Reid Rosefelt

When I got this a month ago it came with three free preset packs--Particles, Graphite, and Glo. I just looked and now there is a fourth one, Breeze. They say they will keep doing this. These free preset packs are as good or better as the ones that other companies charge bux for. Like the paid Output presets, they only use the onboard sounds. So far, they have only one paid preset pack, Air, which comes with sounds of its own. It lists for $49. During the holidays there was a deal on Cube and Air for $115. I picked the package up at Time+Space when they had one of those 15% off sales. Just a tip for everybody, because Air is nice, and if this price came before, it will return, and maybe by then there will be a package with more than one paid preset packs. Cube is one of my very favorite purchases from 2021.

1) Because this site. or anything done by a computer. will NEVER come close to replacing what Larry does. It is just a supplement, like my Tiger the Frog post was every November. It's not going to be as comprehensive or accurate or timely. Larry doesn't scrape twice a day--he posts instantly. Anybody who has ever tried to post something before him knows what I'm talking about. ? There's never been anything wrong with having other sites out there, like @Batwaffel at Reddit, KVR, Rekkerd, Sample Library Review, etc. Who cares? Use them if you want. Or don't. 2) Getting things organized in categories and alphabetized is useful, as my TTF posts prove. Getting a ticker-tape of deals as they happen, has its advantages, but its disadvantages too. A list that sticks is simply different. 3) Having a history of prices would be very nice. It's the one reason why people go back to my TTF posts all year round--to find out what the Black Friday prices were. Imagine what a true history over many years would be like as you are contemplating whether a sales price is a good one. That would have been so helpful for me when I was starting out. 4) Larry doesn't really want to be paid. I have repeatedly sent him notes offering help showing him how to monetize this. Aside from asking for some "coffees" for the first time last year, he has a passion to do this free for the community. He sees all of us as family. That's who he is. And that's why he's irreplaceable. It's ridiculous to think that a bot can offer anything like that. We know him and we care about what he says. I ask you, "Can a bot be pissed off at IK?" ?I think not.

Thanks, Christian! This was the first time I've found a way to use Blue in an actual finished piece. ( I've used Realitone's Ladies.)To be honest, my main use up until this piece was to have Blue sing rude things to amuse me and my wife. Blue is so off my normal workflow that it was a sudden inspiration that came in late: "Why don't I see what Realitone Blue" can do for this?" She is not designed to sing any lyrics you want like a Vocaloid or Synthesizer V or Emvoice or anything like that. She can only make limited sounds. But Blue can sing "Beh" and Blue can sing "Tee" Those sounds are on the short list of what she is able to do. The issue is whether people hear that--some apparently do, some apparently don't. For me the issue is that she doesn't sound like a real singer. Close. As you say, I can get away with it because the video is about a Bettie. Or is realism an issue? Some "real singers" are so autotuned nowadays that they sound more machine-like than Blue does.

Really? Scraping the internet with bots? I'm not aware of any of them. I'm curious about this history. Everything I've seen so far has been collected by human hands, like Larry, @Batwaffel, Don Bodin, rekkerd, etc.

There's a guy who's in the process of building a website that will scrape some of the deal information off of the main music websites and assemble the deals in one place. It's sortable: by company, category, subcategory and discount. You can also click the words "grid list" at the top and see a different way of displaying the data. This is not the kind of thing that could ever put a dent in what Larry does. To start with, he's not looking to track everything. And secondly, the computer bot scraping the web doesn't know what it's scraping, so there may be ridiculous results unless it is moderated. But if it works, it will be a useful supplement to Larry, and a big competition for people who only list the main stuff. The cool thing about it --assuming it will work--is that it will track the history of music software deals. After a few years, it could be very useful https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/ Don't get hung up on whether it works perfectly or not. It seems like he just started putting it together recently and it currently is a work-in-progress to show how it may work. Although some of it already does work. He started a post in VI:Control to get suggestions from people about what they would like in a site like this. https://vi-control.net/community/threads/im-building-an-automated-platform-that-lists-all-music-software-deals-in-one-place-with-price-history.119796/ What do you think? If you have suggestions about it, now is the time to go to VI:Control and chime in.

