Carl Ewing

It's not really a typical subscription model. I gt a $200 voucher every year for spending $150 on Mix / Master subscription. It's a complete no brainer if you already plan on buying $150 PA plugins in a year, which is quite easy to do. I'm curious how many people will blow $150 on the Forever sub in a year, get 5 plugins, and realize they totally wasted their money.

My last concern when subscribing to a sample / loop company is how well their software manages my existing sample library. I'm paying money for their catalog of sounds, not for their management software. I subscribe to Loopcloud Professional and Splice because of the sounds they offer. But their DAW integration & sample management features will ALWAYS be shit, because you can't build a software that is A) a massive e-commerce service B) an account / subscription service C) a data / library manager D) an integrated DAW sample player / editor / tagger, and, well you get the point. It will always be a shit experience. These platforms are built to sell you more shit. Not to make your workflow better. Honestly. Why would people spend money on a sample / loop subscription and make "how well does this software manage my entire sample catalog" as their priority, instead of "does it have any sounds that I actually want"? If you need a sample libary manager, get a dedicated piece of software that isn't a bloated mess of e-commerce. Most DAWs these days have excellent dedicated options anyway.

Okay - checked some forums on overclocked 5950x and audio problems and most of the discussion was over RAM speed / timings. Specifically when using DCOP to auto overclock. Many needed to set their RAM back to default speed, or manually adjust timings (FCLCK) until they got stability. Seems the auto overclock was creating timing or voltage issues for both the CPU and memory. Do you get the same audio problems when not overclocking? If not, this might help narrow the problem down to overclock settings.

Definitely check power settings. Any sort of power switching (i.e. throttling, minimum / maximum power states) will cause tons clicky weirdness as the computer tries follow power states. It's the source of many many problems with both Intel and AMD processors. Even if you're OC'd from the motherboard, the OS still has lots of control over the CPU (and CPU, GPU, etc. power). Go to Power & Sleep Settings, then to "Related Settings / Additional Power Settings". Switch to "High Performance" and then "Change Plan Settings". Then go to "Change Advanced Power Settings" and see what's available. You should see a setting for "Processor Power Management", and under that "Minimum" and "Maximum" processor state. Set both to 100% and see if that fixes anything. (Consumes more power, but ensures CPU is rock steady.) In the same window you'll see "USB Settings / USB selective suspend". Disable that. Also grab all updates from your MOBO manufacturer. Especially chipsets, BIOS, hard drive controllers, and USB controller drivers. Also check for power options in your BIOS. Not sure about AMD, but Intel geared motherboards often have a lot of weird power settings. Intel Speed Step, Intel C-States, and other crap that mess with CPU throttling / speed. AMD may have the same. Try to get rid of anything that's messing with CPU speed / power. And check temperatures regularly when doing all this.

Yep. Do lots of mobile work on laptop. The only thing I tweaked were power settings - eg. to stop the CPU from throttling or cycling through power states, and a couple USB power settings. Battery / AC power switching is really the only problem I've found. Run 150 track projects no problem now. On my desktop it's maybe 2 tweaks to power settings and it runs 100% without issue. Actually, the Steinberg Power Profile is probably just fine, but I like to customize a little bit because I max overclock my CPU 24/7. Windows 10 is very efficient in my experience.

One of my favorite plugins. Still not sure what it does exactly, but used in every project for probably 15 years. I would call it a filtery-phasy-panny-modulation-thingy. Great for ambient stuff - specifically giving movement to overly static pads and background textures. If you use the "hold" function and use "manual" to sweep through the phase positioning, you can get some very tight control over a sounds placement in the mix. "Hold" shuts off phase modulation, so it's like static phase control - especially good for taming harsh frequencies to position something in the background. But the oscillating sweeps are really quite cool on the right material. But everything it does is heavily colored. Not transparent by any stretch. Great in combination with Waves' "Mondo Mod" for stereo imaging coolness. For $11 it's a no brainer imo. EDIT: Just checked the demos on that sales page - I have never used it for those agressive modulation / phase effects. I've mainly used it in ambient, with very slow speeds, or static speed for stereo imaging effects. It's quite a cool psychoacoustic plugin. But seems they're advertising it for extreme phase modulation fx. Interesting.

I feel the PA giveaway is totally out of balance with NI and iZotope stuff. That's a crazy PA giveaway now that I think about it. HG-2 is possibly the best premium saturation plugin on the market. Shadow Hills is also a premium mastering comp. Oberhausen is an absolutely excellent emulation. It would be like U-He giving away Repro-1. Crazy. Then iZotope with some Neutron Elements which is on PluginBoutique for $20 on the regular. Lol.

FFS! Own literally everything on the list except the PA Ampeg SVT-VR. Although PA and iZotope have given away a few of these before. That Shadow Hills and HG-2 are huge giveaways though. Man o man.

Assuming you paid $20 for each of those plugins...erring on the low side, that's about $1860 spent. Which is about 10 years of subscription which would also give you $2000 in annual sub vouchers, and $1000s in monthly vouchers. If anyone has doubts, this is why the PA subscriptions are a no brainer.

