty expensive even with forums like KVR, VI Control, Cakewalk, etc. and it often costs far more than $10 in advertising (including paid search) and PR efforts to bring a new customer on board, and now instead, he just put a bad taste in the mouth of a bunch of the very kind of people who is going to have to pay even more money to attract back -- if that will even work. Frankly, if this was my first experience with the developer, I wouldn't bother with him again. There's enough competition where you can find alternatives. The cost of creating a bad first impression with great prospects -- and us sample and plugin addicts are great prospective customers -- is far more than $9 per prospect. It's just bad decision making. Is it bad ethics? I don't think we could go that far. But it is plain and simple, really bad decision making.

Okay, thanks for coming with me on this new tangent. When my daughter was in elementary she used to take forever to eat her breakfast before school. And I'm kind of an unconventional guy with a big sense of humor. So take this with that understanding. So to get her to move faster I put on Metallica while she ate. She hated it, so she ate faster, but complained. I was using an FBI technique. I'm not a Metallica fan, BTW, it was just my sense of humor. So years later, last month, her and I are in the car and "Master of Puppets" comes on and I politely go to change the station, she says, "Nooooo!!! I love this song!!!! It reminds me of Eddie!" It was surreal. All of those techniques, I was pretty sure she would hate Metallica for life. Nope! At least it's rock, so I love that she loves a rock song. Although my kids don't like Zeppelin! I'm an old rocker. That was my genre. Although I am the son of a classical pianist and also love Chopin, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. Rachmaninoff... Back in the day (the mid 90s )Jimmy Chamberlain (Smashing Pumpkins) stated I was one of his favorite rock drummers -- in front of witnesses!!!! And now I have two kids who barely even like rock music except for my daughter liking that song (and mellow stuff like Coldplay, which I love too).

Before you abandon KONTAKT, think about the employees of hard drive companies and their families, Fleer. Think about the children!!! Come back to KONTAKT. Do the right thing and order those additional hard drives tonight. For the children.

Very nice. I especially like the pizzicato string parts. Imaginative and playful synthwave. Funny. My 13 year old daughter is now a big fan of synthwave due to "Stranger Things" and is listening to songs I listened to as a teenager. Thanks for sharing that, I enjoyed it.

No KONTAKT? I don't think I could do it. I'm not sure I have had a single project that doesn't use at least one instance of KONTAKT.