PavlovsCat

How dare they! We need to keep buying stuff. My checking account still shows a positive balance.

So, if we could persuade them to do another sale, might you be interested in picking up some additional sounds for your M-Tron Pro? Also, are you happy with the VST? It seems great and is easily the VST I'm most looking forward to picking up next.

Only 550 presets! Man, we've become spoiled with choices!

Over a decade ago, I dropped over $200 USD on an GForce M-Tron and expansion packs. Even with support, I was never able to get the VST to work with Sonar. They've extended upgrade pricing to me and I'm ready to try again. I seriously love the sounds of Mellotrons, Chamberlins and the various iteration of "trons" (on a side note, I find it interesting how we call all of them Mellotrons when Mellotrons were actually a blatant rip off of the Chamberlin; I can't think of many other inventions where we do that) and I have A LOT of VST and sample libraries of them. However, I don't have the M-Tron Pro and I love the demos I've heard of it and its various expansion packs. However, my budget is tight. I was once, long ago, a working musician, but I'm now just a hobbyist and have a very limited budget for this passion of mine. Consequently, I've been hoping GForce would have a Black Friday sale. Nope. A Christmas sale. Nope -- or at least, not yet. And I did some searching to see their history of sales and found that they're pretty erratic. So the reality is, while I am on their email list, my email inbox is overloaded and I've come to rely on this forum -- and largely cclarry -- to keep me informed of even developers' sales, even for ones where I'm on their email lists. So, my point is that considering that GForce is a relatively small developer, if there is enough interest, that we might be able to persuade them to have a sale. In fact, I'm hoping that if I can get enough people interested here, then other forums, I will send their CEO an email informing him to get his attention. Is anyone with me? I love what G-Force does. I want to buy the M-Tron and just about every expansion pack and if there are others who love Tron sounds as much as I do, I bet we can get better pricing and make G-Force happy too. What do you say? Is anyone with me? https://www.gforcesoftware.com/products/m-tron-pro/

Okay, I just listened to the walkthrough. It seems like a decent quality library, but it doesn't appear to be extensively sampled in detail I'm accustomed to nor does it appear to have a strumming engine or sampled chords (loops). But I suppose it's mainly about the tone of the single note samples. I have to come back to this one because I love the idea. Kudos to the developer for doing something different. I'm just trying to figure out if I would actually use it. I did download his free Wurlitzer electric piano (Wurly) a few weeks ago and that seems nice. I'd urge others to download it.

I've been obsessively buying guitar sample libraries and VSTs since the 90s. I'm not sure what to make of this. I need to listen again. cclarry, you play guitar (I was a working rock drummer for two decades but also play keyboards, as piano was my first Instrument), what do you think, @cclarry? I have all of the Orange Tree Samples libraries. I've consulted to them for years and IMO, they're the best there is for realistic guitar sample libraries. But I have lots of other guitar libraries including the more odd, sound design ones and stuff like Sonic Couture's eBow library (I even have a somewhat amusing personal story featuring its inventor). This is only $10 GBP, which makes it makes it easy to buy, but I don't want to buy libraries I'm not going to use. But who knows? Conceptually and from demos, what do you think?

None, really. KONTAKT is pretty pervasive for DAW users who spend a lot on sample libraries. The big opportunity is on the lower end of the market with hobbyists that aren't willing or are unable to afford KONTAKT, but also, these users tend to be unable to afford costly sample library purchases. That said, the market has matured to the point where there are many options for those users too, such as SFZ players and free VSTs and free and low priced sample libraries. So, it's really not a problem for a quality developer that is a sharp business person who has properly analyzed the market before determining their product strategy and does effective marketing and promotion planning and implementati0on (SPOILER: most don't, but that's not to be blamed on KONTAKT licensing; that's just a lack of business skills). The great irony that your average user is unlikely to realize is that licensing KONTAKT Player often is helpful for KONTAKT-based developers reaching music producers at the lower end of the spend scale, which often can mean a higher quantity of consumers, but costs the developer a lot more than non-licensed, more costly libraries aimed at consumers that spend a lot more.

Yeah, I definitely want it to be at least 7200 RPM. But as long as you replied, what do you think of this video software?

