29 Things To Stop Buying in 2021

[kitekrazy]

https://alltimelists.com/29-things-to-stop-buying-in-2021/?view-all&fbclid=IwAR0c27tr0jS6-z54PZs11slvuRO1k1pked8-7279iQhrZrpDKCDysZRs5UI

 

Not DAW related but there are probably 21 things to stop buying in the DAW world.

1. EQs -  I've seen known producers who do tutorials and more often they are using built in EQs.

2. Orchestra libraries - if you do this as a hobby like who cares what sounds you use?

 

[Shane_B.]

There's a few I disagree with, but the biggie is the gym membership.

They shut ours down when things were "bad". Then opened them up and things got "worse". Yet not a single person at our gym, the neighboring gyms, or any I ever heard about came down with it, spread it, or had any symptoms. I'd venture to say people who go to the gym are at far less risk. They're healthier in general and gyms are not sanitary by nature so you build up your immune system just by being there and fighting off all the things that gather on the equipment and flooring.

I can't believe streaming services weren't on his list. They're all going up in price. Netflix and one of the services I subscribe to through Prime just went up. I just got high speed net so I can finally stream, but the novelty is wearing off. Probably going to ditch Netflix soon especially since the price hike.

Edit: I just realized he did address streaming services. Don't know how I missed that in my first readthrough. Getting old I guess. 

Edited January 25, 2021 by Shane_B.

[Shane_B.]

The one about hand sanitizers is true. My wife is an engineer and interviewed at one of the big companies that produce them a long time ago. It's a marketing tactic. There is no difference between sanitizer and regular soap. Same stuff, different bottle.

[craigb]

More than one is dead wrong, but who seems to care anymore?

IBTL! ?

[kitekrazy]

22 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

There's a few I disagree with, but the biggie is the gym membership.

They shut ours down when things were "bad". Then opened them up and things got "worse". Yet not a single person at our gym, the neighboring gyms, or any I ever heard about came down with it, spread it, or had any symptoms. I'd venture to say people who go to the gym are at far less risk. They're healthier in general and gyms are not sanitary by nature so you build up your immune system just by being there and fighting off all the things that gather on the equipment and flooring.

I can't believe streaming services weren't on his list. They're all going up in price. Netflix and one of the services I subscribe to through Prime just went up. I just got high speed net so I can finally stream, but the novelty is wearing off. Probably going to ditch Netflix soon especially since the price hike.

Edit: I just realized he did address streaming services. Don't know how I missed that in my first readthrough. Getting old I guess. 

 I wouldn't like wearing a mask in a gym.  At one time many gyms were not affordable.

[kitekrazy]

19 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

The one about hand sanitizers is true. My wife is an engineer and interviewed at one of the big companies that produce them a long time ago. It's a marketing tactic. There is no difference between sanitizer and regular soap. Same stuff, different bottle.

 I came from a generation that was exposed to more germs.  I never buy antibacterial products either.

[Shane_B.]

Prime seems to be the way to go imo. You get free shipping on most stuff, tons of free music, over 10K movies, and you can add movie channels at a fraction of what Netflix is. I subscribe to Shudder through Prime. It's a horror movie channel that's bringing back the 80's horror scene. They took over the Creepshow Series, Joe Bob Briggs Drive In Movies, and others.

Edited January 25, 2021 by Shane_B.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

3 - Yet another LA2A, LN1176, Fairchild 660/670, VariMu compressor emulator that claims to be the dog's balls. There's probably more emulations or those than particles in the known universe and they're all the same thing with a new face on. Flour from the same batch on different packaging and names.

4 - Sample Packs. You never use them, you don't even know what's in them. When you need them, you end up using the one that's close enough and easier to find, since you have no patience to comb trough thousands of slight different samples of the same kick, snare and so son.

5 - Subtractive Synthesizers. How many more Minimoog emulations do you need? Can you even tell them apart

[Starise]

1 hour ago, Paul Young said:

https://alltimelists.com/29-things-to-stop-buying-in-2021/?view-all&fbclid=IwAR0c27tr0jS6-z54PZs11slvuRO1k1pked8-7279iQhrZrpDKCDysZRs5UI

 

Not DAW related but there are probably 21 things to stop buying in the DAW world.

1. EQs -  I've seen known producers who do tutorials and more often they are using built in EQs.

2. Orchestra libraries - if you do this as a hobby like who cares what sounds you use?

 

My suggestion on EQs, compressors, limiters: If you want to step up get just one or two good ones. No need to go round' buying them like candy. If I want a good EQ I have Fabfilter Pro Q. The GUI and controls are amazing. My go to limiter has been McDSP 4L4000 or IK Stealth limiter though Stealth is a little dirty and not as clean as the 4L4000. It all depends. The Cakewalk brickwall limiter is ok on some material. . I don't think the Adaptive Limiter was a part of the new Cakewalk, but I like it as well. I'm not as selective on my compressors. I have way too many of them.

