Brian Walton

I wasn't a fan of the UI either (and still think it could use some improvements) but I found a couple Skins I like and honestly makes a world of difference in my enjoyment of them: XENON (one on top) https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=528204 FModern (one on the bottom) https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=534812&sid=5d25d9f59535d6c697c1de908356ab2d

Seomeone mentioned this as a free alternative (for some of the same concepts) and I gave it a shot and think it is pretty good https://kushview.net/element/ I paid for the $2 easy installer one time download version. I havent tried the PA one - though I am a fan of their plugins.

Considering IKM requires you to download "everything" I coulnd't afford the SSD that product would go on, let alone the product itself.

That must be it. I'd never pay full price for anything (ok except Scaler 2). So if you paid full price then that certainly could be it. Went ahead and grabbed it as AutoAlign, Volume, Saturator, Delay, Reverb, I figure those are worth less than $10 a piece. ?

Weird. I own AutoDyanmicEQ and TurboCompLE (both in that bundle and they want to charge me $44 for the Essental Bundle).

I usually just take a look at close to the end of the month (check for deal end dates) or the first day of the month to see what are the options sub $10 to grab the freebie. Starting to get close to redundency or having to resort to buying the cheap Kontakt instruments (that I can't use due to never investing in full Kontakt). I'm really suprised PB hasn't put a lot of other plugin shops out of business. The free deals and cheap options to captalize on those deals have been fantastic. Is it April yet? I already got the March deal. ?

This. PC is really the only thing that sets it apart. (which I do agree is rather significant given the lack of PC options) Many good "normal" vst versions on the market.

This. As a "lifer" the sell to Bandlab was the best possible outcome. Thrilled about where we landed.

I can't predict the future, but my personal observations This isn't a buy becuase the company is hemoraging A top tier brand that has seen ridiculoius growth in the last year Captial Investments want a return on their money (this typically doesn't mean lower prices) Hopefully Izotope is doing well enough and continues to do so that major price hikes/lack of sales won't be necessary to meet expectation When the pandemic ends - the demand for the surge in plugin buying is likley to dwindle back to some state of normalicy Make no misake, we have seen a huge boon in plugin buying in the last year.

Quite sure I'm right. https://www.franciscopartners.com/news

But that wouldn't be correct.

Francisco Partners bought majority stake in both companies to spell it out here.

I think you are thinking about Soundspot via Plugin Boutique. APD rarely offers anything dirt cheap.

I wouldn't read too much into the idea of NI or izotope really feeling like they needed a "partnership" this is simply a 3rd party investing in both of those companies, which will force the matter. Yes

none of those seem like a deal to begin with..... 1 deal or 100...I need something good enough to actually temp me to spend money to consider it a deal.

I can't exactly speak to that as I don't have any non-boutique dirt pedals. But I did about a 15 minute test doing some A/Bs with a couple non Klon, or Klones and my guess would be the EHX is likley better. The Chow gets some of the general tone in the ballpark, but it also tends to kind of take over the tone and not feel as much as your amp driven. More like "Klon clipping with some random amp behind it." I found it also impacts the high end in a way that my pedals do not do, taking away air from say an amp sim and the dynamics do not feel like what they could/should be in my short test. For those that work in the box, a cool tool to have. But if you are a legitimate guitar player and have pedals, it might not be your go-to.

The delusional nature of this guy "a lot of people made videos about the Klon subsequent to my video, it was really fun to see the resurgance of this pedal." He was about 10 years late to the Klon hype train and videos consistantly get made on the subject, they never went away. Including Klones. Sold mine years ago. Crazy that he paid $5K for one.

The phrase you are looking for is "claim to fame" And mine is correcting others on the interwebs. j/k ? Related to music, I'm in a small circle of people with experience with all 3 Trainwereck amp models, as well as Komet amps hand tuned by Kenny himself. In additon to experience with real Dumbles (not on the caliber of Trainwreck).

Odd the activation page still pops up and seems like the only way to get the product to work is to do the trial by entering all "1s" Wondering if it is going to have any issues after 30 days. The start screen doesn't end up going away after restarts and seems to rely on having to keep doing this every time it starts.

Same deal with something like the Elysia Master Compressor. But sicne it has been out for ~6 years or something like that, it makes me wonder what the UI update/requriement is for PA to make those requirements and adjustments. And that one I'm sure has been a top seller.

With Youtube, this was likley an automated process. It isn't an infraction they sent you, but simply notification that you do not have the copywrite to that song (you clearly didn't write it), and therefore you can't monitize the video. The copywrite owner can monitize your video (though with next to no views on it, they are not even going to be making a single $1 on it. You can basically ignore those notifications, but perhpas think about what you want out of these projects. I can't fathom spending thousands of dollars on convering someone-else's music in a way that I couldn't at least post on the internet without someone else running ads on it.

Which ironically in the demo from PA, they do massive screen zoom ins so you can see what is going on. Would benefit from a resizable GUI update for sure.

All of this.

But those are also things that can be added to any DAW via other market leaders and there are hard drives full of free stuff and paid stuff I'll never use. What features are in the DAW are the reason to pick one DAW over another one on the market. If no new features were needed at this stage, everyone would be flocking to Cakewalk, as it is free and very well featured. I agree some features can feel like bloat. But seriously try to use Sonar of 5 years ago vs Bandlab Cakewalk and it feels antiquated. Just the theme editor feature alone is huge for those of us that are running custom themes. Ask why anyone is actually using Studio One that is a Windows only user and I think you will find the answer comes down to features.

Some pretty interesting/impressive tech that doesn't seem to get a whole lot of attention these days. Note for thsoe trying it out. You can't seem to demo the SE Versions. So you might run into a few surprises once you lock it down to the lower end version. Drums for example, obviously you only get 2 kits. However, what isnt' exactly straightforward is that during the demo phase those two kits have different cymbals you can switch between across each of them. You only get one set with the SE version. Despite the claim that the Drums are syntasized, it still has about a 12 gig download (for some samples) which makes it larger than, EZ Drummer, AD, and half the size of Drum Core - which has like 20+ kits and audio loops for a plethora of drummers. CPU hit is also higher than expected given the proported system efficiencies of this model. That said, tech is impressive and with JamPoints seems like a reasonable deal. The Bass is only about 200 megs and it includes the 5 and 6 string options for the P-Bass which was welcome. (and Jamstix does have pre-set outputs for MODO drums of both kits, so you don't have to do the mapping yourself)