PavlovsCat

But he actually doesn't remain neutral and that has long been a concern of the developer community. Mike attempts to create the perception that he's neutral, but one can easily see that he's had a good deal of run-ins with developers and sometimes engages in name-calling of people on his forum (mental illness is a go to insult for Mike). If you look on the final or second to last page of the 8Dio attack thread, there's one of the only posts where someone is defending 8Dio that MIke didn't delete and Mike harasses the guy. He accuses him of being a shill for 8Dio and then mocks him. It in no way reflects a man (Greene) who is remaining neutral. I realize it's a controversial issue with people. But when Christian Henson made an anti-trans tweet furthering misinformation (basically that small children are getting ***** change operations in the UK; in fact, the minimum age there is 16), a conversation began at VI-Control with a good deal of LGBTQ composers wanting to discuss the situation. Mike censored any conversation related to the Henson matter. I'm your average heterosexual married once middle-aged dad and don't have an agenda beyond treating others with respect and kindness, but I'm not a fan of censorship. I think it would have been great if the conversation were allowed to continue. When Mike doesn't like a developer or someone disagrees with him, he tends to be pretty aggressive, I would say even bullying. Just from what you can observe in the 8Dio thread, he's furthering stories without any evidence to support allegations and these stories go back 13 years, even before the formation of 8Dio, and I know one of them personally, and it's not being represented truthfully. And I can tell you first hand that if you criticize one of his friends or Mike himself, that post will likely be deleted. Mike acknowledged deleting hundreds of posts in the 8Dio thread -- I had some of them and I know some others that had their posts deleted or saw pro 8DIo posts deleted -- yet Mike claims that he didn't delete a single pro 8Dio post. Mike is angry at 8Dio since they pulled their sponsorship of VI-Control and the CEO harshly criticized him. Also, Sarah and Mario both work for Impact Soundworks/Andrew Aversa, who also posted in the thread and is an 8Dio competitor and Vi-Control advertiser. That wasn’t disclosed by Sarah, Mario, Andrew or Mike.

Hey Uncle Lar, what's a gonio? And once I find the gonio, should I meter it?

I was waiting for the next thread on MNTRA. A year after I bought a library for MNTRA and couldn't get it to work after many attempts, I decided to give it another try and installed the latest version and installed the updated libraries fresh and everything worked!Yay!! I say this as a message to all you kids out there (in Cakewalk forum terms, a kid is anyone under 40), never give up!

You say portato, I say portatoe. For some reason, I saw the word portato on my Google search and felt compelled to make that joke. I'll show myself out...

I didn't know this, but I googled it! "staccatissimo A style of playing notes in a detached, separated, distinct manner that shortens the notated duration of the note in a more exaggerated way than normal staccato. Staccatissimo is indicated by solid wedge directly above or below the notehead."

This a great group, the best! It's part of why we're afraid to venture out from the deals forum. There's such a great group here. Dead serious. I'd be happy to hear music from everyone here after spending so much time here. I never even had the nerve to publicly share music with only me playing until last year and it was at this forum. It wasn't easy, but people were super nice and encouraging.

That post wasn't a great idea. But it's a pretty hostile thread and he was going to be attacked no matter what he said. And consider that I'm easily one of the top harshest 8Dio and SoundPaint critics at this forum, but I'm not okay with the mob action mentally of that thread. People aren't looking for facts, they're looking to burn the developer at a stake. It's a hostile echo chamber.

Last month, Mike Greene was telling me that his forum was the wrong place to air grievances against a developer and now he's actively participating in a thread against a competitor developer declaring that he's on "team Sarah." Troels commented in the thread for anyone following this toxic drama. To be really candid, this is exactly why I loathe VI Control. The bullying and the ethics are terrible there. Look back on my posts about 8Dio and I have been hyper critical. I've even been that way with Troels and he was still friendly with me. So Troels posted in the forum (and yes, he was the person I was chatting with) and guess what? The angry mob is attacking him because they blindly believe every charge made up from Sarah Mancuso. I can tell you, as someone libeled by her weeks ago, she's not someone I find even slightly concerned with ethical behavior. Again, who creates a thread praising a developer and their libraries and then after that developer doesn't pay her 6-7 figures she wants for her non-commissioned work she pitched to them (FTR, Troels told me that Sarah initially asked 7 figures for her scripts, Sarah claims she asked 6 figures; I haven't seen anything in writing that makes clear which is accurate) , she goes back and modifies her praise of that developer to pure venom and trashing every product and urges everyone not to buy their products. If that isn't an obvious vendetta and libel, nothing is. She's deliberately trying to damage a developer, to destroy them. completely out of spite and the forum's owner is supporting her effort. I am done with VI Control after this. I would urge others to vacate that forum. Mike Greene is using his forum to sabotage a competitor. I hope developers stop advertising there after this,

