Carl Ewing

Interesting - impulse response loader seems like it should have been the leading new feature and not at the bottom of the page. If I remember correctly, the only way you could use IRs before was through Reflektor (reverb) module? Don't really like GR - comes in handy sometimes, but perhaps they'll continue putting more resources into it and make it (eventually) more competitive.

Lol.

Do a negative review of an 8Dio product. Post it on Youtube. Resist the lawsuits. I'll believe anything you have to say about products after that.

What's your cut?? 10%? 15%? You're clearly being paid to promote this promoter!

There are some premium rack spacers around that are better I think. The GUI really does effect vibrations / resonance through the entire rack. Specifically - the free Rack Spacer causes weird buzzing noises on my kick drums when it's placed below certain compressors. I think the problem is the bullet holes. Not sure why they added those, it weakens the face plate UI. My favorite rack spacer cost $399 (flash sale) and solved all of these issues, and also improved the imaging in my mixes...almost as well as my hardware rack spacers.

I think this is a cost / benefit type situation. I own an Axe FX III, and I have Amplitube 5 Max. One is for heavy duty work, the other is for in the box on mobile rig, or when I don't have to time to deal with external effects. I have some other sims that came with bundles (Plugin Alliance, Guitar Rig via Komplete), and these do get used occasionally. I like having them around. Now - those two purchases were well over $4K (with other Fractal hardware accessories.) I'll likely never need another guitar related effects or cabinet or amp sim for the rest of my life. But I could have also picked up dozens of amp sims plugins for a fraction of that price, and likely get along just fine. Sure, some will be ****, some will be average, some will great - but I'd still be saving thousands just picking up a bunch of much less expensive plugins. I think this applies to a lot of things in the plugin world. Is it better to buy a $10K mastering comp....where you'll never need another again, or a $5000 Lexicon reverb unit, where you'll never need another one again, or is it more cost effective to buy 20 different reverb plugins and 20 different mastering comp plugins, for a fraction of the cost of hardware, and get along just fine? I think there has to be a realization that many of these plugins are trying to emulation extremely expensive hardware. It's going to be a lot of buy & try till you get something that does the job well. I don't think there's anything wrong with buying a bunch of plugins you don't really need, if you're goal is to have the ultimate effects for your workflow...or to have a lot of different options to cover all your bases. And even shitty sounding plugins can have their uses. I have quite a few crappy distortion plugins that come in handy once in a while.

This shit's getting worse than cosmetics, sneakers and Tequila. Can't wait for Floyd Mayweather Harmonic Impakts, recorded at Madison Square Garden (OMG!), and Albion 8: Kardashian Nordic Nights, recorded live in the Lafoten Islands using Soviet Era ribbon mics (OMG!), and lastly, just in time for Christmas: Metropolis Ark Ø7: The Ghost of Elvis's Footstep and Stomps (AI Edition), immaculately recorded summoning the ghost of Elvis through a Ouija board to reproduce the sound of his shoes striking various surfaces, recorded with way overpriced mics and EVP Recorders, thrown through a fully refurbished Wessex A88 Console (OMG!) at Graceland. Produced with a new Pro-Tools Seance AI application, in coordination with the Presley Estate, Hans Zimmer, Rick Rubin, a little girl possessed by Quincy Jones, and a surprise appearance by Kafka's ghost, who you can hear yelling at us about "shameless sellouts" in the background of some impacts. Truly a remarkable instrument that will be utterly useless to 99% of people who buy it, but you'll still pay $799 for the privilege of telling as many people as possible that you own it. Did we mention AI? You'll buy anything with AI in title. #AI-Elvis

They were all on sale from $14.99 - $19.99 each on ADSR last month. Entire bundle for like $130. Clusterflux was a freebie w/purhcase the month prior. Now a $9.99 sale for another this month. Safe to say these are dirt cheap, sub $20 plugins, and will be on sale regularly going forward.

Considering they basically sell 1 plugin now - and that plugin isn't really competitive in 2023, and they haven't really done proper updates of their other plugins in a decade + (some of these date back to 1st Gen DirectX), and the dev is basically gone / MIA, it's safe to assume this is all abandonware now.

