Carl Ewing

Damn - thought it would be a free RME UFX with purchase of Silk 2. Sad.

I've used the subscription specifically so I can cover almost everything mixing / mastering related with one company without having to buy from others. So I use Plugin Alliance stuff extensively. I also switched to a PA sub because of a mobile rig I often use where I didn't have access to Universal Audio stuff prior to Connect. It helped cover some redundancies (BX amp sims, Shadow Hills, etc.) across all systems. I really like many of PA's workhorse "does-one-job-well" plugins like Neold U2A, Maag EQ4, Townhouse Bus Comp, etc.. PA excels in that department. Top plugins for me are: All Neold, especially U2A (i love this thing more than my family), Maag EQ4 & 2, Townhouse Bus Comp, Vertigo VSM-3, SA2RATE2, HGM-MS, Unfiltered Audio (various), Amek 9099 / 200 strips, SPL (various transient stuff), Elysia (various), Kiiv XStressor (now replaced by UA Native Distressor), Lindell SBC, DS Tantra 2, , analyzer plugins like Metric A/B, and a couple of their synths like Knifonium. I like PA. They make many fantastic plugins, especially in the workhorse department. Brainworx, Lindell, Neold, Kiive and Unfiltered Audio are excellent developers. I don't mind spending $200 a year (grandfathered into an old plan), to have access to all their stuff...and get to own 10 a year of my choosing. Agreed. I also bought an Axe FX III, so I'm done for the amp sim stuff for 10 years hopefully!

I prefer this, as I use both templates and external hardware FX. Just by taking a split second look at the channel-send section tells me what's being used & the level of each, without having to look at the names. If send 1, 3 & 7 are being used, I know what they are, and if 2, 4 & 8 are blank I know what's not being used. This applies to console view and channel view. This would be a mess if only used sends were stacked on top of one another regardless of Send #. This is also helpful from UI perspective when looking at 100 tracks in the mixer...since all send #s are on a horizontal line. I can just scan that line in the mixer and see everything going to Send #7 on a horizontal line. Same as a hardware mixer. If this wasn't the case it would be a nightmare for solving gain staging issues, especially with complex side-chaining setups. So there are features from hardware that I like having replicated in software. But having it as a simple preference setting would be cool too.

Weird! I've never even notice this, and I've been mixing 150+ track scoring projects for 2 decades. Now that you've mentioned it, I want this feature!! Although I usually do all my track arranging in the timeline, which then auto updates ordering in the mix console...but would be very handy to be able to do this from console view. Having said that - $600 is a steal for a software of this complexity / feature set, regardless of a few strangely missing features.

As a multi-decade Cubase Pro user (and Nuendo), I find it funny they always offer these essentially hobbyist products for free, when they have an enormous catalog of professional instruments made by themselves that would be appealing to high end users. Especially incentivizing other professionals that are coming from Logic or DP, etc. So here we have a mixed bag of mostly crap products, or lite versions (i.e. useless) of decent products, or products that routinely go on sale for dirt cheap. And I don't know any pro Cubase users who don't already have Melodyne, Guitar Rig (or a better / full guitar ecosystem), or better synths / effects already. Is it really that much of a revenue / profit loss to offer something of real value - from their own catalog - to incentivize higher end users? Say, something that will get people into the Halion ecosystem. It seems all these companies cater to one crowd with these bloated freebie packages of mostly useless crap, with nonsensical combinations of "whatever we could get for pennies on the dollar from our partners", instead of trying to build their higher end userbase. That "Pop Guitar 2" sample pack and 1-Month Splice coupon must have taken weeks of executive level negotiations to secure, I'm sure. /rant

After getting heavily into the Orchestral Tools ecosystem I rarely even touch my Spitfire stuff anymore. The quality difference - and more importantly, the usability difference - is absolutely enormous. Then again, the prices are quite a bit steeper.

Just checked for fun - but the $19.99 plugins do not qualify. (Has worked before with the $0.01 difference, but not this time!) Luckily my Mix & Master subscription renews this month (grandfathered in) and they sent me a voucher to get the XXL sub for the same price. Niiiiiiiiice.

Hoping they do the same for Absynth - or perhaps hand the source code over to Rhizomatic / Brian Clevinger if he's interested in evolving it. Although Plasmonic seems to be the focus now.

Ya- $200 for a plugin. Lol. I just spent $200 for Salu, which is close to 100 GB of some of the most beautiful instrument recordings I've ever heard in a virtual instrument. And it required a couple hours of walkthrough videos to convince me it was worth it. The price vs. value in this market is totally out of whack. And people advocating $200 for a plugin that just hit the market.......I have words for these people. ?

Promised not to buy anything new till the summer. Promised. Myself. This has been on my list forever. Can't reneg on promise, especially to self. Will not buy. No buying anything till summ--- Bought it.

I've reduced many of their libraries by deleting many of the MIC positions. Not sure how Century is set up (don't own), but it seems they have Two Mic Mixes in version 2.0, and up to 8 mic positions on top of that. It should be possible to reduce that footprint substantially if you have no use for the extensive mic arrays. The list on the product page is: Close 1, Close 2, Close 3, Close 4, Mixed, Decca, Close (another one?) and Wide. I've reduced a couple of their other libraries down to one close mic, mixed and decca and sometime the wide. Or just the Decca if I didn't like the close mic(s). Has reduced those libraries by 50% or more. This one seems a bit more complicated as the site mentions the close mics vary depending on articulation.