So, I won't say exactly, but I did go directly to a main source to find out what occurred with 8Dio (okay, it's easy to guess by that who I chatted with). Here's what I found. According to what I was told, Sarah Mancuso created a non-commissioned hobby project around a discontinued 8Dio library and then approached 8Dio to pitch them to pay her more than ten thousand dollars for it. 8Dio wasn't interested, but offered her something (money) for her effort out of gratitude. Sarah was clearly hyper offended and modified the thread she had made from praising 8Dio libraries to not just bashing those libraries, but repeatedly calling the same company she was praising "amoral" and bashing the same libraries she was previously praising and then citing anyone she knew who said anything bad about 8Dio even if it had nothing to do with her original objection. It's a very clear vendetta by someone against a brand, a clear effort to attack a brand. A smear campaign. Mancuso also didn't share that she works for one of 8Dio's competitors (the owner later chimed in on the thread). Look at my past posts about 8Dio. I'm hyper critical and guess what, I've never been told to take anything down and 8Dio has always been very professional with me. And I've NEVER at any point taken any NFRs from 8Dio or Soundpaint or money. I just hate terrible ethics and the toxic behavior in that thread and even the forum owner participating in it, It's one thing for Mancuso to share her specific experiences, but she's engaged in an all out attack and take down attempt of a business, She's urging people not to buy 8Dio and from her own story, she approached them to pitch them something she made for one of the retired libraries -- when pitching a developer something for an existing library is a crapshoot -- and she's angry that they didn't pay her what she feels it's worth. I don't find that is anywhere in the realm of bad ethics or exploitation. Now if 8Dio hired her and didn't pay her an agreed amount, that would be unethical. But if you perform work in advance and pitch it to a company and they don't want it, that's not a reflection of their bad ethics. It's their right to accept or reject anything they like. Does 8Dio make my favorite sample libraries? Nope. Have they ever been dishonest with me or pressured me to take down a negative review? Nope. But, of course, I'm not an influencer, and the reality is, brands routinely work with influencers before their "reviews" go live and brands will negotiate on negative portions of a review video. Again, I urge people to try for themselves rather than believe the words of someone trying to destroy a company simply because she's bitter that they didn't want to buy her non-commissioned work for what she wanted. FTR, I've heard her music and she's clearly very talented. I would suggest that she better focus herself and not do non-commissioned projects if she wants to be paid, as those are a crap shoot. From a strategy perspective, with VI Control's owner chiming in to declare that he's on "team Sarah," I don't think it would be a great idea for 8Dio to post there. No matter what their response, they're not going to get a fair hearing on that platform. I know that 8Dio is on Discord and that is where I think anyone who wants their side of things should check.

After seeing 8Dio having a full scale attack on them at VI Control led by an influencer/coder that is angry that 8Dio refused her offer for paid work and the others with vendettas and bias, including the site owner (who posted that he's on "team Sarah"), the smear campaign reeks of bad ethics and there's enough that's clearly not right to see that it's not an honest critique of 8Dio. So, while I'm pretty critical of 8Dio and SoundPaint libraries, I've never once found them engaging in unethical practices in the ten or so years I've been an 8Dio customer. Every time I've had an issue with 8Dio or SoundPaint libraries, they've resolved things with me in a fair and ethical manner. In fact, the only time I've ever returned a sample library was a SoundPaint guitar sample library and I told them why I didn't like it and they promptly gave me a refund. Relationships with contractors, including influencers, are negotiated individually. The attack thread claims that 8Dio doesn't pay contractors very well. I really don't know if that's true or the the poster is just bringing everyone with a grudge to bash a developer that they're not working with. But I don't find their attack thread ethical. There are numerous misrepresentations in it and bias. The original poster works with an 8Dio competitor, but she didn't disclose that, and ethically, she should have. So I can't vouch that 8Dio is great to work with -- I really don't know. However, I don't find Mancuso is a trustworthy source and the obvious bias and poor ethics of the attack thread throw up too many red flags to ignore. all I know is that I have been very critical of 8Dio and SoundPaint libraries and have never suffered repercussions for that. I have never accepted NFRs from 8Dio or SoundPaint, I've always been a paying customer. I definitely wouldn't cite any of their libraries as my favorite of their kind, but they're a legit business in my experience and it's sad that I even need to state that about them, but the attack on them at VI Control is so over the top and all-encompassing with the owner of VI Control signed on, that I think customers should share their honest experience instead of being silent when there is this kind of attack. EDIT: Update. Since posting this a very respected developer friend told me that he knows contractors who've worked for 8Dio and has never heard them bashed by any of them.