Received a lot of free shit from from Audient, Soundcloud Pro, Focusrite and Loopcloud sub the past year. It's wonderful. Soundcloud Pro was a surprise - 40% off Arcade annual sub, 2 months free Splice, 4 months Sonarworks, 2 months Loopcloud, 10% off waves (haven't tried to stack on sales yet), 2 months Serato Studio, Gobbler plugin deal (12 months of Eventide Micropitch, Instant Phaser, XILS PolyKB, XILS PolyM, Relab LX480, SSL Drumstrip), and a whole bunch of other shit. Supposedly Adobe discount is coming as well. Gotta love oversaturated market and everyone fighting for new customers.

Pfft. No Waves Abbey Road Vinyl? Clearly you don't really care about your vinyl collection. Hipster level 0. Next you'll say you don't have at least 8 vintage tape cassette emulators. Poser.

What does that even mean? "Winnner". Took me over 10 years to find a mastering engineer I liked. It's not about good or bad, or winning or losing, it's whether the mastering suits the music and improves it (this can mean many things to every artist). On a large project - like a soundtrack or album - it's also whether the mastering engineer can find the through-line of all the tracks and either correct inconsistency problems, or find a cohesion that brings everything together. Particularly across large projects that have been produced and mixed in various states of exhaustion, mood, conditions, and sometimes with different gear / monitors. A mastering engineer should be commenting on the mix and overall project, and there should be a back and forth if there are issues that can be corrected in the mix. This isn't expensive - mastering is relatively cheap. I paid for mastering on my first album on a bus boy salary making $2 / hour. You can find exceptional human mastering today for $60 a track. Mastering is extraordinarily important. There's a huge range of philosophies and techniques - you can give a track or album to 20 different mastering engineers and get 20 totally different results, that all have a strong impact on the final sound. And these are differences that are obvious to even the most casual listener - especially on long projects, like a soundtrack, where a listener may be listening to that project for an hour +. Poor mastering can make something exhausting to listen to. Like the endless submission I get of people mastering through Ozone presets - this shit is awful to listen to. Or like any of Arcade Fire's releases - possibly the worst mastering I've heard in popular music in my life -- and they paid a lot of money to have great mixes rammed through tape and vinyl to give it whatever BS "warm" characterstics they thought they would get, which basically meant "smashed to shit and unlistenable on high quality monitors". Seriously listen to this sonic awfulness: But, digressing. It's so strange to have this critical step in the music process reduced down to some kind of "final sheen" or whatever weird thing people view it as today. This shit can't be automated, unless the music so damn generic and dull that it likely gains nothing with or without mastering. I've put my music through these AI programs - they are terrible, treating the music like some kind of product in an assembly line that can either have a blue or red or yellow filter placed on it to make it "mastered". Every algorithm, every single service I've tried sounds like shit. Period. Which isn't surprising, when it completely misses the whole damn point of mastering. Stop treating your music like a product on an assembly line. Your listeners will thank you for it.

Nice! My upgrade price is $1500, and I own 24 plugins in the collection + Sound Design Suite (40 plugins, many of them in Mercury). Only $1500! What a deal.

What's the 75% off nonsense? It's $199 reg. This is $50 off sale. And same deal at Sweetwater and a bunch of other retailers. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/CompCloudPlus--eastwest-composer-cloud-plus-annual-subscription-automatic-renewal

Umm. Is this on sale? I will buy immediately. Sounds like it could make my tracks better. I could also use a Bass Hibachi to complement my Hibachi Saturator (M/S Pro version of course).

I swear to god it's the same "Industry Review" people saying the same shit on every plugin. And how many frickin' producers does Rihanna have? Honestly - there needs to be some kind of pillaging of the shameless testimonials in this industry.

UI has become sluggish af with the 7.5 update, at least on 2 of my systems. Hoping that's on a list somewhere.

If you can wait, AI sales are almost always SIGNIFICANTLY better in November / December. Best to wait until all these major orchestral library companies are competing with each other for sales at the same time. The bundle sales last year were pretty great.