Sometimes the Cakewalk compressor is just fine. Sometimes I'm looking for something a little more selective. How much better are 3rd party plugins than their factory equals? 

Better EQ's have improved filters resulting in a slightly more honed sound. Not that you will always hear the difference, but it's there. I use Melda's Dymanic EQ or Izotope Ozone sometimes when looking for a dynamic EQ.. You can use the Fabfilter EQ as a dynamic.

Have I bought just one or two? No. I have somewhere around 1400 plugins last count. That's why I can tell you it isn't really necessary. Just get a few good ones. 

I think the TRacks plugins are a great value for performance mainly because it's a one time buy unless they add something else to the pak later. Waves has WUP. With TRacks, buy one time and be done with it. Don't get me wrong Waves makes wonderful plugins but when you buy one they charge for updates using WUP. Melda is another great plugin buy if you can get past those GUIs. I never liked them even though I have a few of the plugins. 

On orchestral  libraries;  I thought the violin samples were tinny in one recent library I bought so I decided to try the same samples in several of my other libraries. Guess what? They were all tinny. I almost blamed the library. It's either my hearing or my setup.  Here's the real kicker, during my little experiment I decided to make comparisons of a bunch of instruments across all of my libraries. You would not believe the results. There is no huge difference between many lower end libraries and the more expensive ones depending on the sound and the context. Example- I have the Joshua Bell violin and the Taylor Davis violin. Both are excellent sampled violin libraries with large foot prints. Just for kicks I decided to try a few samples from IK's Miroslav Philharmonic 2 which isn't thought to be very good compared to the likes of Spitfire and Vienna. I came across one solo violin with  really nice vibrato sound . Would work great in a mix. The kicker? I looked and it's 8.1 mb. That's right 8.1mb. Wow. In this case it would have worked just as well as the JB with less programming hassle. Same thing happened with string sections in Amadeus. I compared it to  Spitfire's CORE violins. I had a tough time telling the difference. Amadeus is somewhere around 20gb or less. 

[kitekrazy]

1 hour ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

3 - Yet another LA2A, LN1176, Fairchild 660/670, VariMu compressor emulator that claims to be the dog's balls. There's probably more emulations or those than particles in the known universe and they're all the same thing with a new face on. Flour from the same batch on different packaging and names.

4 - Sample Packs. You never use them, you don't even know what's in them. When you need them, you end up using the one that's close enough and easier to find, since you have no patience to comb trough thousands of slight different samples of the same kick, snare and so son.

5 - Subtractive Synthesizers. How many more Minimoog emulations do you need? Can you even tell them apart

That was/is a bad habit for me.  I'm now turned off by bloat.  I avoid them if there are no midis.  I had over 100GB from one producer. I started to delete all of the wav files, kept the mix files, but converted those to mp3 just in case I wanted to duplicate it.

[kitekrazy]

26 minutes ago, Starise said:

My suggestion on EQs, compressors, limiters: If you want to step up get just one or two good ones. No need to go round' buying them like candy. If I want a good EQ I have Fabfilter Pro Q. The GUI and controls are amazing. My go to limiter has been McDSP 4L4000 or IK Stealth limiter though Stealth is a little dirty and not as clean as the 4L4000. It all depends. The Cakewalk brickwall limiter is ok on some material. . I don't think the Adaptive Limiter was a part of the new Cakewalk, but I like it as well. I'm not as selective on my compressors. I have way too many of them.

Sometimes the Cakewalk compressor is just fine. Sometimes I'm looking for something a little more selective. How much better are 3rd party plugins than their factory equals? 

Better EQ's have improved filters resulting in a slightly more honed sound. Not that you will always hear the difference, but it's there. I use Melda's Dymanic EQ or Izotope Ozone sometimes when looking for a dynamic EQ.. You can use the Fabfilter EQ as a dynamic.

Have I bought just one or two? No. I have somewhere around 1400 plugins last count. That's why I can tell you it isn't really necessary. Just get a few good ones. 

I think the TRacks plugins are a great value for performance mainly because it's a one time buy unless they add something else to the pak later. Waves has WUP. With TRacks, buy one time and be done with it. Don't get me wrong Waves makes wonderful plugins but when you buy one they charge for updates using WUP. Melda is another great plugin buy if you can get past those GUIs. I never liked them even though I have a few of the plugins. 