I think this may be the best price so far. The first I heard of it, it was 59 euros at VSTBuzz or about $67 And then over BF it was 49 euros or $55 And now it's $40

I'm intrigued by Emvoice, but I do worry about the price drops. If the company goes under then the software no longer works. The downside of Emvoice is that you only license voices. The program is in the cloud. The upside is that there are free updates forever. The only thing you pay for would be new voices. Black Friday 2020 $139 per voice Black Friday 2021 $119 Earlier this year $99 Now $59 Even if it goes lower, $59 seems like a very fair price. For the BF 2020 price for one voice you can now get two voices. if it's as good as the demos. I'm going to download the demo, and decide for myself, although I read somewhere that it wasn't available anymore. Hopefully $59 will be the sweet spot and a lot of people may jump. I have a video planned where I could really use this, so I am likely to be one of them.

Then you already have it! ? With the update, I will have the user interface in the one you bought. As far as I know,the new Guzheng is the same as the old one aside from a different UI and the fact that the Guzheng now has NKS.

@Zo Thanks! I will get to these soon.

This is a gear-oriented forum, so that makes sense . And maybe they didn’t like it! ? That’s okay. I’m just trying to work on musical video projects every day and finish them all. The important thing is the learning. I try to do a good job but I have no idea what the response will be. I don’t know about all of you, but when I buy something, I don’t always make music with it. I think one problem I’ll never be able to fix is mastering. I listened to this on different speakers and headphones. All sounded decent, although the Beyerdynamic phones made it sound much better. But then I tried earbuds. Awful and totally unlistenable. ? And people use them a lot. I also have to say that Sonarworks is not working for me. Going from phones to speakers, I find I’m better off without it.

I've been playing with it in my DAW for a long time, but when I tried to record, nothing happened. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but for me it was like Addictive Drums. You have to generate MIDI patterns and drag them into the tracks. Anyway, I prefer the control I get from having MIDI patterns and wavs over live play anyway.

Interesting. I figured there must be a lot of ways to use XO, but I just settled on exporting wavs so I could get going. On the export page, you can export MIDI too. Basically I settled into the method of exporting composite wavs to do my arrangement. And then when I was done with that, I exported stems This allowed me to take elements in the stems in and out as the piece developed. Often what I did was that I heard something I liked in one of the stems, so I redid it myself with another percussion instrument. So in retrospect, maybe I should have used MIDI stems. I'll try that next time. Or a combination of stems and wavs. It gets VERY complicated when you're using your own sounds and not just the presets. You have to remember which folders you checked. But while I enjoy playing XO live, I think outputting stuff is a better technique for me when I sit down to actually finish a piece.

This is a really intimidating title for a contest. You need a LOT of confidence to enter this.

Here's my new video. I was trying to make music out of my comfort zone. I've fooled around with XO, but never actually finished any music with it. Turns out you can't play it into your DAW, you have to output wavs. The cool thing is that you can output out all the stems. And because it's XO, I didn't just use Delhia de France's sounds like loops--I was able to put all these noises I've collected into the drum parts. But definitely XO and de France got this project started. Once I saw Bettie dancing to her beats, it was a go. I thought it was worth a shot to try to get Realitone Blue to sing "Beh-tee," and I think it worked out pretty well. It's hard for me to think of this piece without it. At the end, I even have two Blues singing harmony. But the best thing (as with my previous video) is Evolution Series' Brontë. This is such a cool VI. I expect I'll be using it a lot. I think it kicks the ***** of the competition. So beautiful. I wondered if I would ever get round to using Boz Digital's El Clapo and Das Boot, but they are in this too. There's a few bars of Butch Vig at the beginning too. I did think for a while about making this a binaural mix, but I decided it was too complicated for that. But my experience with binaural led me to make this kind of nutzo spacially.

