Magic Russ

You can leave a spreadsheet with license keys to your heirs. I can see my grandkids getting emails "Russ, congratulations on having been a NI user for 75 years. Check out these great savings on Komplete 37". Or whatever they use to send messages in the future.

A discount is now a "gift"?

Is there any point in getting Garbage if you already have Trash?

Hi, Ed!

With all that is messed up in the world, is it really worth getting bent out of shape because a software company is not compensating you for already having the product they are giving away?

Studio One has a feature which allows you to use an Apple or Android tablet to control your console. I would not complain if CW implemented something similar.

I do like the turbo delay. Any thoughts on the other two?

You left out the most important part that this is FREE. Also Kontakt 5.4.3 required.

Run Native Access, will be under "Not Installed" tab on left. 150 presets for House music. Hopefully this doesn't get pulled like the Absynth update. Audio demo here: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/expansions/massive-x-expansions/

And they released a new library for Massive X

I was running through the presets, noticed that a lot of these are made by Brian Clevinger, the designer for Absynth who is no longer with NI. This bank is fairly effect heavy.

I hope so too. Most companies don't release patches for products they are going to let die.

Added new preset pack with 200 patches, plus MAC updates and bug fixes. As always run Native Access.

Mostly KSP additions and bug fixes.

One thing that is nice to know is that if you buy in at one level, you are not locked in to that level. If for example, you have the Ultra Plus Pak from a few years ago, you can simply update to the new Pro Pak without losing any of your content from the Ultra Pak.

Mine actually showed AD2 needed an update.

VST does sound cool.

The deal ends tomorrow night. I have a copy of BIAB 2018. I pull it out from time to time. I was wondering how much value there would be in upgrading. Are there any features from the last few years you guys consider indispensable?

Only in Ableton format unfortunately, but the samples are at least wav.

The Karanyi Vapor Keys turned out to be pretty nice.

van Buuren's class spends a lot of time on composition and sound design. There are 33 lessons, 6 of which involve mixing and mastering. I haven't gotten to the mixing and mastering chapter yet, but he does use Ozone, FabFilter stuff, L1 Limiter, G Bus Compressor, Kick2, LFO Tool, Bark of Dog, Noveltech Character, Valhalla Room and ArtsAcoustic Reverb. For Synths, it's Serum, Massive Sylenth, Omnisphere, Nexus, Kontakt and Avenger.

My wife and I took advantage of this last year. The cooking classes are really good. It's surprising to see Gordon Ramsey in a show where he's not freaking out. The music classes vary. Tom Morello was the best I had seen so far. He knew what he was talking about and presented an interesting method of coming up with new riffs. Carlos Santana came across as a bit of a flake. Deadmau5 had some good information, but I didn't feel like he knew how to communicate that well. Armin van Buren came across much better. I only saw a couple of episodes of Timbaland, but I liked his idea of building ideas from sounds you could vocalize. My wife seemed to like the business classes they had. And even though she's a historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin's class had a lot of lessons that would be applicable to present day organizational communication and leadership.

That's fair. There are some well done libraries I may or may not use, like Embertone's recorder or NI's Yangqin. Also, after I posted this, I saw the Nova Keys freebie. 9 short samples of someone playing random notes on a piano. Definitely a good example of one to avoid.

This is a zip with 9 wav files. Not particularly useful.

There are a lot of holiday gifts available right now. However, I have spent a lot of time downloading things I'll never use. So which products should I download and which aren't worth the time?