Carl Ewing

Ya - the $88 upgrade to 6.5 was a much better deal, especially if you dont need Neutron 5. The upgrade from MPS 1-6 to MPS 7 is $209, and I think @Pluto Gabo is correct that the only difference is Neutron 5 vs. Neutron 4, so that's an extra $120 for that difference. Glad I pulled the trigger. For anyone wondering - upgrade from 6.5 to 7 is $99. Hopefully that's it for upgrades for me, as between Komplete CE, Plugin Alliance subscription and occasionally keeping MPS up to date, the amount of crossover products is getting ridiculous. They need one bundle or subscription that just put everything together. Maybe call it "Komplete 'Super Collector's Edition' Collector's Edition Ultimate MEGA XL MPS 1.0"

Says on website that bundle deals end today (October 27th). I'm guessing that includes bundle upgrades as well.

No mention that the magazine never innovative over time? Music industry journalism is maybe one step above gaming journalism these days. And that's not a compliment. It's no surprise most of the media side has been co-opted by serial killer looking influencers in their basement. This months CM highlights are "Becoming A Software Guitar Hero", a 'sick pulsing bass line' masterclass, dime a dozen software reviews, Sara Simms on the "future of trance", which follows the hard hitting previous issue covering some 'experimental' artist's first use of her own vocals, musings on Reason Studios legacy, some other artist finding "magic" somewhere in her computer, a 'hair-raising' workshop dissecting Prodigy's No Good circa 1994. And of course a bunch of 'freebie' loops that are 10% quality you could get in a loop site subscription for the cost of a CM subscription, and software freebies that, well, most software is dirt cheap these days and few people want the clutter / headache of mostly low-tier future abandonware. They should have put their resources into social media. Their Youtube channel is surpringly dull af, with endless thumbnails of software screenshots and monotone tutorials / reviews that sound like they're read from a teleprompter. This is not a company that was going to make it much longer. And that includes Music Radar, which isn't much better.

Ah - you're right! Didn't notice the pulldown for version number in my PB account. Yep, I see 1.3 available for my full Console & Expanse plugins. Both are "upgrades" from the Lite version, so perhaps I have it before you because of that path. Thanks for the heads up - the default pulldown option really should be the latest version. Weird. And 100% agree. Would be great to have all modules in one plugin. Hoping for that as well. I sometimes avoid inserting them if I know I want modules from both and don't want the added time of dealing with both plugins separately. I'll usually reach for a different multi-fx that has the right specific combination (eg. RC-20, Tantra, TR5 suite, etc.)

Okay - this is weird - I own the full Lifeline Expanse and trying to figure out how this works. It seems to be not only the individual Space module, but also a huge update to the main plugin (that has all modules in one plugin), but also now has all 5 modules (Space, Format, Dirt, Re-Amp, Width) as individual plugins. What I did was buy the Space module (for free with code), then downloaded that file. It installed all modules, plus updated my full plugin (from version 1.1.2 I think to 1.3) , with everything registered to my old serial. What's weird is that the full Expanse plugin file (downloadable from my Plugin Boutique account) is still the older version (v. 1.1.2), and this "freebie" thing seems to be version 1.3 for the full plugin in addition to the individual modules. SO! If you own the full plugin, you should get this freebie, as it seems to be the only version that also updates the full plugin. And you get all 5 individual modules, not just Space. Even more confusing because Expanse Audio doesn't have account / login, so all files have to be downloaded from Plugin Boutique and I never received an email from anybody about this update, nor does it mention anything about the individual modules. Anyway - hope that helps anyone that has full version. Cool update. Just confusing af.

I've hesitated on a lot of uJam stuff because they seem like the kind of company to do a 99% sale on a bundle of their entire catalog during Black Friday. Watching their sales it seems more about getting as many people into their ecosystem than having any logical pricing strategy. For example, a few these plugs were 8.08 recently. So is $29.99 for three random instruments a good deal? Or will you be able to get 20 for $99 in a month. Probably.