This is a problem with convincing people that music / audio production is a science and not an artform. It ain't just music either. This is the problem in graphic design, animation, videography, photography, etc. as well. These industries are about selling you gear. Everything centers around this objective. I would love to see a video where a review for an overpriced or redundant piece of music / audio gear was "You don't need this. What you DO need is to go outside and have life experiences. Then you'll actually have something to say using the gear you already own."

Here where? You have the wage trends for the company: 500+ programmers, engineers, UI / UX designers, cloud / SAAS, marketing, accounting, etc? Rent, taxes, electricity, computers, software, servers, etc. in Israel & US? I'm looking at their employee list on LinkedIn. Virtually all these jobs are technical and will have seen significant inflation pressure on wages over the last 10 years. Unless they are losing substantial talent, which is, of course, entirely possible. But you seem to have the numbers. I'd love to see them.

It's 100% guaranteed that their cost of doing business has gone up significantly, and the previous 'race-to-the-bottom' plugin price bonanza was never sustainable after years of extremely high inflation.

Nothing creepy about 6 fingers and 3 arms. I match many ladies on Tinder because of these attributes. Although in my case, it's not technically an arm. But it plays piano.

Isn't that Easter sales?

Do you (or anyone) know if there is a way to export the one shot / loop samples (vocals, percussion, etc.) as .wav files? Looking at the World Suite walkthrough, there are some cool vocal one-shot performances, but much prefer to have these as raw .wav files in my sample / loop drive. This can be done with Kontakt, but not sure about Falcon.

Just checked - and anything released since November - when I bought the bundle - has been added to my account. Only a couple new things, but it's definitely getting added. As for 2024, have no idea. One thing I'm disappointed with are the Battery Kits. There aren't even enough velocity layers to make them useable - for me anyway. Quite unfortunate, as they clearly did a lot of recordings for each of these kits (loops, multi-tracks, kits, etc.) so you'd think they'd spend a bit more time making them playable.

Don't blame @jngnz for IK devaluing all their products to the point of absurdity. By your own logic, the ~140 products in TS3.5 are now worth ~$1.50 each, and the 30 products in TS4.0 are worth ~$5 each. Of course, some products are more valuable than others. For example - I completely understand that TONEX MAX is 50% the cost of the TS4 $199 upgrade, since it's so indispensable and ground breaking, and will absolutely not be abandonware in 2 years. But, let's be honest here. Like most developers these days, milking existing customers for upgrades is highly profitable. Whereas, attracting new customers is expensive, and incentivizing them with dirt-cheap "total catalogue" products is where profits are lost. iZotope and Native Instruments have perfected this method. Get people into the ecosystem for cheap. Then milk them for upgrades. IK might be slightly better at this when it comes to "group buys", which is another dirt-cheap way to get new customers in and prepped for the milking. It's smart business in the short term. That 3rd point is intentional. Has been the case for years in products like Amplitube. Crippling software with "missing product" prompts is a sales tactic. Doesn't matter what it does to the user experience. You must be constantly reminded of what products you don't own. I'm sure IK borrowed this from mobile gaming. And, unfortunately, it works gangbusters in the gaming world. Surprised more audio devs don't use this tactic. Then again, those other companies probably care about their customers' experience lol.

Had this problem with Omnia. Even the ISO download links they sent failed during download. Had to install a better download manager (Chrome extension) that would re-connect the download fragment / queue, as it would not resume once connection failed. Took 2 days. But eventually worked.

Have been chipping away at Time Micro / Macro. But Salu has been on my list since it was released. Very much considering the quartet, dreamstate, evolving and the other sound design-ish patches. Such a gorgeous sounding library. Just not sure what to get first. Picked up the entire Ark series (0-5) during 2022 sales season, and Sine player still hasn't grown on me. But for the sound of these libraries, it's worth the headache.

It's a fantastic delay. Quite deep, and can achieve some fantastically cold / digital pitched delays that are really common in techno / EDM / synthwave. I would not use it as a warm / tape delay though - even the vintage / tape modes. It is extremely cold sounding imo - but I'm guessing their target audience initially was EDM. Quick 30 second demo of that 'spot-it-from-a-mile-away' tone: The same style delays with Echoboy will sound much much warmer - more in the dub / reggae / hip-hop territory, and more difficult to get that brittle / squishy digital tone. But for what it does, Replika doesn't really have competition. It's the only delay I can think of that does that tone so well. Which might be a very bad thing if you're looking for a warmer delay - for that, there are much better alternatives imo. And the micro-pitcher & diffusion mode are fun as hell.

That is absurd. KSHMR is a maaaaasive electronic producer, who has products through a gazillion companies. It would be like trashing Native Instruments/ Splice.com because the KHSMR sample packs are one of their biggest sellers / partnerships, despite controversies with those sample packs over plagiariasm with Mick Gordon's Doom OST. Lifeline Console / Expanse have absolutely nothing to do with any of the KSHMR stuff. They are exceptional plugins - both have replaced most of my lo-fi plugins, including RC-20 and Lo-Fi-AF (Unfiltered Audio), as they are far more versatile , with great programming / UI, and sound far better (specifically the full versions). Free lite versions are a no-brainer, since upgrading to full is often on sale for dirt cheap.

Having cowbell without timbale is sacrilegious where I'm from. Strange too, because a lot of the rhythms in that library walkthrough have a Cuban / Latin vibe. Looking through the percussion list, it's odd they left out so many key percussion instruments. It's a really thin list, heavily weighted to light percussion spectrum, that likely cripples the library's versatility. Hopefully they add to it in the future.

Good catch - thanks for pointing that out. Totally missed that - thanks!