That's pretty cool. I wonder how many guitarists bought a Strat because of Jeff Beck. And yet I've never heard a single guitarist who really sounded like Jeff Beck. Not even close.

Libel is only if you lie about a person or a business. If I state that I think XYZ developer's library of sample llama screams is complete garbage, that's not libel. If I state that someone said something to me they actually stated is not libel. If I falsely state that a certain developer is a serial killer, an adulterer and that he's embezzling from his corporation, that is libel. Libel means publishing lies. Now Corey stating in writing that he was blackmailed, if untrue, is both unethical and libel. Was Tawnia trying to persuade him to soften his negative comments or was it actually a threat? I'm not sure where his reviews he stated deleted appeared, but if it's on somewhere like Trust Pilot, 8Dio wouldn't be able to delete them. It's difficult to say if he's exaggerating on what he was told or not. I only know him from his videos, and he appears to be pretty honest, but then, in his own words, he stated that he was willing to delete his critical comments in exchange for free libraries. So the bottom line is, we really don't know if he's portraying his conversations accurately or not. We're only hearing one side of the story from someone we really don't know. If I'm going to be completely candid -- and that is my preferred way to operate -- I do find influencers commonly have very convoluted ethics. Their whole operation relies on getting free products and cash for doing reviews (and if those are popular enough, ad revenue from Google). If you're an influencer and you do a very negative review of a developer -- and Corey famously did one years ago for a developer whose name escapes me but he's a metal producer based out of Indiana -- and what happens then is that developer is no longer going to give you free product or sponsor your channel and pay you to promote them on their channel. The whole industry of influencers, to be super candid, is very ethically problematic. These are sales promotion people. Every brand has had influencers as part of their promotional plan for products for the last 10 years. Are we to be shocked even that our favorite influencer -- and he's my favorite in this space -- is not above being comprised because he was hyper critical of one developer? I stopped writing on marketing strategy a decade ago. I actually have contemplated writing on the other side, educating consumers on marketing strategies and tactics that are ethically problematic -- and the most common ethically problematic marketing tactic is the use of influencers, because they pose as unbiased reviewers when the truth is, they couldn't be any more biased. Their model is about trying to appear unbiased while getting free product and dollars from the folks their "reviewing" products for. Cory appears fairly honest for an influencer. In my experience, the closest shot people have to an unbiased review is still going to be at a publication that has a legit j-school quality editor and can make the balance between the editorial side and advertising (every publication faces those battles). But I wouldn't put any influencer on a pedestal. The entire model is pretty corrupt by design.

Knowing how VI Control is managed, you won't see a thread that negative stay up on a developer that buys a sponsorship or advertising there. I won't say too much, but there are bad ethics all over the place there if anyone seriously cares. I didn't know much about the Dirk stuff. I'm mainly focused on getting the best sample libraries and plugins I can get for the lowest price and not big into the other stuff. I have given advice to a lot of developers. But I'm not really up on which developer is ripping off which contractor these days. But the sleaze of some of these folks is pretty bad, but I wouldn't be turning to folks like influencers and unstable and hostile contractors bashing competitors of companies they work for, especially when they clearly have an ax to grind -- not if anyone is searching for truth. After reading through the thread, my take is that there's one very hostile individual (Ms. Mancuso) who has a vendetta and isn't a great source for a balanced perspective, especially when she works for a competitor that I didn't notice her disclosing (maybe she did, but I didn't see it, and those relationships are certainly going to impact her and it's very clear that she's bitter about not getting the deal she wanted with 8Dio, so the bias makes clear that we're not getting a very balanced/honest perspective; my personal experience with my single interaction with her leads me to believe she's not big on ethics and integrity). As far as Plugin Boutique, I completely agree with you, it's pretty blatant when everything is rated 4-5 out of 5 stars. But frankly, VI Control isn't a great place for honest negative feedback on developers who advertise there. I'll leave it at that.

