PavlovsCat

I'm not sure what you're referencing. My comment you quoted only referred to Fleer and Larry and that the vast majority of Cakewalk forum users appreciate Larry. There was actually a series of bullying, taunting and attack posts targeting Peter. It wasn't just one, it was a pattern. But, again, I wasn't referencing you or anything you posted. Perhaps you misunderstood my 99% remark? It just meant that there are some users here that have made some unfriendly posts directed at Larry or make negative posts when some of us post our appreciation for Larry. I absolutely wasn't referencing you or your posts, which I get, was just you expressing that since Batwaffel deleted his posts I referenced, you couldn't discern the issues being discussed. Suffice to say, Batwaffel made a series of bullying/harassing attack posts targeting Peter and I called it out. As it's my thread, I felt an obligation to address it. Batwaffel later owned up to doing those things and has since stopped. Was his half apology sincere or just to ensure he doesn't get banned so that he can continue to self promote at this forum? I certainly don't know.

At this point, only a complete newbie wouldn't know that. And the newbie would find out after a few minutes of checking out threads here! You call Larry the king, I prefer "the boss," but either way, I think it's very clear that you and I -- and many others miss him. Not just his deals, but his presence. Hopefully, in time, he'll return, see how people missed him and realize that he's extremely loved and appreciated by 99% of the folks here.

I didn't witness Peter engaged in bullying and taunting. There's always an excuse by people who routinely engage in bad behavior for their behavior. I don't know you or your history with Peter, but 20+ years of managing digital marketing-- including social media-- tells me you engaged in cyber bullying and Peter didn't, whatever rationalization you want to make for your bad behavior. Try owning up to a mistake, apologize and do better. I'm not going to say anything further other than I was really sickened by your behavior and think you deserve to get a lifetime ban from this forum.

@BatwaffelYou deleted your post completely unprovoked harassing/taunting and bullying posts directed at a very friendly member of this forum. I don't know you, but I loathe bullying and those who engage in such behavior and was contemplating reporting your posts harassing a fellow forum member. I would strongly urge everyone to avoid this person's Reddit. We don't need to reward that kind of behavior.

Larry's fine. He's very prolifically posting on Facebook. He's just not posting here lately and he was pretty much responsible for the vast majority of threads here. Hopefully, it's just a vacation that he'll return from.

Since Larry hasn't posted in a long time and may not return, I thought I'd share the Facebook group that Larry and I are in where he got many of his deal posts from. Even then, Larry had discount codes that these posts often don't have. <Sigh.> If you're out there Larry and see this, it is definitely NOT a replacement for you, just a valuable resource for our fellow deal loving friends. https://www.facebook.com/groups/plugindeals/?ref=share

Every time this developer has the exact same $29 USD incredible sale for this library, they claim it has a regular price of $299 USD or more (spoiler: you can almost always find this library available for $29 USD), I feel a duty to recommend anyone interested in this developer do a search at this forum, KVR and VI Control before making a purchase. I have yet to see a single positive post about the quality of this developer's string libraries. In fact, everyone I know that bought it -- including a good friend of mine -- has told me it's among, if not, the worst KONTAKT sample libraries they've ever purchased; poorly sampled, poorly organized and poorly coded, resulting in an unusable library. Search the forums first and you'll even see some of our regulars bought this and regretted it. Last month the developer ran a Facebook ad for the library -- for the same price -- and I commented about what I have been told about the library and several people replied that they had bought it and confirmed it was very poor and they regretted their purchase. There are other string library choices in this price range that are good quality. I'd suggest checking into Spitfire's free BBCO Discover library, their Originals line and Impact Soundworks Rhapsody, which sometimes goes on sale for $29 USD.

Thanks, that's great! I'll go out of my way to consider your libraries for purchase. Like I wrote, I really do like the sound of the demos. Also, I'm a former Fortune 500 marketing director and consultant (I founded a business years ago) and have consulted to more than two dozen sample and plugin developers, so there was definitely some experienced insights in my post. I would strongly recommend you start with KONTAKT, as it has the largest user base of consumers who spend on sample libraries by leaps and bounds. I don't think the markets for other formats comes anywhere close. I wish you great success in your business. Thanks for listening.

