Carl Ewing

Oh - I didn't even notice they added this! Thanks for the heads up. Grabbing that immediately. That's one of the better mixing / mastering Youtube channels imo. I think his Expendables-cast-member appearance is already the clickbait, so he's usually just down to business, and uses some great music to explain concepts, review products. Although he reviews a lot of expensive hardware - but will also compare to the plugin version if it's available.

Amazingly, you can use both. It's not an all or nothing thing. There are certain EQs I like the sound of - and i go to those EQs for specific curves in a simple interface. I don't want to be pulling Pro Q or Kirchoff for doing simple air band or low end control. What usually happens with these plugins is I spend 20 minutes ****ing around with dynamics or complex curves, when I already know a 1081 or Maag4 or Manley can get me amazing results in 10 seconds. Some would say we like these emulations because we've been listening to music for decades that uses these specific EQ curves & saturation in mixing / mastering. That's probably true. But they wouldn't be used if they sounded terrible. Ha. An unusual and excellent take on why unlimited band parametric EQs shouldn't be your first choice. Timestamp 1:17. (helps that I really like this guys' mixes, and I've heard this philosophy from other mixers I really like): I tend to agree here. Also - it's likely most of your favorite sounding albums were made using fixed band / fixed Q EQs & channel strips. With more complex EQs being used sparingly for problematic areas. I actually started overly relying on Pro-Q the last few years, and it's led to so many overcomplicated mixes, with infinitely more complex curves than I actually needed, and when I started switching back to channel strips - or fixed band EQs like the 1081, things got much easier, and imo started sounding better and more glued together. Although - I would add - don't give up on EQs like the Curve Bender, if you bought it and mess around with for a week. I think a lot of people buy an analog EQ, then buy another one, then another one, and then you have 50 channel strip EQs and stand alone EQs, and have no idea what any of them actually sound like. These are incredible EQs that could easily be used to master (or mix in some cases) entire albums. But it takes a LONG time to learn what they sound like and what they're good for. (EDIT: Was going to recommend - if you're starting out, and want a blend of a mastering EQ like the Curve Bender, with switchable freq / q) but also with a spectrum analyzer and visual curve like Pro Q, check a demo of the Lindell EQ825. It sounds a lot different than the Chandler, but having the EQ graph / spectrum analyzer (which is optional in the U) in an analog EQ is a fantastic learning tool...and it shows you how versatile / complex you can get even with limited bands.)

This does not sound great, sorry. Those strings, choir, brass, percussion, piano sound dreadful. Brass is great, because it's ported from Cinebrass - one of the greatest brass libraries ever made. That guys track relies heavily on the brass...unsurprisingly. Let me clarify again - if you need something - anything - and have limited budget Musio is probably great. Cheap, perpetual, very large mid-tier libraries that cover tons of categories. But there is MUCH better stuff around, including free libraries that are excellent (Project Sam, Spitfire, etc.). In capable hands of course. 🤣And something like Composer Cloud is like $10 a month and blows Musio away. I know people here can afford this, because their post history is filled with buying cheap crap hand over fist, month after month after month. Ha.

Odd man out - have had Musio sub since it fall 2023. Never use it. Decided not to resubscribe for a 3rd time. Not interest in buying what is essentially a back catalog of mid-tier libraries. Musio is awful software. Quality of the Musio ports are terrible. Outside of Brass, there are way better libraries on the market. Most of the libraries are old or uninspired. And with terrible porting, even high quality instruments like CineBrass don't even come close to the quality of the Kontakt versions. World instruments aren't good. Vocal libraries aren't good. All the wind stuff is decent, but you could get Composer Cloud for a year for $100 and have access to better voices, better world instruments, better wind instruments, better percussion, much better orchestral libraries, better pianos, and gazillion other excellent instruments. I will argue CineBrass is the exception, but it sounds awful in the Musio engine anyway, so still pointless. It's just a bad product all around imo. Sure, it might be worth $120 just to have a giant library of mid-quality stuff lying around, but I think money is better spent elsewhere. Sometimes having a lot of mid-tier stuff is worse than just spending $120 on one excellent library. I don't know what Cinesamples was thinking with this terrible product. Likely just getting on the subscription / proprietary engine train, but with an engine so bad it crippled already not so great libraries. I am actually shocked by how bad some of the world instrument and vocal libraries are compared to the competition. It's wild to see.

