Carl Ewing

Do you often read about audio related things instead of just...listening with your ears? My experience on heavily reverbed percussion is that the plugin greatly reduces that reverb, while the body of the drum remains in tact. That after years of using it lol.

Use De-Verb a lot. It's very qood at quickly controlling baked-in reverb in a lot of orchestral and percussion libraries. Other tools will do the job (other transient designers, de-reverb plugins), but De-verb is basically a one knob 2 second job, and does what it does very very well. And it's not just "decay of a sound". These type plugins will ideally reduce the background ambient / reverb WITHOUT affecting the overall envelope of the sound. For example, I use de-verb a lot of older 8Dio percussion libraries that have enormous amounts of baked in reverb. De-Verb (as well as iZotope's De-Verb, and some other transient designers...Smack Attack from Waves is very unnderated imo) all have a bit different sound / feature sets, but de-verb generally does the job well. What's great about these type plugins is that after de-verbing a sound (especially percussion), you then have a more controlled sound, and can apply compression, saturation, etc. to bring out more of the washed out body that was getting lost in reverb. Some sounds are un-fixable, but I've used de-verb extensively for years to get more life out of dated percussion libraries that clearly had great source recordings, but just waaaaay too much of the room mic in the mix (before mic options were a thing). I have also been able to get something like 8Dio's Epic Taikos & Epic Dohl to sit with Spitfire's HZ Pro close mics, and Damage 2 close mics, and not be able to hear the original reverb from Epic Taikos, but still get all of the body of the sound, which I've always liked (quite similar to Action Strikes taikos, but better velocity control).

No way it's the same filters. CPU hit alone will tell you that. Or, just listening to them. There is not a single filter in Pigments that comes anywhere remotely close to their MS-20, mini or M12. The filters in Pigments sound like *****. Worse than ***** compared to anything U-He, or Serum, or Knif Audio, or Massive X, or hell even Omnisphere, although Omnisphere's filter options are absurdly deep. If you want to test how bad it sounds - build a simple saw bass patch in Pigments. Then build one in Repro-1. There is no reason to use Pigments for literally any synth purpose, unless it's the only synth one has, and it's just for very average jack-of-all-trades utility sounds. Which seems to be what it's made for.

Pigments is my most regretted purchase lately. That thing sounds like $%#@ (in my opinion of course). I don't understand the hype, and I don't understand how Arturia can make a synth that sounds so lifeless (filters, effects section, etc.)

Ya - they need the instruments included - Modo Bass 2.0 / Drums 1.5 upgrades (which many people have not upgraded to from last group buys), Hammond, etc. will draw a lot more people in. The best one they had was the one last year (I think?) that included hardware purchases - i.e. if you bought a pair of MTMs or an interface, if gave you 3 (i think) free software items at equal / lesser price. Not sure why they don't push hardmore more - their iLoud and Precision series monitors are exceptional, and I'm seeing them in studios all over the damn place these days. They could get a lot more hobbyists into that hardware with group buys that include MAX software - like some of their guitar hardware group buyed into Aplitube Max, etc.

Ah - thank you. I thought 500GB seemed suuuper excessive.

Normally joke about OT being absurdly overpriced. But this is actually an excellent, excellent deal. These libraries are pretty incredible, and that's a great price for all of them together. Some great diversity across this bundle. And it's like $150 more than a single Spitfire Albion library. However - it's 500GB of content. But for $600, that's an insane amount of useable content for like a gazillion genres. EDIT: Sale goes till July 24th, so lots of time to check out walkthroughs. Wish I could swap out Loire for Umbra or Khasso, but I guess they got South / Middle America covered with Andea.

Oh man - this is going to start getting confusing. Can't wait for all the Brainworx plugins to look like Massive X.

Did a quick search through that site - most prices are absurd. Love seeing people trying to get $100+ from PA plugins though. Lolol. VI-Control still better for second hand licenses. Something about having to interact with the buyer on a public forum - and getting publicly called out for absurd resale prices - makes sellers much less likely to gouge. And easier to make offers or buy multiple things in a bundle.

Those drums gave me more anxiety than Uncut Gems.

Oh - I meant the recent coupon drama.

Awwwkward....

What? Lol. Now that's 100% bullshit. Do we also blame piracy for the shuttering of all the Blockbuster video stores and DVD plants? Strangely, Apple and Netflix were rolling in $billions of new revenue...for some reason. How do people read numbers like this and think "ya, that seems about right - clearly nothing in the music industry has changed the last 20 years except the Pirate Bay. What's that? Music streaming crushing retail and manufacturing? Irrelevant!" Also - global music industry revenue is now higher than it was in 1999 (not inflation adjusted). But it's twice as big as it was 10 years ago (2012 - 2022), with streaming accounting for 70% of revenue, and physical now dropping to ~15%, and digital downloads accounting for 4%. (The remaining revenue is mostly performance rights). And with a higher percentage of revenue going to independent artists & labels than ever before. This is currently the best business era for indie artists in the history of the artform. Ironically - we can all thank digital music piracy for warp speeding the evolution to streaming - because digital music piracy is what helped consumers make the switch to listening to music digitally (especially on their mobile devices) rather than buying physical going to the store...which in turn motivated the creation of commercial services like iTunes to grab that market.

You are flat out wrong about this. Almost every studio and every colleague I've ever met in the music business has used or still uses pirated software. Same applies to graphic design and video work. This can be everything from full scale libraries to preset packs, loop packs to effects. In design it's effects packs, fonts, full design programs, brushes, textures, clip art, and on and on. See it all the time. And these are studios that spend 10s of thouands on software every year. Why do they do this? Some of it is habit - always that nerdy engineer guy who has a portable harddrive filled with pirated shit. This guy is in every studio - everyone knows that guy. Other reason is trying out full products (like full sample libraries) before paying for it. Again - I see this happen all the time in large commercial studios.