I have a large budget for purchases if I need them. Most of it goes to hardware. But I think I probably buy less than most amateur / semi-pro peeps I see on forums, which is always funny to me. Although I've ran into a lot of amateur musicians, especially guitarists, who have better equipment than the pros I know. Most of my colleagues, and myself included, use subscriptions where possible. $1000 / year for instrument / plugin subscriptions would give you almost anything you need to do excellent work. That's about $100 a month. Composer Cloud, PA Annual plans, etc. are the smartest way to a) have fixed annual costs, no update costs and b) try out expensive software for long periods of time to see if you even use them. Same goes for bundles like Komplete. These are no brainers, especially on sale. You can tell someone doesn't run a business when they complain about fixed costs like subscriptions provide. Audio / music work doesn't have to be expensive. There are excellent, absolutely excellent free plugins and instruments. There are excellent subscription options. And routinely excellent sales across the industry. This applies to software and hardware. I tend to do 90% of my purchases during Black Friday sales, and follow sales (to see what something should actually cost) and releases over the year to create a large list of what I want. And then wait (usually). 20 years ago, software budgets could go well into $10s of thousands per year. A single string library could be $1000+, and rarely ever go on sale. For that same price, you could get 5 years of composer cloud today - and 5 years is about the lifetime of a competitive sample library. Libraries will either be discontinued, lose compatibility, or require paid upgrades in that time. Economic downturn or not, this is the THE cheapest time in history to get into music / audio production. There are way too many cheap paths to excellent quality stuff. Unless you pirate, then every year is the cheapest year I guess. Haha. But I think people really have to become more disciplined. There is no need to have 10 tape emulations. 14 reverbs and 8 LA-2A emulations. Imagine running any other business where you're constantly just buying more and more shit because it's on sale. Like a construction company that has 80 types of a hammers because of "flash sales". Haha. Excessive software also creates legacy / compatibility nightmares over time, and just adds tons of logistical headaches (i.e. total wastes of time) trying to keep track of it all, or doing new system installs or troubleshooting.

Ah. This is a Mac problem. So paying for over priced hardware AND having to deal with that nonsense? My condolences.

You need timely updates on EQs and comps? Are you waiting for them add Photoshop capability? And I've never had a single problem / bug with any PA plugins in over a decade of using them. And yes, they should add ADC1 to PA. It would be added to my subscription, since I would never actually buy a comp / limiter for $60, let alone $129 regular price. It's 2023, max price for any plugin is now $29.99.

It's amazing he's one of the few that produces string libraries that actually sound like strings we hear in film scores. I.E. Warm, dark and full...when used quitely or loud. It's amazing so many larger developers don't understand this tone, considering they are all trying to create "cinematic" libraries. A funny example is LASS, where all the EQ preset options are "Dark Knight", "Shawshank", "Road To Predition", when you cannot just magically EQ you're way out of really thin and bright sounding recordings. It must be done at the recording stage. Much easier to brighten and thin out strings - than try to manufacture warmth / darkness. Always hoped there would be a library - perhaps in a few years, since it would be enormous - that's not just multiple mic positions, but multiple microphone options with entirely different tonal characteristics in the source recordings. There are some percussion libraries that do this and it's wonderful.

I've always had problems with these programs - Loopcloud, Arcade, etc. Anything that requires significant internet communication inside the DAW, has extensive e-commerce functionality, and / or has absurdly bloated UI like Arcade, seems to cause endless problems for me. Arcade is far worse than most (images are loaded through internet-browser loads in the background...i.e. you'll notice 10 or so internet browser processes in task manager when it's running, and many calls to the GPU), but Loopcloud has given me so many problems. They've constantly said that performance issues (especially regarding online previewing) would be improved, but it's always buggy af. I noticed ADSR manager also has default nonsense like frequency colored stereo wav images - I can only imagine the bloated code behind that program as well. Just give me an elegant, but simple UI, with an excellent database search, and optional image display (ideally there would be none or just a greyscale .wav form a la Cubase mediabay), and keep the e-commerce aspects as minimal and easy as possible. This can be done and look excellent. The Standalone loopcloud app is already a bloated POS (and the search is now worse than ever, with database searching split over THREE tabs now...Search (which is mostly useless), Explore (which is 100% useless), and Library (which has 99% useless negative space on a large monitor), with most of that bloated code going into the native DAW program. Just want siiiiimple. I swear these designers take lessons from 90s era Geocities websites.

Damn. Had to do a double take on that 4TB number. Wish these prices would come to my continent. Could fit 12TB in my mobile rig for $500. Uggggggh.

Not a compressor. No threshold setting for a reason. Honestly - what is your problem man? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Perhaps stay out of the conversation until you get some experience?