Carl Ewing

He responded fast to a support question I had in December. Responded within an hour.

It's weird they do this a few days after their anniversary sale lol.

Ya - I think a lot of people just want to buy shit impulsively, and these companies are likely making a killing off people thinking they're getting stuff cheap - but likely buying stuff they don't need, buying things often, and spending way more than they need to in the long run. Somehow a once a year purchase, and having all your bases covered, is less preferable than obsessing over vouchers and sales every week trying to nickle and dime a company that knows exactly what's it doing to get your money.

The point of the subscription is that I get to use a massive part of their catalog for a year + get $200 to buy whatever I want during a mega sale. Why would I be buying $15 plugins - that I've likely never used much other than a demo - when I already have everything to try out for 12 months? And then buy specifically what I want / use in December sales season. I don't understand why anyone debates this deal. It's insane. For $150 my entire mixing and mastering needs are covered for a year - by extremely high quality plugins - and the cost of the sub still goes to permanent buys on heavily discounted super sales. This is the best deal in the industry as far as I'm concerned. Not only that, but 2 years of this subscription has saved me tons of money not having to buy shit I don't need from other companies. I haven't bought a UAD plugin, or a single emulation or mix / mastering related plugin from any other company since I started this subscription - and I used to spend $100 / EACH on those UAD plugins. My studio's plugin expenses went WAY down these last 2 years.

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.