Exactly. I can only imagine what cclarry has in the way of data and hard drives. But I was just about to go online shopping for another external drive. Recommendations welcome! Now what will I call this drive? I was thinking of cclarrysFault or cclarry-deals.

It's a small piano library for free from Boz Digital. This is a pre it sounded nice in the demo. From their Facebook page: "Christmas freebie? A cry for attention? Call it whatever you want. I created this very VERY basic kontakt library of my piano. This was a first test because I just wanted to dip my toes in the kontakt waters, and I had a 1926 Steinway Model L in my living room, so I figured, why not? I put up some mics, collected some samples and dropped them into kontakt. This was the result. You are welcome to have it for free. I didn't intend for this to be anything more than a test, but it actually worked better than I had expected (note: expectations were quite low), so I figured I'd offer it up for free if anyone wants to use it. There are 2 dynamic layers (with filtering to make it sound a little better at different dynamic layers). I sampled every tritone. There are no release samples. There are no pedal down samples. I captured a single stereo pair. It requires Kontakt 6. Did I mention it was low effort? If not, I'm mentioning it now. But it does work. You can download it directly from this link (download size 137mb): https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoNdWz6KJnnmkMkbvenHlEpim92UCg?e=EKAaS9 Here's an equally low effort little sound sample so you can hear what it sounds like before downloading it: http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/.../piano%20sample%20test... " https://www.facebook.com/BozDigitalLabs/photos/a.425499820895892/3437997132979464/

Thanks. I appreciate it!

The videos were a bit odd and didn't get into much about using the vocal library. Does anyone here have it? Are you able to play single notes and chords using the various vocal vowel patches and still have it sound realistic? The price seems ridiculously cheap, but after a few YouTube and Google searches which yielded no reviews and no social media posts beyond the dev's Facebook page, I came across a reddit thread on on a recent sale on the library, and a current customer chimed in and stated that he thought the library wasn't worth much more than the $19.95 USD it was on sale for at the time because he found the content very limited. If they dev just would have done a walkthrough that showed how to play the library from the keyboard, this would be a dead simple decision for me. As it stands, I watched the videos, read the website copy and it's not crystal clear how the library works.

I love SonicCouture libraries. Great, impeccable quality and really creative. If anyone else has older SonicCouture libraries with upgrades available, I just checked and found all of my upgrades are half (50%) off.

@cclarry so the ratio is cclarry 1,000 freebie tips, PavlovsCat, one. Oh well, I'm trying! I love Cinematique Instruments libraries. The Klang libraries are really cool, IMO, and free or very cheap.

While most Cinematique Instruments libraries require the full version of KONTAKT, CI have a few libraries for HALion, including two free libraries that work with the free version of HALion (Sonic SE 3). They're available at the Steinberg site and worth downloading, IMO. One is a glockenspiel and the other is a guitar harmonics library. The glockenspiel library: https://new.steinberg.net/vst-instruments/alto-glockenspiel/?et_cid=15&et_lid=23&et_sub=Alto%2520Glockenspiel The guitar harmonics library: https://new.steinberg.net/vst-instruments/guitar-harmonics/

@cclarry, of course, it wasn't opportunistic to download it when it seemed intentionally free, but once we all discovered that it was only free due to an error by the retailer, certainly, keeping/installing it after that is the very definition of opportunistic. In essence, it's saying,"Tough luck, your mistake got me it free!" Anyhow, again, I realize I won't win many people who grabbed the plugin when it was free over with my point, but it's a very basic ethical point. If someone makes a mistake and you take advantage of it, that person is literally the very definition of an opportunist. (I'm actually using literally literally!). Anyhow, I'll stop there. I just hope that some people decide to NOT to take advantage of the mistake. That's all. I've always enjoyed this forum and how people tend to be lighthearted and pretty kind to one another. I don't want to bring it down, I just wanted to step in with a POV on a thread where I think we can all do better. I love freebies. But I would not be okay with this situation. The right thing to do is to contact the retailer to ask or just delete the download. It's what we would all want if we were in the retailer or the developer's shoes. Mistakes happen. We hope that when we mistake that others will not take advantage of us. I'm just saying, let's do that to this retailer. It's not like they're Amazon. Small mistakes can impact small retailers in a way that would be nothing to a big retailer. I'm sure the total annual sales of that store don't add up to a rounding error for Sam Ash.