Not comparable to Omnisphere. Not comparable to Omnisphere. I really want to sit down with some people and hear what kind of music they create with these products. I often see comments on forums and think "this person doesn't actually make music with these products". Also - Falcon's synth engine is lifeless and cold af. At no point am I reaching for Falcon (or Halion) for anything to do with analog synthesis. Not in a million years. There are literally free synths on the market (Surge XT) I would reach for first lol. (Edit: This is unfair - Surge XT is incredible considering it's free - it shouldn't be mocked for it's price. It could easily compete with synths costing $200. Although learning curve is steeeeeeeeep. Created by the guy behind Bitwig.)

The system is a complete mess. It's not just you. It should be a complaint - lots of people are likely using up slots on stuff they already own. I doubt IK cares much - it's been like this through multiple group buys. I'm guessing the UX / database guy gets hired off Fiverr once or twice a year to make some minimal improvements to their backend. There's no way this will eventually result in a collossal e-commerce / database screwup later on down the road that costs them a ton of money. Most companies don't think this far in advance.

Having mixed a ton of stuff on headphones over the years, I don't think tools like this help much. Flat doesn't mean better in headphones. And I think trying to emulate room acoustics, cross talk / speakers on headphones is just asking for trouble. Andrew Scheps has famously mixed very successful albums on completely unaltered $100 Sony MDR 7506s. I have personally mixed for some very big projects on HD600s without issue - and often without an a speaker reference while on the road. It's about learning your headphones, not trying to make them sound like something they aren't. And if you can't create a great mix on HD600s, no amount of hardware / software is going to help. And HD600s are the same cost as this IK product. My 0.02 cents anyway. Also - I've tried using Sonarwork frequency "correction" for 6 sets of different headphones. Mixes always translated terribly - for worse than without the "correction". I think these products are mostly selling people the idea of "solving a problem" that doesn't actually exist, and is more down to people using headphones they either don't know, or for people using headphones that don't match the kind of music they're making.

I think this is more about utter confusion from consumers about what things are worth when it comes to the Group Buy. So Amplitube 5 Max v2 is $299 on IK site. Tonex Max is $299 on IK site. But on another site you can get both for $129 - a bundle that is not offered on the IK site as far as I can tell. A customer would be reasonably expecting that getting both of these bundled together would put them in the $199 tier. This should be a no-brainer from IK to just honor that bundle at $199. Considering I qualified and bought Tonex for $30 at Plugin Boutique and qualified for that price tier. This whole audio industry is just begging for consumer protection agencies to step in and enforce pricing laws. Nobody has a clue what any of this stuff is worth anymore. And this is from an anarchist lol.

It counts as one product, same as Modo Bass 2 and Modo Drum 1.5. You get everything in T-Racks Pro with the one slot selection. Pro includes the following 40 plugins (again, using one GB slot): Classic T-RackS Equalizer Classic T-RackS Compressor Master Match Black 76 Limiting Amplifier British Channel Bus Compressor Channel Strip X Classic T-RackS Clipper Classic T-RackS Multi-band Limiter CSR Hall Reverb CSR Plate Reverb EQ PA EQP-1A Vintage Tube Program Equalizer EQual Full Metering One Opto Compressor Saturator X Space Delay Brickwall Limiter De-esser Delay Lab Dyna-Mu EQ 81 EQ PB FAME Studio Reverb Filter Fusion Linear Phase Equalizer LO-FI Punch Master EQ 432 Mic Room Precision Comp/Limiter Quad Comp Quad Lim Stealth Limiter T-RackS Leslie Tape Echo Tape Machine 99 The Farm Stone Room Studio Reverb White 2A Leveling Amplifier ---------------------------------------------------------- *** It DOES NOT include the following 22 plugins - which are included in MAX version (62 total) - and would have to use 1 GroupBuy slot each to get these if you don't have some already: *** Bass ONE Comprexxor CSR Inverse Reverb CSR Room Reverb Dual Spring EQ 73 EQ PG Joe Chiccarelli Vocal Strip Prism Reverb Quad Image Quad Saturator Sunset Sound Studio Reverb Tape Machine 24 Tape Machine 80 Tape Machine 440 Tascam 388 Tascam Porta One TEACD A-33340S Teac A-6100 MKII Triad Chorus Vintage Tube Compressore / Limiter Model 670 White Channel Lurssen Mastering EQ ------------------------------------------------------- I already had T-Racks 5 MAX and Total Studio 3.5, so only had to grab a few missing ones. I luckily got the Tonex PluginBoutique sale for $29.99 earlier today, which qualified for anything under $199. Also - getting Modo Drum 1.5 or Modo Bass 2.0 gives you all the modules / kits / basses with 1 slot. At least, it did for me. The Tonex Signature collections all go individually through one slot each. Same as PianoVerse. Same as the Amplitube collections. But at the $199 level (which any new registration of Tonex MAX or Amplitube MAX would put you at), T-Racks Pro should be an option and will include all 40 plugins in that specific tier.

