TheMaartian

I have been using Bitsum's ParkControl for years to manage core parking and to use their High Performance power profile. Note that Win11 uses power profile overlays. Bitsum's "Balanced: High Performance Overlay" works well on my Lenovo ThinkPad P17, which locks the power profile to maintain thermal control, but accepts and works fine with the overlay. It is unnecessary to purchase a Pro license, but I did to support the devs. Currently on sale for $8.97 from $14.95.

I don't for one microsecond believe that Microsoft will, much less can, write an ASIO driver that will perform better than the multi-client driver provided with my RME Fireface UCX II. There could be some useful developments like device aggregation that RME could take advantage of. I'm more interested in the improved support for MIDI and MIDI 2.0.

Some excellent sounds in the YT demo. Purchased and installed!

Beautiful! Nothing like a hint of Fizzy Pickle for the holidays. Always welcomed by these old ears. 😇

This is a very cool product. I paid list for it (29 €) some time ago and thought it was money well-spent. The direct BF price on his website is 19 €, so pull a tener and a couple of singles out of your digital wallet, and grab this AudioPlugin deal. His website: Mario Nieto World website His YouTube channel: Mario Nieto World YT channel

My prices are in euros and included taxes (319 € for the Value Pack). That's the same price as buying direct from Toontrack, which is MUCH easier. The new Art and Jazz SDXs are included. Neither is currently on sale at the moment, but the 2 Roots SDXs are (107 €). I bought both. I think the Value Pack price is not a sale price, so at some point in the future, I'll buy one and get the Art, Jazz and Hansa Rooms SDXs. After purchasing the 2 Roots SDXs, those are the only ones that I don't own that I would like having available. EDIT: The combination of Toontrack's servers being slammed with BF purchase downloads and the typical huge size of SDX libraries (the two Roots libraries total over 60 GB) led to LONG download times. I have a gigabit fiber internet service, but I'm over 30 minutes in and still have 30 minutes to go. That's about 1 GB/minute. Good thing I have other things to do in the meantime.

Yeah. I deleted that email for exactly the same reason. BTW, when, oh when, are you going to repost The Last Manthric Space Opera? I keep checking your YT channel and it's still missing. 🥺

I just priced out a Mac M4 Pro Mini with 64 GB RAM, 4 TB internal SSD and Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro preinstalled, monitor, keyboard and mouse. Almost 7K €. Instead of buying that, I bought a Lenovo ThinkVision 27" 4K monitor to connect to my Lenovo ThinkPad P17 and a Logitech keyboard that utilizes the Unifying receiver that my Logitech mouse uses. 840 € total. I'll keep the remaining 6K € to invest in basses. The only major problems I had with Windows updates was the update from Win7 to Win10. That broke a bunch of stuff, like the driver for my audio interface. That driver was never updated for Win10, so I have to buy a new interface.

But the intrusive components DON'T get uninstalled. THAT was the problem that caused me the headaches and all of the work.

I here you. I recently decided to price out a new Mac Studio M2 Ultra, configured similarly to my Lenovo P17 ThinkPad with 7 TB of SSD. By the time I was finished adding RAM and SSD, 27" display, keyboard and mouse, I was over 6K €. I think I'll stick with what I know. I was writing assembler TSRs for MS-DOS back in the '80s. Been stuck in that ecosystem ever since. Oddly, after years of listening to complaints of Windows upgrades hosing users' systems, it's now MacOS users who have to be cautious about OS upgrades.

[rant] I don't care how good their plugins are, I refuse to buy anything by Universal Audio ever again. Why? Their intrusive Windows App Manager (or whatever they called it; I can't remember). Uninstalling it doesn't get rid of a ton of crap that it installed in the first place. I spent quite a bit of time tracking down all of the files the uninstaller left behind and in the Registry Editor cleaning all of it up. [/rant]

Really nice cover, Derek! Tasty lead guitar! I thoroughly enjoyed the reggae arrangement of this classic song. One little quibble. Being a bassist, I hate to say this, but to my ears, I think I would have liked your cover even more if the bass track was reduced in volume 1 dB or so relative to the other instruments and voice. I listened to it on my high end Focal monitors that I have EQ'd to my studio, which can be a bit boomy.

I do. It's a solid pipe organ with a lot of useful presets. It's good that the clean sound presets for each setting are included, so you can use your own ambience FX. It's not, for example, National Theater and Concert Hall organ in Taiwan, but it is definitely worth adding to your EZkeys arsenal, especially at the sale price. I already purchased it way back.

I have Kontakt v5, v6, v7 and v8 installed. v7 and v8 are VST3 only. Some music software (I'm looking at you Band-in-a-Box) still don't support VST3. Steinberg no longer licenses the VST 2.4 development software to new plugin developers, so many new plugins are VST3 only. In my opinion, it's much easier to just load the version of Kontakt that was used to create a given song, rather than trying to port an existing song to a new version of Kontakt. I think that would be a complete waste of time.

Anyone else notice the message PreSonus posted on their forum, that they're shutting it down? They want you to purchase their subscription package or hang out on Bassfacebook. I'm not going to do either. The Studio One Pro v7 upgrade is the last $$$ they're ever going to get from me. Bitwig Studio v5 is proving to be very capable. Time to remove Studio One from my sig.

