Patrick Derbidge

One person's trash is another person's treasure is all I can say. I own AD2, SSD4, EZD2, all the drums programs that come with Komplete Ultimate, Melda Drummer 2, Jamstix 4 and probably some others I'm forgetting. I'm a fanboi of all of them but mostly AD2 and EZD2. One thing that I still find appealing about these two is that the midi grooves are from professional drummers. This, of course, means that you have to invest a bit more to get as many packs as you can to have the options you want but this also makes the drum parts sound professional with the ability to still tweak them to your liking. Jamstix and Melda drummer, on the other hand are getting better with their programming to come up with natural sounding drum parts based on your input. Because of their learning curve I haven't given them as much time as I need to in order to compare but that also is another boon for AD2 and EZD2 since musicians need to be focused on making music rather than learning all the time. It's a catch 22, because without taking time to learn you don't make very good music, but spending all your time learning keeps you from making music. It's a balance. Saying that AD2 isn't good enough for pro music is BS. Saying that you don't like it due to it's workflow or other issues is fair. What I like most about AD2 are the drum kits, especially the Fairfax kits. They sound amazing. The good news is that If I want to use some of EZD2's stellar songwriting tools, I can send the midi out to AD2's fairfax kit and have the best of both worlds. Don't underestimate AD2's own features though. The Grid search is not quite as good as EZD2's tap to find but it still works fairly well. The beat transformer feature also works pretty well. I have used these features with great success. The Mixer features in AD2 is far superior to EZD2's mixer but it's not even close to SD3 or BFD2. Since I always set up separate tracks in my DAW for each drum and prefer mixing them with my own plugins, this is not a huge deal for me. I guess, in the end, if I'm being honest, the biggest selling point for me is the Fairfax Kit. I own almost every EZD2 kit and I still go back to the Fairfax often. I do, however really like the Claustrophobic kit in EZD2, even though it's old. It had a sound that you just can't find in any other kit I've tried and blends well with others as well. To each their own but I am at the point where I know what I like and don't like so a good walk through video and trial run convinces me much more these days than peoples opinions. Other than looking to find out if there are stability issues, I generally don't put much stock in opinions since we are all so different in how we compose.

Thank you so much. I suppose I could make it available but we'll see how it turns out. I'm not sure my writing skills are anything to "write" home about, LOL. (sorry, Dad joke)

I am enrolled in a class at my University called Alternative DAW's, which basically means alternative to Pro Tools ? My final assignment that just got sprung on me was to write a a paper on an Alternative DAW of my choice. Besides explaining some of how it works I wanted to get your feedback on your favorite features of Cakewalk. Perhaps give me a couple of your favorite features and a couple of weaknesses to balance the paper out. I am mostly a Reaper user so I'm not as versed in Cakewalk as I'd like to be and Reaper was already taken by another student so this was my next choice. Thanks for your help in advance.

When it comes to a DAW I'm looking for fast, usable, stable, and functional not a trophy wife. If there was a contest for the most updates, Reaper would win hands down. Not for everyone but I'll take stable over pretty.

I have more Kontakt instruments, soft synths, wav files, plugins, than I know what to do with so this might take up more space than I need, however from what I've seen and heard I think if you're starting out and low on cash this looks like a worthy pickup. Even with all that I own I'm half tempted just because I like having loads of sounds to choose from. The downside is there is a tendency to waste a lot of time going through sounds when you have as much content as I do so I'll listen to the demos some more and decide if I like any of the sounds enough to jump on it.

They were when this was first posted. I'll admit I thought it would go through the weekend so with a busy week I was going to do my research and decide which ones to by but now.... I guess not.

I don't need this at the moment but I know some really good jazz composers that really like this drum kit for that genre so if Jazz is your thing this might be worth looking into.

Exactly. I think that loop and phrase libraries like this are more usable for genre's like hip hop where it's part of the genre to take loops and phrases and manipulate them with the beat. For everything else, it's hard to say how useful they will be. I don't write as much music as I'd like lately (too busy trying to pass my music theory class which I have yet to decide how much it will help me) but I own a few of these libraries and haven't used a single one yet. Price is right though. I find if I use something once, I'm happy. It's hard to put a price tag on something that contributes to a finished piece of work.

Good list. I especially like the Melda plugins. I have actually put together my own list with alternatives for each of my Waves plugins. The problem is that my Waves are working just fine for now so there is no real push for me to replace them all right away. Every once in a while when there is a good sale on an alternative I'll pick it up. I like airwindows console but they haven't replaced NLS for me but it's not like NLS is a plugin I'd die without, I just like to use it. The truth is, if I lost all my Waves plugins today I wouldn't be despondent. Plugins are not a cure to poor mixing skills and luckily I've been through enough training that I'm happy with my improvements and I never stop learning new mixing tricks to keep me current.

Ah sibilance, you're right, it is better. I used that a lot on my last mix and remember liking it better. Thanks for the reminder.