Ya, this is a no brainer. Also on MPS 3. Been hesitating on upgrading since there's now crossover between Komplete CE and also have Plugin Alliance sub, and also got some v11 elements stuff for free. But that's $88 bucks to upgrade RX from 7 to 11, and Ozone 9 Advanced to 11. Very reasonable imo. But it kinda sucks having so many duplicates of various plugins. They really should offer additional "loyalty" products to people who are inside all 3 ecosystems - for example Komplete CE should come with Ozone advanced (instead of Standard) if you already have advanced Izotope products or a PA subscription. But clearly I'm still giving them money, so what do I know. lol

About 1 month from the biggest sales season of the year. Patience everyone. Unless you mean this specific forum, in which case, there are many sales forums.

Just a note: you have to click on the link in the Loopcloud account that adds the non-sale version of Circuits to your cart. Circuits is currently on sale for $8.08 at Plugin Boutique, but code won't work with that version. You have to add the regularly priced Circuits which is priced at $69 for it work in the checkout.

But it's not doing anything innovative enough to wait around. There have been DAWs like Ableton that were game changers for certain types of music genres - practically inspiring entirely new genres of music just because of how the program was designed or how that design / feature set evolved over time. But waiting around 10 years for a new DAW - that isn't really attempting to do anything new - to just incorporate features that other DAWs have had for decades, when those other DAWs are quickly evolving on their own, I just don't see the point. It seems the marketing for LUNA revolves almost entirely around "the sound of a million dollar analog recording studio. Experience a mix as if you were seated at a vintage console, complete with analog tape machines, built-in summering, and flexible mixing options". These aren't things I really care about in 2024 when I need Nuendo features like direct Wwise integration for game audio post, or Cubase's logical editor / expression maps and advanced MIDI for scoring, or Bitwig / Ableton's absurdly robust features for modern EDM. Now - I get LUNAs appeal to people producing / mixing / engineering certain genres like rock / pop, where it may compete directly with Pro Tools. Perhaps over time it will be a big threat in this area, developing a superior console-style DAW with a more traditional mindset. But it would take a decade+ (or an 180 degree switch in development approach) for it to compete with DAWs like Cubase / Nuendo / Logic or Bitwig / Ableton Live in areas that matter most in 2024, let alone 2034 where these DAWs will continue to be miles ahead.

Agreed. It really needs to be one of the first things taught to people first entering audio production. Over the years I've received so many stems, stereo mixes, etc. with pops and clicks because the client / colleague didn't understand buffer settings. That's an odd comparison. Ozone is massively robust mastering suite with far more uses & utility than these three plugins combined. Comparing which one is better makes absolutely no sense. I could understand comparing individual modules if you were only interested in EQ, limiting and saturation, but there would be no point in discussing or owning Ozone if you didn't need it's gazillion other features. Also - Ozone 11 adds so many mastering features (stem focus / vocal focus, multi-band transient shaper, clarity module, delta listening feature, upward comp, etc.) that it's completely pointless to compare it anything other than a mastering suite with similar features - and there are none that I can think of. Theoretically, owning Ozone 11 advanced, with individual modules, could replace countless plugins across the whole mixing spectrum. I don't see a reason to own plugins like Split EQ, Soothe 2, Pro-L, various imaging plugins, various transient shapers or dynamic EQs, or quite a few saturators with how good a job most of these modules do. The only reason I don't recommend Izotope products is because there constant upgrading means you are buying into endless additional costs since they milk the hell out of their way-to-frequent updates. And their installation software is easily one of the worst in the industry.

These are mixing plugins. Buffer should be set very high. I can run a dozen of these plugins no problem on a 5 year old laptop, but buffer set to 1024 or 2048 samples. If my laptop (which isn't that great) can run it, anyone with a decent desktop system should have zero problem - but not if you're trying to run 64 sample buffer like you're doing life performance with them. I can run 100 of these plugins on my desktop system (12700K overclocked) with zero problems and a buffer of 256 samples.

From what I can tell it is a couple GB smaller than World Suite 2, so they must have replaced a lot of stuff in this upgrade. WS2 was about 38GB on disk, and WS3 is 34.7GB. It could be a better compression algorithm though.