A small music retailer makes a mistake that may cost them money (the developer may expect the retailer to pay at their agreed upon rate for each of the licenses that went out). Consequently, my hope is that, while people may have downloaded the plugin without realizing the retailer made a mistake, that now that they realize that it was a mistake, that they do the right thing and not keep it -- perhaps, contact the retailer and ask them what's the best course of action (if they say they worked things out and you can keep it, you can keep it with a good conscience, and perhaps, keep them in mind for future business). Otherwise, once you're aware that the plugin was only given away free due to a mistake, it would be opportunistic to keep it. Things are tough enough with the pandemic, we can at least be decent to one another. I realize that my simple post calling for people to do the right thing isn't going to be popular, but I still think it's important to have a reminder up. Ethics still matter, even when no one is looking. [Edited for clarity.]

Offhand, here's what I recall purchasing this weekend: - Beautiful Void Audio - A synth library, I forgot the name - IamLamprey - Some really cool sample libraries from a very creative independent developer - Izotope Excalibur - multi-effect - Frozen Plain Artic Strings - SampleTekk - various upgrades to my old piano libraries and a couple of new pianos - Sample Fuel - various synth libraries - Sospiro Strings Ben Osterhouse - maybe the best deal of all this year. A beautiful KONTAKT sample library featuring bass, cello, viola and violin for under $35 USD. - Sound Dust Flutter Dust - Splash Sound upright piano library - Synthmaster One - Miscellaneous small libraries and synth patches from independent developers at Loot Audio and elsewhere Not for me, but I bought my teenage son a gaming PC, which I'm also going to install Cakewalk, Reason Lite (which I picked up at Plugin Boutique for free, and various VSTs and sample libraries for him when it gets here tomorrow. I'm contemplating whether or not to upgrade to the latest versions of Melodyne Studio and Studio One Pro (opinions of users is welcomed).

Aidan, Kirk Hunter has a library ridiculously cheap at AudioPlugin.deals. I think it's $29. FTR, I've consulted to Kirk in the past and we're friends, but it doesn't cloud my objectivity on sample libraries -- of which I own and use a lot. Kirks been making orchestral, largely string, sample libraries for decades. I would totally put this deal in the realm of no-brainers. Listen to the demos, visit Kirk's site and check out YouTube if you want more info. If you like what you hear, I don't think you'll ever beat this deal. You need the full version of KONTAKT, but this is ridiculously under priced, IMO. It's never been priced even close to this level.

CloudBounce seems to have a good service. The one thing that gives me pause is that it appears that they haven't had a round of funding in many years and according to everything I can find online, their founder is the only current employee.

Wow guys, great job on the tune! I'm enjoying it right now. Kudos to all involved.

As you can probably figure out, Aria's a sample developer whose libraries have widely been seen as extremely poor, by customers and other sample developers. The complaints are pretty comprehensive ranging from sample quality, quality control and KONTAKT scripting, but one thing seems very clear, the scripting of Aria libraries appears to be extremely poor by all estimates. I don't recall ever coming across a post from a satisfied Aria customer. If you're looking for a bargain on strings, I just picked up Ben Osterhouse's Sospiro Strings -- a string quartet with individual bass, cello, viola and violin. It's a KONTAKT library (requires the full version) , that cost less than $35 USD at Loot Audio (it's on sale now). I've been recommending it to friends lately. I've never bought any of this developer's libraries before -- and I have yet to install the library (I'm awaiting a new DAW PC), but the demos sound beautiful and the reviews and recommendations from musicians like composer Guy Michelmore are very positive. VI Control even has a Ben Osterhouse appreciation thread!

Your post reminded me that this forum has a no swearing policy. Now I completely agree with no political or religious discussions as most people can't seem to discuss those topics calmly these days, but swearing??? We need to fight for our rights, friends. For some of us, this is a very tough policy to live by.

FYI, Cherry Audio just made their MG-1 free without any strings at their website, so if anyone wants that totally free without making a purchase, you can grab it at the developer's website.

You realize what happened here with this thread, right? cclarry put up a deal a day before it happened. It's very clear that weve reached the point where retailers and developers can no longer keep up with cclarry's pace.