This story Mario / Evil Dragon told on Vi Control goes back 13 years ago, and I was the person that a developer turned to for advice on behalf of Mario at the time. Troels, the co-founder of 8Dio (Tawnia is the CEO of 8Dio, and Troels' wife). So 13 years ago, Mario worked for a developer that made a competitor library to ToneHammer and the developer had literally plagiarized some of the content from ToneHammer, so there wasn't a very good relationship between the two developers. Mario posted a review on ToneHammer's competitive library, basically painted it as inferior to the library he worked on. Except Mario hid the fact that he worked for the competitor developer when he compared it as superior to ToneHammer's library. Troels saw the post, DMed Mario that it was unethical for him to pretend he was giving an unbiased review, that he had a moral imperative to disclose that he had worked on the library and for the developer whose library he was praising as superior to ToneHammer's library. Troels' stated that Mario could be sued for what he did. Mario was very worried that he could be sued by ToneHammer for his review without disclosing he worked for the competitor whose product he favorably compared. It was also rumored at the time that Mario was engaged in piracy, so I think that also made him concerned about legal action against him. The developer took the situation to me to ask my advice. I told him -- and I think we had a group chat -- that what Mario did was certainly unethical and he should give Troels a sincere apology and not engage in that type of behavior again, but considering that Troels' company was located in the US and Mario lived in Europe, the odds of ToneHammer taking legal action were very remote. But again, I emphasized to focus on the ethical aspects, and approach Troels with a sincere apology and not engage in similar behavior in the future. I never knew if Mario took my advice or not until recently. I discovered Mario did nothing. He never apologized for his behavior. So when Sarah Mancuso started her thread pulling in anyone who has ever had a dispute with 8Dio she could find, I knew that Mario's story, that he presented as Troels attacking him for merely doing a light critique of his sample library was patently dishonest. It was a lie. I spoke with the developer involved in it and he still had all of his notes and shared them with me, and it is exactly what I just presented. Consequently, I posted the real story in the thread. Mario responded to me, basically acknowledging that I was telling the truth. We had maybe 5 or 6 posts interacting, friendly, but I was calling him out for not telling the truth. However, Mike Greene, the owner of VI Control, and an 8Dio competitor, deleted all of those threads and PMed me not to share my story on his forum again. His message stated, "Stay out of this!" He let me know that he detested 8Dio. He later deleted more than 100 posts by other forum members, the majority of which objected to the toxic attack on 8Dio as being a vendetta. Now, this makes it even more complex, but the person who created the thread, Sarah Mancuso, turned what was her 8Dio fan thread sharing her Kontakt scripts for one of their libraries into an attack thread, pulling in stories from everyone she could find who ever had a beef with 8Dio. I knew one of the other people she used in the thread, Corey Pellazari. After sharing my story, I was contacted by 8Dio's CEO, Tawnia, who was appreciative that I came forward to tell my part in the story. She also shared screenshots and emails of what occurred with Corey. In that case, the screenshots and exchange made it very clear what occurred. Corey was working with SoundIron -- co-founded by Mike Peaslee, Troels' former partner in ToneHammer. The two had a not so amicable split and dissolved their business prior to Mike co-founding SoundIron and Troels co-founding 8Dio. Corey, a talented, yet broke, composer, was eager to do work for developers and had a deal with SoundIron. To cut to the chase, Corey was an 8Dio customer. But he created a puppet account and did a written review in 8Dio's WordPress based review system (they no longer use) under the puppet account and it was brutal, making insults about the management. All of the screenshots and registration and correspondence with Corey was shared with me. Corey created the account using the same fake name he used in a April Fools Day video on YouTube that he made, and oddly, he used his Gmail account with his full real name as the email address and his business name. So Tawnia contacted him about the reviews and said that he could do a review under his real name, but this puppet account never made any purchases, so he needed to delete it. My take on the correspondence was that Corey was incredibly embarrassed about it and very angry about being confronted. When I asked him about it, he didn't want to get into it. And he was pretty unhappy that years later, Sarah and Mike Greene were using it to make their own personal agenda attacks on 8Dio. The story gets even stranger, so you'll need to keep in mind that Corey publicly shared that he had some very severe mental illnesses, disclosing that one was bi-polar disorder. I believe that played a factor in some of his behavior. In any event, shortly before his death, I was trying to get Corey's home address to get a new computer to him, paid for by 8Dio, What people don't know is that Corey, while he had made a video about 8Dio -- he never once did a video reviewing 8Dio libraries (he made a video where he shows people how to optimize / batch save 8Dio libraries). Corey did privately vent to me about different developers he had negative feelings about, and he definitely had some resentment with Tawnia, however, Tawnia was also his confident that he shared his personal life and struggles with. So it's pretty complex. It's not at all what Sarah Mancuso presented in her thread, and Sarah and I had many PMs about her thread about Corey. Sarah never once reached out to Corey or ever had a single communication with him. She also never once had a correspondence with Tawnia, even though she had referred to Tawnia as an "evil b*tch" in her thread attacking 8Dio, Tawnia, and Troels. Sarah eventually acknowledged in our correspondence that she was angry with 8Dio for not doing a deal with her on her scripts for their library. Troels had shared with me that the library she created that for had long since been retired, that she persuaded him to re-release it, and he told me that in the several months that he released it that 8Dio made a little more than $400 USD in gross sales for the library. He told me that Sarah had asked 7 figures for the library and it just wasn't realistic (Sarah claims that she asked 6 figures), so he liked her work and proposed she work with 8Dio on a future project, letting her know about two upcoming projects. He offered her a rate, and Sarah told me that it was below what she felt she was worth, and that was the end of their relationship leading to her making her thread. I also took issue that Sarah Mancuso and Mario / Evil Dragon, both work for an 8Dio competitor, Impact Soundworks and were attacking that 8Dio and not disclosing that. In fact, I only learned that when someone posted it in the thread -- Mike Greene ended up deleting those posts, like he did more than 100 other posts objecting to the attack on 8Dio. I had, in friendly PMs, been trying to persuade Mario and Sarah to disclose their employment with Impact Soundworks. Andrew Aversa, Impact Soundworks owner, ended up posting in the thread too, after someone posted that Mario and Sarah both work for Impact Soundworks, an 8Dio competitor, and that it was unethical for them to make these attacks against a competitor and also not to disclose that fact. I should also note, that after this began to die down, Sarah had told me (via PM) that she felt a bit played by Mike Greene and stated that 8Dio never wronged her. Mario, in our conversations, still felt that Troels was in the wrong 13 years prior and that Troels was a bully to tell Mario that he could be sued. When I told Mario that I would have likely told him the same thing in Troels' position, it fell on deaf ears. So this is the other important factor in all of this and explains why Mike Greeene was so passionately engaged in this vendetta thread against his competitor, 8Dio. Just weeks prior to Sarah turning her 8Dio fan thread into an attack thread, Tawnia/8Dio pulled their sponsorship / advertising from VI - Control. Now I realize this is controversial and many people in this forum have different views, but this is what occurred: Following Christian Henson making his controversial anti-trans tweet (and yes, it is now become public, via Mike Greene, that Christian has a trans child and was frustrated), Tawnia, on behalf of 8Dio, came to Mike to persuade him to stop censoring LGBTQ forum members from discussing the topic, as he had recently done (I read their conversation and discussed this with them, BTW and tried to work things out). When Mike refused, things Tawnia told him that as long as he was censoring the LGBTQ community 8Dio could no longer support VI Control and would be pulling their sponsorship and advertising. Greene had posted and later deleted a claim that Tawnia threatened a boycott, but that was not part of any of the correspondence that I saw. In any event, this was the incident that lead Mike to become furious with 8Dio and he even attempted to persuade me to never work with 8Dio. After I forwarded an email to Tawnia where Mike told me how he hates 8Dio and urged me to never to work with them -- referring to me as a "good guy" with a "great heart." Mike told me that he agreed that what he was doing maybe wasn't ethical, but Tawnia has a lot of people who don't like her, and where there's smoke there's fire. He said that he really wanted to simply ban her from VI Control but that it would be a bad look publicly and urged me to never work with 8Dio or Tawnia and very insultingly, claimed she was manipulating me to share my story and make Mike look bad. I told Mike that Tawnia actually was trying to persuade me to NOT post on VI Control because she finds it so toxic. When I forwarded Mike's email telling me not to work with 8Dio and disparaging Tawnia to Tawnia, cc'ing Mike, Mike responded by threatening to make me look terrible on 8Dio, by taking my long posts and creating a thread which he said would make me look very bad. He later followed through and took my posts from various threads, edited and deleted his posts I was responding to and created a new thread. The bottom line is that VI-Control's owner, Mike Greene, who is also an 8Dio competitor, is angry with 8Dio's CEO after the company pulled its sponsorship of his forum, criticized him and has spent the last 10 months going on long, off the rails rants about 8Dio hurting other developers by lowering their prices too much.