Guessing iLoud headphones. If they make headphones as great as their speakers they'll make a lot of money.

*All iZotope products are now available in Native Access. This is a really welcome addition. iZotope Product Portal is horrendous, especially when needing to keep multiple systems updated. Updated 12 products in about 20 seconds. That would take 20 minutes with the iZotope app.

I do forgive NI a bit, because Komplete is an enormous collection of very useful stuff and updates to flagship products- and they add significant content every update for a couple hundred $ on sale. And funny enough, now include Ozone. That Collector's Edition 15 update this round included Kontakt 8, Action Woodwinds, Fables, Vocal Colors, Guitar Rig 7, Kithara, Valves Pro, a new acoustic guitar, Ukele, Alicias e-keys, upright bass, another bass, another e-keys, Irish instruments, Ozone 11, a couple hybrid instruments and a gazillion expansions (Leap, Massive presets, Scenes, etc.). I can't complain about this. ha.

"Version 12" for a plugin shouldn't even be a thing. The milkening of customers continues. I appreciate that something like Pro Q has had 4 paid updates in 16 years. If it were released by iZotope it would be on Version 46, with 8 different versions from free (1-band) to Basic (3 bands), to Advanced (11 bands) to Pro (14 bands) to Pro-Master-Premium-Bundle (26 bands with M/S multi-channel and Breaktweaker for free). What a **** company lol.

Feel the opposite. Have so many of these for free - they all sound generic or terrible. The guitar ones are especially awful sounding - production and realism. The drum ones have some need-something-quick utility, which might be cool for $10, but MUCH better drum libraries around for each genre. Have tried demos of a few of their FX - they don't sound very good either imo. Their business model seems to be: build a massive catalog of products as fast as possible. Get users into our ecosystem as cheaply as possible with lots of freebies and "mega bundles!" with lots of marketing hype ("Ziiiimmmmer!!"). Then entice them further into "collect them all!" bundle deals. Once consumers are into the system, push "complete catalog" super deals, and properly milk those customers for incremental updates to all products. All seems about as sleezy as most of the music software industry. Something like those drum libraries should be one Flagship product, with all titles / genres in a single VST instrument. Instead they've got 20 separate different plugins, that all all get incremental updates, meaning users will have to keep paying those micro-updates to ensure all those libraries are up to date. I avoid these kind of developers because when you have a business model like this, it is also reflected in the quality of the products. But for gear addicts, these guys have gamed this very well to milk these kind of customers for life.

You are clearly unaware how much ungodly levels of shitty pop music were made in the 1950s (and every decade since). You have benefited from the Great Filter called 'Time'. Trust me on this - my family ran a vintage / memorabilia shop that played an endless rotation of records for this era - not the hits - just random crap. 99% of it is nightmarishly awful and all sounds the same. Like being stuck in a David Lynch movie set in an apocalyptic 60s white-suburban wasteland that might rival Pleasantville. Adding to this - AI created pop music would have been extremely easy in the 1950s and most of the 1960s, since record labels essentially just took whatever song was popular and would sign 10,000 other bands to try and recreate that same sound...over and over and over and over again. Literally 1000s of **albums** of nonsense replicas in what were maybe (maybe) 3 genres. At least today you get EDM, trap, Afrobeat, Dancehall, Reggaeton, hip-hop, folk-pop, K-pop, RnB, alt-RnB, alt rock, pop-punk, indie pop, Latin Pop, Synthwave, Electro-pop, and on and on. There are times lately when the billboard 100 is almost half filled with world music. Having said that - the linked KSHMR song is terrible, even by KHSMR standards. Dude's made some decent club tracks, and is quite a good producer, but ya, this track is *****.