Starship Krupa

The Sansui 1975 styling of the UI's is lovely.

I must do a comparative test between MMatcher and HorNET VHS and ToneBoosters TB Morphit to see which works the best for headphone correction. Theoretically, my K240's, DT880's, ATH-M50's, MDR 7506's, and Superlux 681 EVO's should all sound the same using these products, which should also sound the same as each other. Somehow I expect that such is not the case.😄

Oh, I thought that what you meant by "trying to take a leaf out of Plugin Alliance's book with their freebies" was that they were emulating the practice of giving away a number of plug-ins in order to draw attention to the ones that they charge for. Which is a practice that I've benefited greatly from over the years and which has encouraged me to buy the companies' paid products. Plugin Alliance, MeldaProduction, IK Multimedia, Applied Acoustics and iZotope all have hundreds of dollars of licensing fees I've paid after being given a free taste. It predisposes me to look favorably on their products in part because it suggests to me that the people running things at these companies might understand the importance of good will in successful marketing, that it's not so much about wringing the last drop of money out of each individual product, that the warm fuzzies will result in more than enough sales to offset the costs of producing these freebies. So it's a smart thing for Waves to try to get into. Given their reputation, even among people who like their products, for trying to extract as much cash out of each user as they can with WUP or full-on subscription licensing. It seems with Waves that plenty of people love the products, but few people feel any good will at all toward the company producing them. They have had the practice for many years of giving away licenses around Black Friday, but that seems not to have done much to inspire good feelings.

I've watched enough White Sea Studios YT reviews to look for the non-functional screw heads😄. Rackmount holes I can forgive, after all it is T-RackS. Moreover, as they are at the edges, they don't distract the eye.

I'm going to proceed with using it as if there are no restrictions. I've searched for a licensing agreement and none is disclosed in the usual places.

Kilohearts, Native Instruments, iZotope, ToneBoosters, MeldaProduction, Audio Damage, Cherry Audio and IK Multimedia are just some of the companies whose product lines have included multiple free loss leaders for years. Not having a collection of free products is the exception for plug-in manufacturers. I'm having a hard time trying to think of a company that doesn't. Which is the point, I reckon. FabFilter, Sonible, UAD....

The licenses for the individual modules are specific to TR5 or TR6, so if your licenses were purchased for TR5, you aren't entitled to the TR6 versions. That's how it's worked for me at least. I would think that that is by design, because it would amount to a free upgrade for each of the modules, which I don't think they'd want to do (otherwise why bother making new versions).

I couldn't find a license agreement. Not on the website, not in the download.

Surprise, I also know of a free product that can help out with this until such time as the Cakewalk developers implement the feature natively: DMG Audio Track Control.

What do you mean? If there's some restrictive license for it I can't find one. I can't find any license at all for it.

Thanks for this review. I'm a big fan of the Exponential algorithms, going back to when Phoenix first went on sale for $9.99. I tried a demo, substituting if for my previous main reverb and the difference was stunning. Using a good reverb turned my mix into something that sounded....not sure of the word I'm looking for, "real?" "professional?" I'm apparently very sensitive to reverb tails when listening to music, and Phoenix' tails go on forever without turning grainy. They're just "right" in a way that no other reverb I'd tried before that. Since then MeldaProduction's TurboReverb has proved able to equal if not best it (esp. the Brichamber model), but it doesn't surpass it (for natural go-to reverb that is; MTurboReverb can also do what you call the "color" stuff like SuperMassive). My questions for you: the fact that everything from Phoenix/R2 through Stratus/Symphony is very easy on resources is a selling point for them. iZotope are notorious for the high overhead their processors usually have. How does Equinox stack up to the Exponential reverbs that were coded by Exponential? I have Neoverb, and it just seems to me like an attempt to kludge an iZotope wizard onto the Expo algos. I don't need my reverb to analyze my song and then recommend a preset, I can choose presets myself, I can even adjust the parameters myself, although I usually don't with the Expo reverbs. Second, have they finally done away with the godawful single seat iLok'd licensing scheme and enabled the much saner iZotope licensing and validation? That alone would make it worth the loyalty upgrade price. Otherwise, as with anything iZotope that I want....kick back and wait for the glitch, they usually seem to happen right around the end of iZotope's financial year.

I notice some confusion as to how exactly to install the presets. The location mentioned is the correct one for VST3 presets, and a host that uses Steinberg's canonical VST3 presets can populate their preset list by scanning them. Sonar, unfortunately, while it can load single VST3 presets one by one using the VST3 menu, it doesn't scan the location and populate its own preset manager. Fortunately, with this one plug-in, I found a solution that populates the plug-in's own menu system as well as Sonar's own preset menu: after you've installed the VST3 version per the instructions, also install the VST2 version and let Sonar scan it. After it does, the preset menus should work in the VST3 version and you can delete the VST2 version. I don't know what's going on here, but it works, and when I called up Minimogue VA VST3 in another DAW, the menus were functional in it as well (although I don't know if they otherwise wouldn't have been). I know this is a necro of the thread, but so what. This topic is very high in Google's results when you search for how to install the presets.

It looks like the "Classic" UI wasn't present in the first iteration, but arrived pretty soon after that. I can say that some of the newer IK releases are leveraging the AVX extensions, because MODO Drums refused to install on my old laptop, whose 2nd generation i7 apparently lacked that instruction set. Yes, less eyeball fatiguing colors is good, and they're at least in the ballpark of resembling their earlier forms. Red Opto Compressor looks good, and IIRC, has the M/S feature that I love so much. I wonder when that startedI was surprised to see that the 670 arrived so early. It was actually the plug-in that introduced me to the magic that M/S processing can do. I had been conflating it with M/S micing, so had no idea why such a thing would be included in EQ or dynamics processors. Ohhhh, it lets you process mid and side individually, same as if they were left and right, and that can do magical things to the stereo image. It was one of the presets that had something about widening in the name and that was the lightbulb moment and now I use it on everything. Started using it with the MeldaProduction processors too, most of which also have the feature, and any other plug-in I get my hands on that has it. I understand not wanting to see a stylized tyrannosaurus rex on the face of every plug-in. Especially since IK are, IMO, the best at designing clean skeuomorphic UI's. You don't put in silly things that distract the eye, like non-functioning screw heads or wear marks, the UI's represent what is best about using hardware and that type of UI: you can see knob position and meter movement instantly, and when you move a control, it "feels" more analog. Also, they're just pretty to look at. As I said, you got it right 25 years ago, which is impressive in the software business. I'm thinking of XLN's recent facelift of Addictive Drums. When I first got the product, as part of a bundle, I paid less attention to it than I should have due to the fake brushed aluminum Johnny Space Commander control panel UI that screamed "I'm from the early 21st century!" Then they laid the free update to 2.5 on everyone, with the UI overhaul, and I took another look and saw that it's actually a pretty great product. Maybe I'm shallow. If the UI looks exciting, I'm more excited to use it. A dinosaur silhouette in a purple oval kinda doesn't fit that. He could be on the website somewhere in with the blurbs, though. I found the history of the product to be fascinating, and would also if more of it were described on the IK T-RackS product pages. I wasn't aware of the pioneering nature of the company.

A lot of stuff I have, a lot of stuff I don't have that is covered by other manufacturers products I do have. New T-RackS modules are always fun. Since these are individual licenses, seems like there's a decent chance that I'd be able to give the dupes away....

I hope my research helps you get the most from it. Syntronik 2 and Sampletron 2 are fantastic.