Tier 1: https://vi-control.net/community/forums/deals-deals-deals.138 (Can't access this tier without registering account.) Tier 2: https://vi-control.net/community/forums/deals-deals-deals-tier-2.172 Much more active product discussion + a lot of deals get missed here & on Reddit. Plus, the removal of competitor sales here makes it even worse. However - I like this forum as it often posts update notifications and occasionally free stuff unrelated to audio (i.e. Humble Bundle, Free Games, etc.)

This isn't a problem of scale. It's an intentional decision on the developer side. Most of NI / iZotope's problems come from too much walling off of sequential versions with poorly thought out (and inevitably dropped) feature sets. They've created a cluster**** of coding mess, conflicting encryption protocols, file extension / folder structure messes that mean various libraries can't be read by various version of Kontakt. This has nothing to do with overhead or how many products they sell. It's just terrible software engineering with non-existent consideration for backward compatibility. This could be fixed quite literally by one guy working full time for a couple months. I'm sure NI can afford it, considering it's their flagship product and the vast majority of their product catalog is built on it.

I haven't been able to login in 2 days. Sent a support request. Guessing some disaster on the server side. Also interesting to learn that they require resetting passwords every 6 months. Sounds like they need to hire new IT people - having all your users constantly resetting their passwords every few months just screams "we have some serious IT problems".

Absolutely. I will give NI credit for at least trying to make their ecosystem a little easier to manage / install / upgrade. As crappy as it is, it's a step in the right direction. The back compatibility issues are absolutely unacceptable though. But I have no idea what iZotope's Product Portal is supposed to be - that has to be one of the most awful pieces of software I've ever used. And I have Output's Arcade installed, so that's saying a lot. I wish these developers would look to a companies like Spectrasonics. I opened a project from 2012 today (2012!!) and everything loaded 100% perfect with a dozen instances of Omnisphere. Never even noticed that they've kept the VST / .dll file named "Omnisphere" for over 12 years (not Omnisphere 1, Omnisphere 2), and the raw omnisphere midi sounds identical to how it sounded in my 2012 mixdowns. Considering how many features they've added in the last 12 years, that is incredible.

As someone who is constantly having to open legacy projects for ongoing multi-season / sequel projects, it's infuriating. Native Instruments is infamous for it's terrible backend engineering and file management, and nothing epitomizes this than having to have Kontakt 4, 5, 6, 7...and now 8...installed to open projects going back 5+ years. And then having to have multiple versions of some libraries on legacy drives, because all the nonsense they do in between versions (and kontakt file specifications) means developers need to update conform with no backward compatability. If I start a day knowing I need to open projects from 2018, I know I'll spend an hour or two just dealing with various Kontakt version not knowing where anything is, even though everything is installed AND linked through Native Access. And if any older libraries have been batch saved to ensure smooth operation in the god awful performance of Kontakt 7, those libraries will no longer work in Kontakt 4, 5, 6, and I will need the original files in order to connect and load in legacy projects. Then there's the wonderful "find missing files" dialogue, that even when pointing it to the right files, it often won't actually load anything and Kontakt will load blank. To solve this? I have to have legacy versions of my DAW installed, so I can try and open the project in the same state is was in many years ago - since sometimes that works - hoping that somehow Kontakt will figure it out - then I can copy the properly loaded project settings into the new DAW session. NI is the ****ing worst. I love their products from a creative point of view, but they cost me $1000s a year is lost productivity because their software is so god awfully engineered, with not a damn ounce of concern for how major backend decision will affect their customers, and that they're spitting out Kontakt versions simply to milk their customers base not caring how much of a nightmare this is for professionals. I could throw a chair through a wall some days with how much time I lose dealing with this nonsense. Now that I hear Kontakt 8 is coming out I've decided to start meditating again.

It has a demo. I think it sounds as bad as most software saturators. It's a pretty easy pass.

Have both - agree they aren't really comparable. I think Ethno World's strengths are the Vocals. Just a huge selection of global vocal styles / phrases. I rarely ever reach for the Ethno World instruments - they are very difficult to get working realistically - but I have used Silk & Ra extensively with great results. Although RA is veeeery dated imo, and the recordings aren't as good as more recent world instrument from other devs that feature the some of the same instruments. This is tempting, since I run Composer Cloud but own RA and would like to start purchasing some stand alone libraries. But the cost is identical to a year subscription via JRR Shop (with GROUP discount), and my subscription renews next month. Hmm. Hmm.