Well a bunch that are only available directly from the developer. But the PREPARATO Piano is one sale, and that's great, IMO. But if you go to the developer's site they have a free version. Download that first, it's one of the best piano freebies there is. Off hand, their vibraphone library comes to mind. It is gorgeous and only $10 USD (I picked it up on a flash sale for even less than that). Again though, I don't think they're selling it at Loot. They've had some excellent sales at their site, so, if you can be patient you can get great discounts. But I'd suggest grabbing all of their freebies and you'll realize how good this developer is. https://www.xperimentaproject.com/

Great KONTAKT developer. I love every library I've bought from them. Even their freebies are really nice.

A college professor of mine once told me that if you care about a business you thought about buying from but didn't, tell them why you didn't buy from them. As the years went on and I became a business strategist and, now, a business owner, I wanted to do just that. First, this piano library sounds very nice. I might have purchased it, if it were available as a KONTAKT library. Unfortunately, I am through with purchasing sample libraries housed in a small developer's homemade plugins. It's too much work to install, learn and maintain another plugin that easily could have been made as a sample library usable for a popular sample format, like KONTAKT. Buying software from a small sample developer -- often a one or two person business, sometimes, a side business -- has proven to be too much effort for the end result. IMO, small sample developers should focus on making a great, well coded sample libraries -- doing that is challenging enough for a small operation. Instead, when devs go down the path of attempting to code their own sample player, they are competition with well researched, designed, coded and tested apps, like KONTAKT that were developed by teams that include professionals with sampling, programming, testing, user interface design and usability expertise. Expecting a single small developer with one to three employees to have all of these skills PLUS handle customer support is rarely realistic. Plus, the reality is, for those who have invested in KONTAKT or another sampler, the idea of having to add a different plugin that requires a new learning curve and maintenance is a burden I don't want to really want to deal with. I literally own hundreds of sample libraries and hundreds of plugins, I don't want more plugins to learn and maintain for every new sample library. MNTRA was, for me, the straw that broke the camel's back. The sounds are really nice and when the plugin works, the user experience is poor -- but some of the ideas are really clever. It has all sorts of problems that many users have reported in various forums. For me, that includes a library that doesn't even play at all. The developer contacted me several days after my support ticket to tell me that he was super busy and would get back to me in a week, but never got back to me. I eventually gave up and moved on and would absolutely never purchase from that developer again -- unless he started making sample libraries in a format I used, like for KONTAKT. I'm very empathetic to small developers and have provided many with free business advice in past years, but when you make the leap to paid software, you have an ethical obligation to provide a good product and good support; but many small devs get in over their head. Now, I realize that it's inevitable that some people will read this and disagree with me. That's fine. Some of you don't have KONTAKT and aren't invested in another sampler ecosystem. Understood. The developer could have made this for another sampler format, like Decent, UVI or in the open source SFZ format and then you would not have to install, learn and maintain a new plugin for each sample library.

This thread is making us look needy. There is more than a little bit of a needy, jolted ex vibe-- one who is unwilling to accept they were ghosted -- to all of these threads, Fleer. I don't mean to point the finger at you, because you start these threads and I'm over here feeling the same way, so maybe you're just more self-aware, but you're a bit obsessed. And still...here's a special long distance dedication from the Cakewalk Forum to Larry.

No one really ran him off. Some posters were being rude and making unfounded and insulting accusations or just strongly disagreeing with him around the same time. I think because he invests so much time and effort here that he took it very hard and I think he just got burnt out. Hopefully, after a vacation, he'll be back. He has to realize that the vast majority of us greatly appreciate him and value how much he means to this community. If that wasn't already obvious when Larry was actively posting here, it sure is clear now. Even if he comes back just to comment in posts, I'd really like to see him back. He's a giant part of this place for me and, I'm quite sure, most of the regulars. It's just not the same without him. Also, IBTL.

Wow, thanks so much.

The 8Dio sale prices were all incorrect when I tried it out the other day (the current prices were higher). Clearly it's grabbing older pricing and not updating when the pricing expires.