Not many but I still like J37 and Kramer tape. I like Abbey Road Plates, Abbey Road Chambers, Scheps Omni Channel, Renaissance De-esser, Reel ADT ,NLS and F6 Floating Band Dynamic EQ. I also like using One knob pumper for it's ease. I have others to do this but they tend to need a little massaging to avoid artifacting whereas One Knob just works. I also use Waves Tune which I could replace with melodyne but it keeps doing its job so I haven't bothered yet. All the replacements I've found for these that I'd be satisfied with are a bit more money than I want to spend right now so as long as my Waves plugins keep working I don't have much incentive to move on. I still use a lot of others from Waves but mostly just to change things up. I have plenty of alternatives for the ones I didn't list here.

Me Too Fleer but to be fair their plugins are so cheap that a WUP is usually not that expensive. My plugins have kept working so I've only done WUP on one or two for under $10 during a WUP sale. Nevertheless I would much prefer to pay upfront a good sale and get lifetime support like Melda plugins. Over time I have replaced my waves plugins for Melda and others but there are some that I haven't found a replacement for, YET(: Although I completely understand the WUP hate and the sometimes confusing install process and issues one thing I will say about waves is that their plugins are of good quality. At least the ones that I have cherry picked over the years have been solid. I wish I could say the same for Plugin Alliance plugins. I have loved them but for reasons I have not been able to figure out, if my project gets too large then my plugin alliance plugins crash Reaper. It only happens with their plugins so I have, unfortunately, stopped using them.

Face Palm! That's right I forgot. LOL. I guess I better grab it.

Darn. Now I'm sad I forgot about this promotion going on. Oh well, can't say I've used these organs as of yet so not too big of a loss.

It looks like an organ patch from Carnival, which I already own. Maybe I'll download and compare sometime.

I like their non loop stuff but loops in kontakt are not for me. Not sure why I find loops in Stylus useful but not any other way with exception of a few wav loops I own.

Oh this is a fun one. It's like a mystery you have to solve ? But I cracked it! Basically Adagio came first. very expressive but also a bit clunky and full of every type of legato style and some unique ARCs. Then came Adagietto which was just the ensembles from Adagio and has some very nice sounding sordinos. Later, they did new recordings in the same church that was meant to blend with Adagio and Adagietto and they called this Agitato. Then they decided to take some of the "best of" recordings from all the previous libraries and combine them into a more streamlined interface and workflow and called this Anthology. Anthology used to be a free product if you already owned all these other products. Many people found that the processing done to the samples in Anthology were too stale and lacked air that the originals had so 8Dio decided to try again. Same samples, I think, with maybe a few changes to what ARC's were chosen for the new product but essentially a new and improved Anthology but this time they got rid of the old Adagio, kept Anthology in the line up named the new product The New Adagio, which I find to be a very strange decision. I would have preferred they called the new product Anthology 2, got rid of the first Anthology and kept the old Adagio series because they had some really cool articulations that are no longer available to the public unless you already owned the original Adagio. Clear as mud? I thought so.

Dang, I actually paid for this one a few years ago. It's worth adding. It has those sounds you would have expected Exhale to have but surprisingly doesn't.

One of my favorite delays. It really has that sort of produced sound. The only issue is that it does take a little bit of set up and tweaking to get the delay you want but worth the extra effort.

Interesting. I own a lot of EZD packs but never thought to look at their bit rate. Maybe that's why 9 times out of 10 I prefer the sound of my AD2 drum kits. EZD2 has an some awesome composing tools though so sometimes I'll use it for laying down drum lines and then transfer it all to AD2.

Out of that sale I like the Wrenchenspie and the Steel string guitar for the ambient guitar patch. For regular sounding guitar work I use Orange Tree and Ample Sound the most. I have all their older strings, which are not on sale right now, like the Adagios and the Agitato's and Anthology which the new Adagios are sort of a repackaging of the Anthology's. Don't get me started on the confusion they created there, however I do use their strings a lot and really like them. They take a bit of work but I still prefer them over the Spitfire Albion One Strings. Between my 8Dio strings and Audiobro Lass2 and East West Hollywood strings I feel like I have a lot of my string needs covered. For Rock and Pop music I find the New Adagios work pretty well.

To be fair, I think they have some really good sounding cabs and emulations but they are just waaay over priced. I only purchased the standard version of Bias FX and Bias Amp and still felt like I was lacking content for what I paid. At the time I could have spent less money on Slate's VIRTUAL ANALOG BUNDLE and had Scuffham S-gear thrown in giving me both great mixing tools and one of the best Amp Sim bundles available. Unfortunately with the Slate's move to subscription model that option no longer exists.

I would never take you seriously?

Did anyone watch the promo video of the app he developed for these sounds? I think it's pretty dang cool.

280w!!! Wow, that's hot, although we are talking 32 cores vs 18. I wonder if Intel will find a way to do better when they get there.