Many of these are very questionable. Some make absolutely no sense. Who picked Volcano 3 to replace Mondo Mod? Some are $200+ effect suites to replace a $20 plugin. lol.

A company either understands UX or it doesn't. This isn't something that is easily remedied without completely altering how ownership / upper management view software, aesthetics, etc. Sine is a horrendous sample player. It's been out for years and hasn't improved. It is absolutely ***** backward in almost every way, from how libraries are displayed, how dynamics are controlled, how patches / articulations are selected, how the mixer works, how multi-channels are setup, and on and on. It will not get better without essentially lobotomizing those who made these decisions (or managed the process), or firing all of them and replacing them with another team. You can't just suddenly learn these things - it takes years of education on top of a baseline natural talent for design & engineering. It's too bad. OT libraries are phenomenal. But the player is an example of an absolutely unfathomably poor understanding of design - which at a minimum, even if the UX engineering is terrible, which it is, requires at least a baseline understanding of aesthetics / UI. Better than Best Service's Engine player though! (lol)

Because volume automation is just reducing peaks. It cannot simultaneously increase the lower level content at the same time. Well, technically you could do this by first automating the peak volume and then have secondary automation (serially) that mirrors the first with gain compensation. However, this is going to be ungodly amounts of automation, because it's not just a matter of mirroring the attack / release / ratio, etc. Because peaks are generally frequency dependent, so the automation used to bring the peak down may not be the same required to gain compensate the result after peak reduction. (Something compressors are very efficient at doing. And in the case of an optical compressor (example: LA-3A), they will adjust attack / release / ratio constantly depending on frequency content, since it is a photocell - or is mimicing one digitally. It would likely be impossible to mimic the behavior of most analog compressors without having both frequency control and multiple lines of automation that are reacting to the material in a consistent way. This would have to be done with software. So - theoretically I'll give this one to El Diablo. You could theoretically do this with multiple lines of automation. I assume it would take days for a single track. (Perhaps easier with a simple vocal performance.) I would be very curious to hear the result and if such a process actually sounds like a compressor - or can give the desired result - which I doubt it will. I am 100% not willing to try this myself, although now I'm very curious to hear what it would sound like. EDIT: Okay - i just spent 10 minutes trying this on a vocal line that's about 10 seconds long. It does not sound the same - and it's probably more apparent on vocals (which have less transients than percussive material.) The thing about compressors, is that downward push + gain compensation is constantly adjusting - modulating infinite times a second. The math in a plugin, or physics from a photocell in an optical compressor, are complex, and I'm thinking this would be virtually impossible to mimic manually, even though I'm trying. That infinite interaction of variables is what gives compressors that grainy sound (even transparent ones...I'm comparing with Pro-C 2 so I can easily see & copy the data) - and it radically alters the texture of the voice, even when not much is going on transient wise. Using 2 lines of automation, mimicing what Pro-C 2 is doing as close as I can get (including drawing attack / release lines and matching ratio), it sounds...nothing like a compressor. It's too clean and has zero character. This might be desirable in some cases - it's actually an interesting experiment. But I would only use this in really specific circumstances, and there's no way I would call the same as compression. They sound nothing alike. This also could be a matter of practice and learning exactly how to mimic the behavior. But trying it for 10 minutes, I'm not sure why anyone would do this lol.

No it's not. Actually - vocal rider isn't technically doing compression or volume automation. It's doing many many things under the hood that cannot be done with either. There have been endless requests for Waves to make the algorithm public - to understand what it's actually doing - but they have never done so. Also - do you really not understand the different between volume and dynamic range? For example, when you put a compressor on a drum kit, do you not understand the difference between reducing peaks above a certain threshold and reducing the volume of peaks using volume automation (i.e. reducing the entire signal)? These are 2 entirely different things. I'm not sure you understand the difference. ??

Say what now?? Lol. I mean, I could manually create delay effects by cutting and pasting audio clips...but c'mon now, son. Also - automating volume envelopes is not compression. I shouldn't have to explain this here!