Wow!

https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/4409561018258?fbclid=IwAR0C626P2_1HBG3kgwCLBUiGJsSqR9etv_26wK-jiSZL7qSGq8JdU6H9pKs Another reason to buy Unify. I apologize if somebody already posted this...

And they have a competition. https://www.spitfireaudio.com/haunted-house-scoring-competition/ This is the first Spitfire competition that I'm going to "enter." ? Coincidentally, I had decided to make my next video composition on a horror/atmospheric theme. I've been looking at old public domain films on the Internet Archive to score.. So I might as well spring for the 29 bucks (they got me!) and try this. It will just be something to put up on my YouTube channel, and maybe being in the contest will get me a few more views.

I think they need the summer to bring out more libraries to go into Komplete 14.

Deleted. Drugs addled my mind ?

I think Ben is fine. He lives modestly in St Paul, Minnesota, not New York or LA. He was a student when he started putting out libraries. Now he's a teacher. He records these instruments in a room at home, i think. He's the performer, recorder, and coder. So I would say he keeps his costs down. ? And if you compare his stuff to other things on Loot, I wouldn't call them especially cheap. I own most of them but I don't own them all and I wish I did. I've never understood why he doesn't put up his own website and keep all the money. But I guess he doesn't want the hassle of people calling him all the time when their download doesn't go right. But I agree with you. Having an instrument with NI is going to do wonders for his career. Countless more people will discover his talent and they're going to buy his other stuff.

FYI, the next Ben Osterhouse library, Pathfinder Cello, will be a Native Instruments product. So it will be NKS and Kontakt Player and you'll be able to get it this August/September as part of one of the versions of Komplete 14. Probably Ultimate or CE. It was supposed to come out on January 1st, but Ben said in VI:Control that they're still working on it. It always takes more time to get stuff through NI. I was asked to beta test it, but doing so for NI means actually writing music with it. Too much of an ask while I was going nuts being Tiger the Frog. Too bad, I would have done it if the request had come up at a different time. @Simeon Amburgey and I got to know Ben when he came on our podcast. I bet he beta tested it, but can't talk about it. ? It will no doubt be released with some kind of intro price, so that the vouchers won't work. ?

If anybody's interested, here's Ann-Kathrin Dern's video:

Sorry, Larry. I should learn to read. And I may take advantage of this offer now that I understand it. Anyway, maybe somebody would be interested in what I said about the phones.

I hate to say it, but $149 is the regular price for a the DT 770 PRO 80 ohms. I know because I shopped for awhile and that's the price today at Amazon. I don't know about the other headphones. However, I was able to buy a pair for $140 during Black Friday. I remember somebody posting an announcement here where they were less than that. That said, I really recommend these headphones. The 770 has changed my life. I'm mad I never bought a decent pair of phones before . The difference between these and my old CB-1s is truly night and day. I may end up buying a second pair when there is the kind of sale where they reduce the price. ? FYI, the 770 is closed, the 990 is open, and then there is the 880 (not on sale here) which is kind of in the middle, and that's the one Ann-Kathrin Dern uses (along with her Sennheiser). You don't have to spend a fortune to get something that is really super-comfortable and sounds great. What I like about these phones is that they give you a clear picture in your mind between all the different instruments. It's uncanny It really sculpts them out. So when I mixed my first binaural track, it sounded awesome. Then I listened to it on my CB-1s and it was mud. You would never notice that it wasn't good if you didn't hear the same thing on the Beyerdynamics. I had to revise my mix and try to find a middle ground.

I sang with all the bands I was in as a lead guitarist during my teens, and for a year or two I even was the lead singer in a band and didn't have to play. But now... not so good. A few years ago I had a friend sing one of my songs, as he has a much better voice. It took forever. He didn't sing it the way I heard it in my head so I made him do take after take and then I did a lot of cutting and pasting. The lesson I took from that is that I have to do the vocals myself and fix them as best I can. But I do stare at Emvoice a lot. I'm really curious about it. I have too many toys to play with, but it looks like it would be fun to have it sing silly things. A hundred bucks isn't bad for a girl singer, even one that sounds a bit like a machine.