I still got the same request for a code after redownloading, but after clicking Cancel, the IRs were available!

My cost was 29,66 € in France. I assume that number will constantly change slightly with the varying exchange rate. The bundle is over 70 GB. There were individual downloads for each library, which was kind of a pain. I have a gigabit fiber internet connection. The downloads when into the Downloads folder on my C drive. The instruments went into my Kontakt Instruments folder on my E drive and the downloaded ZIP files went into my Rigid folder on my F backups drive. Extracting the libraries and moving them to E and moving the ZIP files to F took longer than the downloads themselves did. 😄

It's included with the $25 (29,66 € in France) bundle. The serial number appears on the FastSpring download page. I didn't receive an email with the serial number, so I copied it into a Notepad text file for backup. I was able to open the demo project instrument in Kontakt 6, 7 and 8, but got a "Kontakt version too old" error from Kontakt 5.

It was up for me just now. Downloaded and installed. I've got a bunch of ReMatrix IR libs, but didn't have this one. Maybe it's new?

I've had the bundle for years. Awesome "toys"!

I picked up String Machines 2. It looks like an excellent, major upgrade to the original String Machines, which I've been using for years. The 68% discount was nice, especially since it included the 20% VAT!

I am not a fan of Sampletank. I have it installed, but only have my Syntronik 2 Max instruments available. At this price, I couldn't see any reason not to pick up all of the Sampletank 4 instruments. It's going to take a LONG time to download and install all of them. My 2 TB Thunderbolt 3 SSD sample drive will be close to maxed out when it's finished. I think I'll move all of my IKM instruments to one of my 2 USB3.2 2 TB drives.

Downloaded and installed. I quickly tested a number of the presets since my dogs are still sleeping, so I can't make a definitive review, but so far, my response is pretty "meh". At least I got more than what I paid for it. 😉

Changes General: An Undo system has been added. Keyboard shortcuts have been added. EZmix 3 can now be used in a fully functional trial mode for 10 days. It is now possible to copy/paste a State between different EZmix 3 instances in a DAW. 125% scale should look sharper now (on "low-resolution" screens). The performance of AI Amp Capture presets on stereo channels should be a bit better now. "Show Tuner" has been added to the View menu. "Next Preset" and "Previous Preset" in the Edit menu have been renamed. Quick Start: Orchestral templates have been added. Some templates have been renamed, for example "Auto-Mastering" to "AI-Assisted.". When a template is loaded and the window is so small that the Preset List is in its own tab, the Preset List tab gets selected now instead of the Similarity Map tab. Loading a template no longer makes the Preset List be sorted by Similarity. Rack: New background images have been added for metal kit parts (snare, kick, etc.). Effect Controls: "Analyze Track" audio capturing will now pause less because of silent input – a longer period of not loud enough input is required for the capturing to pause. "Clear Analyzed Track" has been added to the menu for the current preset. It does not change any of the current preset settings (but selecting the same preset again will most likely yield a different result, provided that it is an AI-assisted preset). "Save as User Preset" and "Rename" now open a dialog where the user preset can be named. "Delete" for a user preset now opens a confirmation dialog. Preset List: The preset list is now accessible to screen readers. Filters: Selectable rows are now always sorted above unselectable/disabled rows in the filter columns. Selected filter rows are now orange instead of gray. The filter columns are now accessible to screen readers. Similarity Map: The preset points are generally sharper now, especially when you zoom in. If a filter is active and less than 250 presets are selectable, those preset points are larger now. "Reset Zoom And Orientation" has been added to the View menu. Settings: A "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab has been added. The Settings dialog can now be closed with Esc. Standalone: At startup, a dialog will appear if there is no input or output device. Bug Fixes General: In some hosts, changing a track with EZmix 3 from mono to stereo did not work well – it could cause a very loud sound in one channel. Having a captured/analyzed track for AI-Assisted presets and then changing the sample rate could yield bad results when other AI-Assisted presets were selected afterwards. AI Amp Capture presets could sometimes produce an unintended bitcrushed sound at buffer sizes 64 and lower (and mainly with sample rate 44.1 kHz). AI Amp Capture presets could potentially produce unwanted click sounds – if you played something very loud, paused and then played something much more silent. Changing from one AI Amp Capture preset to another could potentially cause a crash. Modal dialogs should no longer prevent interaction in other EZmix 3 instances in a DAW. Various accessibility fixes have been made for improved screen reader support (but it is a work in progress). Effect Controls: Canceling "Reanalyze Audio" should now keep the previous state of the preset. Alt-click (Mac) / Ctrl-click (PC) on the "Out" value did not reset it to the preset's default but always to 0. "In" and "Mix" are no longer possible to reset to default when their locks are on. The Gain Reduction peak value should be more accurate now and not miss any peaks. Filters: If a preset pack was marked as excluded, selecting another pack for inclusion did not work as expected. The "clear all filters" button is now gray instead of orange when no filter is active but there are inactive ones (i.e., when there are only gray filter chips, not counting "Favorites" and "User Presets"). Similarity Map: Zooming in much when using a large GUI scale could cause a crash on Mac.