@cclarryI know, like me, you're a big fan of David Gilmour's playing. He shared this great photo of him and Jeff last night. You've probably already seen in, but I thought it was really nice.

I formed an instrumental band at 18 inspired by Jeff Beck's rock fusion music on albums like There and Back, Wired and Blow by Blow. Last night, before bed, I stumbled on a video of Jimmy Page inducting Jeff Beck into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and my wife and I watched it while I talked about how much I loved his playing and the musicians he played with (Jeff always surrounded himself with killer musicians and some of my favorite drummers, like Simon Philips and Vinnie Coliauta and more recently Tal Wilkenfield on bass). I realize the musical heroes of our youth are now quite old, but it's especially hard to see such greats like Jeff Beck pass. I'm going to miss him. RIP, Jeff Beck and thanks for all of the great music and passion that inspired so many of us.

That's a very uncool way to do a reward for completing a survey.

Without Larry I would only learn about sales and stuff like this after they expired. You're the man, Larry. Thanks!

Yeah, I'm with you. I think this sounds really good and I also picked up the Contrabass. While I'm holding my budget back for a while, I know that I'll eventually pick this up. It has a very cool, distinctive sound and based on everything I've heard, it appears to be very playable out of the box. If you get it, I'd love to get your thoughts, Fleer.

I own Originals Intimate Strings and, l found that Originals Intimate Strings met my expectations. It sounds great and is very satisfying to play. However, Originals is a string section, not a series of solo instruments and a very different animal. It's not a highly detailed sample library with tons of articulations like this 8Dio library collection. That said, in my experience, the quality level of Spitfire libraries has been high quality, very playable and reliable.

I want to add this walkthrough of the raw sounds from this library to folks a very good idea how the library sounds. If you're considering this library-- and it's really a large group of solo string libraries-- I strongly recommend giving this video a listen first. The person the video isn't playing anything interesting, so it's musically boring, but it is an accurate representation of what the strings in this library sound like without any effects. It's not an influencer promoting the library, it's just someone playing the various patches dry, without effects or other instruments.

I have these. While they aren't my go to strings, for $50 USD, I think they're worth considering. I think I paid a little over $ 100 US for them a couple of years ago. There are A LOT of articulations for each instrument, but they don't have intuitive scripting that enables you to get real-time, realistic sounding performances like some KONTAKT instruments have (which is what I really love about Orange Tree Samples libraries that made me a huge fan from day one). It takes a bit more work. If you have a go to set of strings and are looking for additional colors, I think this MAY be worth picking up. The interface allows you to trigger the various articulations by velocity you set. Consequently, if that fits your workflow, you may enjoy this approach.

Great deals. I own every piano library on sale. The only piano library on sale that I really don't care for is Singularis (which I picked up free last year). But if anyone is considering these and is wondering if libraries this inexpensive are good, they are very good. Some of their libraries, like the Small Studio Grand (now on sale), are available in the SFZ format, which you can use in the free Sforzando player. Otherwise, the other sale libraries require the full version of KONTAKT.

This is one of the 8Dio libraries I've seen praised the most in forums. I actually bought it the last time it was on sale, but have yet to buy a new hard drive to fit it on (seriously). If anyone who uses it wants to chime in with their take. If anyone has never bought from 8Dio before and wants to buy this, you can PM me for an additional $15 USD off.