There's a reason a totally an obscure company from Sweden ended up taking over the music industry. Or why a company that didn't exist prior to 2000 took over television and movies (for a period). Both Netflix and Spotify were answers to industries that weren't giving customers what they wanted, despite the technology being available. While people were yelling at each other about piracy, a couple companies were like "hmm, maybe we should just give people what they want: convenience. Every movie and every song you could ever want on one platform, with one app, at the click of a button, on demand." If The Pirate Bay would have charged $9.99/mo for access to their tracker list, they would have been as big as Netflix. It wasn't about piracy. It was never about "free". It was about convenience. People would have paid for it. How the movie, television and music industry never figured this out, and instead tried to fight their consumers by putting artificial & obsolete roadblocks in their path, is amazing. Both of these 100+ year old industries got their ***** handed to them by companies that either didn't exist (Spotify, Netflix) or had nothing to do with either industry (Apple) prior to digital piracy. It's incredible how that happened. But a great lesson in idiocy.

If I could download a car I would totally do it. Often. Quite often actually. But I always found that "you wouldn't steal a car would you?" kinda funny. As if duplicating a digital file is the same as duplicating a car. If duplicating a car was easy as pirating a Game of Thrones episode, literally half the world would have a Ferrari, and an entire new department of government would be formed to investigate the illegal use of the Star Trek replicator.

Just checked through a torrent site - virtually every Kontakt library is available, and Kontakt is fully cracked, just like it was 15 years ago...including Kontakt 7. Meaning any library built for Kontakt 1-7 will be totally piratable (word?). What's interesting is that the only products I see from developers who have their own proprietary players (Orchestral Tools, Spitfire, etc.) are the Kontakt versions. For example, all Kontakt version of OT libraries are on torrent sites. I'm sure that was a motivation for some of those devs to get away from Kontakt - too many resources devoted to cracking all things NI.

In a massively absurdly oversaturated market it was just a matter of time until price wars brought priceless down to rock bottom level. This means smaller developers who have have significant overhead will be eliminated, because they can't price compete and likely never sell enough products at traditionally "normal" prices to stay in business. In this environment, small companies REALLY have to think hard about what products they want to develop. Because anything that is even remotely "generic" or remotely similar to products from companies that have a) ginormous marketing teams b) ability to sustain rock bottom prices, will be a problem. ISW does have unique products - that do fall into niche territory (Shreddage series, Tokyo Scoring Strings), but they are really at the mercy of companies like, say, Native Instruments, that can run a 50% off sale offering consumers a terrabyte of sample libraries and a gazillion effects / tools, including guitars and orchestra, for $600 (current sale price for Komplete 14 Ultimate). Or a Creative Cloud subscription for $200 a year. Tokyo Scoring Strings sells for $449. This is an absolutely brutal market for small developers. As a note - Spitfire Audio and Orchestral Tools get away with their absurd prices because their marketing is at Apple-tax levels, and their you-will-pay-an-absurd-premium-hipster-black-turtleneck-level-pretentiousness is unrivaled.

50%? Lol. Black Friday is the only time of year they run sales where you might get something for what's it's actually worth.

I think it's a good rule to never buy Spitfire products unless it says Black Friday Sale on their site. Same goes with Orchestral Tools.

Ah yes - There is a little red notification. However, right below that, it says that I can upgrade to the bundle (that I own) via duplicate individual plugins I own that are inside the bundle. For example, I have a duplicate license for Renaissance Bass and H-Comp that I got through some promos. It says buying this upgrade will add 39 new plugins to my collection (a collection I already own). If I add it to the cart it does give me a discount on the bundle based on my ownership of Renaissance Bass and H-Comp. It does not give me a discount from owning all the other plugins in the collection. So my upgrade cost of owning 2 plugins in the collection is $242. My upgrade cost of owning 39+ of the plugins in the bundle is $242. I've noticed it does this with other bundles as well. If I buy, say, Waves Diamond, it will only consider individual plugins that I own as part of the discount pricing. It will not consider any plugins inside of collections I own (nor the bundle itself). Interesting.

Yay - I can still upgrade to a bundle I already own for $250. Nice to see Waves still hasn't fixed their bundle discount problems. They will quite literally allow me to add something I own to the cart (while logged in), give me payment options, allow me to click "complete order" and not once tell me that I already own the thing I'm buying - even though it's an UPGRADE option. It's been like this for years. Lol.

Because Amplitube takes FOREVER to load and run through presets. Sometimes I just need quick effects for background guitar-like effects. It's quite a fast / snappy program considering the amount of features. Also have Fractal Audio hardware, but sometimes you just need something done ITB that takes 2 seconds. Not even close to the same quality. But yep, GR loads fast and is faster to edit.

Getting tired of companies that do this sketchy stuff with the upgrade / crossgrade pricing. Impact Soundworks is another company that doesn't show your discounted pricing from the main store, and require you do go through a section of your account to access "Deals / Crossgrade / Upgrade" options. Clearly intentional, as I'm sure half their customers don't even see the upgrade / crossgrade pricing. If I go through the main store, this deal gives me a price of like $60 with coupons - forget the exact price, but somewhere around there. If I add through "My Deals" in my account (as OP said), I get $11. That pre-coupon crossgrade / upgrade price should be shown in the main store. It might even get them more sales, since prior customers could actually see their upgrade price when browsing the shop. I wasn't even aware of how many upgrade / crossgrade items I qualified for. But now I'm miffed, so won't bother buying anything lol.

Check the Vi-Control sales forum. People sell FabFilter stuff all the time, often for way better deals than their usual sales prices. https://vi-control.net/community/forums/for-sale-music-gear-classifieds-free-service.66/