If you can download them all at once, I haven't figured out how to do it. That would be nice. I assume that there's no way to do that as the site owner makes revenue off of ads, so they want the page views.

This is the best kind of deal of all, everything is FREE, the presets and the synth they're used in. So, everyone can afford this. I found this excellent resource of free presets for VITAL, the free open source synth. In case you aren't already familiar with VITAL, it's a great sounding synth --I love it more than most synths I've paid for (there is a paid version with some additional presets and features,, which is a good way to support the developer/development of the synth, but it's completely unnecessary for using these presets). There's a lot of great sounded presets at this site, they're well categorized and you get to listen to a demo of each one before deciding if you want to download them. https://presetshare.com/presets?query=&instrument=2&genre=&type=&orderby=relevance

Ha! No worries. I fixed the link. I stopped playing 22 years ago from a repetitive stress injury that caused lifelong tendonitis and am just trying to play again, but have all the skils of a cat walking across a piano and I never had a decent singing voice. Absolutely no comparison with your level of talent. I had a couple of good moments but nothing impressive.

Like everything else I've heard from you, this is excellent. Great job. You really know how to craft and perform a catchy pop song. You're super talented. In a fair world, you'd have a major label deal.

I keep replacing the original file with an updated file and the forum has issues finding it after the original is replaced for some reason. Here's the working link. I changed some things on the vocal effects and mix and added in some reverse guitar parts near the end of the song that I thought helped the vibe I was going for. This was all really just a one-man jam session.

Thanks for the kind words and helpful advice. I'm going to put it to use this weekend. BTW, the guitars and bass are Orange Tree Samples libraries played from my midi keyboard in real-time.

What's funny is before I clicked the link to this thread, I said to myself, "Well, it's not Larry, but it's something," and your first sentence mentions Larry. Clearly, it's going to be a while before some of us can get used to his absence.

This was my impromptu one-man jam session version of "Hey Joe." I didn't play the entire song, but as much as I felt up to at the time. Considering that until last year, I had stopped playing music for more than 20 years due to a repetitive stress injury that limits me to playing to just a few minutes at a time before pain sets in I thought I did an okay job.

UPDATE: I just checked out the felt piano library (for 3 bucks) pretty quickly. It's nice for what it is. It has multiple velocity layers, I don't think it has round robins, but I could be wrong. It only has one sound that is very distinctive. I would call it a character piano library. If you like the sound of the demo, get it. But it doesn't come with additional presets, it's really just about that one sound. For $3 USD, I think it was still a bargain. But it's not a lot different than a better felt piano library you can pick up for KONTAKT for free over at Pianobook.

There are a bunch of sales going on at Loot Audio, however, there's one KONTAKT developer there who has recently captured my attention, Majetone. They rarely have sales, but they're having an excellent sale right now at Loot Audio. Last night I bought Majetone's Truck Drums 2 library and their felt piano library (which I haven't tried yet, but will update this thread after I do). They have other libraries on sale, but the ones that really caught my attention are Truck Drums 2, which is a great sounded drum kit that captures John Bonham's "When The Levee Breaks" kit sound better than I've ever heard before, playing with it is an absolute blast (I was, prior to an injury that stopped me from playing, a semi-professional rock drummer, consequently, I have a deep appreciation for great sounding drums). The fact that it's now priced at $10.63 USD makes it a total no-brainer, IMO. I started playing it last night and even with tendonitis pain, I couldn't stop playing it. I absolutely love it. And it's much more than just a Bonham sounding kit. For my mini-critique, I wish it had two ride toms and I don't love the mapping of the ride and crash cymbal (it's on the same note, separated by velocity -- I'm going to email the developer and give him my insights; I would absolutely love if he came out with an expanded edition -- just take my money, please!). I'll update this thread when I have the chance to check out the felt piano. Also, go to the Majetone and download their freebie KONTAKT libraries and if you use drum loops, they have free loops that sound really good. https://www.majetone.com/truck-drums (this is the page for the drum kit, which includes several audio demos, which are not on the Loot Audio page. NOTE: The sale is only at Loot Audio's site and not at Majetone's site.) https://www.lootaudio.com/category/kontakt-instruments/majetone-industries