Curious - for those into Amp sims, which do you feel are the better sims from PA? I have BX_Rockrack V3 and BX_Bassman but looking for some guitar sims geared towards metal / heavy tones. Already have Amplitube 5 and most collections, but the CPU hit is enormous on mobile rig, so trying to find decent stand alone sims. Also have the Mix & Master bundle, but it excludes all the amp stuff of course. Currently looking at Suhr PT100, Diezel VH4 / Herbert and Friedman BE-100. But have heard good things about the Fuchs as well. Anyone recommend these or others?

Some native plugins still destroy even the best systems. I'll be running a UAD card for years to come still - absolutely need to conserve CPU resources with some of these more recent synths, sample libraries and stuff like Abbey Roads reverbs. Even a 16-core CPU doesn't mean much if a couple plugins aren't well optimized for multi-core.

I'm skeptical of anyone with that many synths in their studio.

Run installer to update installer to install the update. This is the way of the future.

Vocalsynth's Vocoder is pretty weak, and not that versatile. Yes, it's handy when you want a multi-effect with other non-vocoding features, but for straight vocoding Vocodex all the way. It would be like pulling up Byome for saturation distortion - sure it's got a bunch of other effects that are handy, but if I only want saturation distortion I'm going to open a dedicated plugin that is the best in its class. Having said that, I really like Vocalsynth, but not really for strictly vocoding duties.

Use in Cubase without issue. (VST / Windows) But yes, it's only available for Mac inside FL Studio.

How is a vocoder with literally more options than any other vocoder ever made "too limited". I don't think people really understand how complex that plugin is. It's a mainstay in EDM sound design for a reason. This guy spends 15 minutes covering what is probably 5% of it's capabilities - and just those features blow most vocoders out of the water:

Imageline's 'Vocodex'. No real competition. But it takes a month of manual reading to understand it. It's a very deep plugin with enormous customization and modulation options. But it sounds absolutely incredible when you get the hang of it.

Well yes. When you've bought everything you need, why would this sale interest you? Why would you even post this?

The free versions can only be used for personal use - commercial use is not allowed. Not sure how they would ever keep track of that though - but that is the message on each free product page.

Last month Serpent completely saved my ***** on a project where I didn't have access to my guitars and needed them for a deadline. I do a lot of remote work on mobile rig and I'm continually amazed at the quality of virtual instruments these days. Was very skeptical of virtual metal guitars, but client didn't even know I did the guitars virtually. Although it took 8 hours of learning the interface and and getting the right tone / performance . It took some serious midi / Kontakt time to get it all working realistically. But seriously - very happy I bought these a while back. Would have be totally hooped without them, and they've now more then paid for themselves.

This thread is a good reminder why so many musicians are broke. Musicians consistently fail to understand that the modern music business is a MULTI-transaction volume industry. One that relies on sustained / repeated engagement across the largest consumer population possible. That's why you should be focused on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube, and NOT on platforms that are built on a SINGLE-transaction volume model like Bandcamp, with an extraordinary small userbase (especially internationally). You will go completely broke relying on the psychology offered in that Tweet screenshot above. It totally fails to understand that the music business has changed. The resources required to consistently generate $1000 of sales per month on a platform of Bandcamp are many orders of magnitude greater than sustaining that same revenue on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music - which are specifically built to capitalize on enormous userbase + repetition on small value transactions. Y'all will understand this eventually, likely when you're begging for social security inflation adjustments. Now - you can say that "I don't care about any of this, I don't agree with Spotify's business model!". That's fine. You're likely misinformed (like Taylor Swift - who has now generated well over $100 million in revenue from Spotify's 'failed' and 'unfair' streaming model...and done so with relatively minimal resources spent), but that's your right.

The thread is about raising money for Ukraine, asking people to support the military of a foreign nation. Were you expecting the discussion to be apolitical? Lol.

I think this one might be more "what can it replace". Been using it a few days, and it might replace quite a few of my stand alone plugins, since it handles a bunch of tasks I usually have to open multiple plugins for. Especially EQ Tilt, up/down compression, transient shaping. This thing is incredible so far, but just not sure how versatile is it is yet to perform all tasks well. Autogain might seal the deal - as it's a feature missing on so many plugins where it should priority feature.

Would prefer to keep voicing my opinion this till these topics are gone. Now I'll just do it to defend smaller developer sales, who should take priority on this "deals" topic over people shamelessly promoting their totally unrelated Youtube channels. This content doesn't belong here - there's a proper category for it on these Cakewalk forums already. Poster should consider that he's shameless self-promoting on a popular forum that can be quite important for developer sales.

This makes no sense - "not a deal" topics are generally about software / hardware business info that will affect products people use directly, or about something at least partially related to audio / music business news that DIRECTLY affects what people are buying or using every day. And ya, very occasionally jokey meme posts - usually during sales season. But these videos don't belong here at all. Looking around the forum, they belong exactly in the "Coffee House" category. That's what that forum is for. Like you said, you're using this forum because you have friends here, and your posts weren't catching traction elsewhere. I'm sorry that's the case, but these posts do not belong here. All the people responding can always respond in the Coffee House category, which is a click away. Literally. This deals forum is extremely popular for people across the internet, who are looking for up to date deals, most of whom don't post here. I'm sure, like me, they'd appreciate the forum to be as to the point as possible. If there is a place for this content - which there is - it should be posted there. Also consider that that when off-topic post like these are on the 1st page, it potentially means that smaller developers running sales are getting kicked to the 2nd page, and losing visibility. And those developers can use all the visibility they can get.