On orchestral  libraries;  I thought the violin samples were tinny in one recent library I bought so I decided to try the same samples in several of my other libraries. Guess what? They were all tinny. I almost blamed the library. It's either my hearing or my setup.  Here's the real kicker, during my little experiment I decided to make comparisons of a bunch of instruments across all of my libraries. You would not believe the results. There is no huge difference between many lower end libraries and the more expensive ones depending on the sound and the context. Example- I have the Joshua Bell violin and the Taylor Davis violin. Both are excellent sampled violin libraries with large foot prints. Just for kicks I decided to try a few samples from IK's Miroslav Philharmonic 2 which isn't thought to be very good compared to the likes of Spitfire and Vienna. I came across one solo violin with  really nice vibrato sound . Would work great in a mix. The kicker? I looked and it's 8.1 mb. That's right 8.1mb. Wow. In this case it would have worked just as well as the JB with less programming hassle. Same thing happened with string sections in Amadeus. I compared it to  Spitfire's CORE violins. I had a tough time telling the difference. Amadeus is somewhere around 20gb or less. 

I never buy solo string libraries because to make them really work you need to have a good understanding of how the instrument work.  The are far more articulations for strings than winds. 

From tutorials I've seen stuff like Fabfilter, Izotope is used to polish up.  

I think that Spitfire BBC Discover demonstrates that size does not always equal quality. It sounds great for a 300mb library.

[bayoubill]

All 3rd party plugins including free ones 

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

1 hour ago, Starise said:

My suggestion on EQs, compressors, limiters: If you want to step up get just one or two good ones. No need to go round' buying them like candy. If I want a good EQ I have Fabfilter Pro Q. The GUI and controls are amazing. My go to limiter has been McDSP 4L4000 or IK Stealth limiter though Stealth is a little dirty and not as clean as the 4L4000. It all depends. The Cakewalk brickwall limiter is ok on some material. . I don't think the Adaptive Limiter was a part of the new Cakewalk, but I like it as well. I'm not as selective on my compressors. I have way too many of them.

The issue of dirtyness is something people often complain with the T-Racks plugins. They tend to "print" on the hot side of things. Whether that's by design or to exploit the psychoacoustic effect of "louder sounds better" is anyone's guess.

1 hour ago, Starise said:

Better EQ's have improved filters resulting in a slightly more honed sound. Not that you will always hear the difference, but it's there. I use Melda's Dymanic EQ or Izotope Ozone sometimes when looking for a dynamic EQ.. You can use the Fabfilter EQ as a dynamic.

There's very little, if anything, that Pro Q3 can't do.

1 hour ago, Starise said:

On orchestral  libraries;  I thought the violin samples were tinny in one recent library I bought so I decided to try the same samples in several of my other libraries. Guess what? They were all tinny. I almost blamed the library. It's either my hearing or my setup.  Here's the real kicker, during my little experiment I decided to make comparisons of a bunch of instruments across all of my libraries. You would not believe the results. There is no huge difference between many lower end libraries and the more expensive ones depending on the sound and the context. Example- I have the Joshua Bell violin and the Taylor Davis violin. Both are excellent sampled violin libraries with large foot prints. Just for kicks I decided to try a few samples from IK's Miroslav Philharmonic 2 which isn't thought to be very good compared to the likes of Spitfire and Vienna. I came across one solo violin with  really nice vibrato sound . Would work great in a mix. The kicker? I looked and it's 8.1 mb. That's right 8.1mb. Wow. In this case it would have worked just as well as the JB with less programming hassle. Same thing happened with string sections in Amadeus. I compared it to  Spitfire's CORE violins. I had a tough time telling the difference. Amadeus is somewhere around 20gb or less. 

I believe till this day that orchestral libraries have a personal vendetta against the percussion section. Either you don't have all the instruments, they're poorly represented, don't have all the articulations and so on.

[paulo]

3 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

Probably going to ditch Netflix soon especially since the price hike.

I just did exactly that for the same reason. In the last year they gained something like 30 million new subscribers because of lockdowns and the increase in revenue plus what they didn't spend on making new content led to a very healthy increase in their share price and still they had the cheek to increase prices.

[Wibbles]

MAGA hats.

[Shane_B.]

Quote

My suggestion on EQs, compressors, limiters: If you want to step up get just one or two good ones. No need to go round' buying them like candy.

Better EQ's have improved filters resulting in a slightly more honed sound. Not that you will always hear the difference, but it's there. I use Melda's Dymanic EQ or Izotope Ozone sometimes when looking for a dynamic EQ.. You can use the Fabfilter EQ as a dynamic.

 

+1 on Melda's Auto Dynamic EQ. It's my go to. I was on my original version from when I bought it many years ago. I checked their site a few days ago and it's up to V14.16 now. I downloaded it and it recognized my authorization and I was good to go.

I really like several of their VST's. MAutoVolume is really good and so is MAutoAlign. I've only ever used the demo's but they're only $59 each. I should grab them sometime. I used MAutoVolume for bass and vocals before compression. It fixed my varying levels before they hit the compressor and every compressor I used worked better with a more even signal. Kept me from having to use envelopes to adjust gain.

I also still like the Sonitus stuff. I still use the Comp and Reverb but not so much the EQ anymore.

That said, all the stock stuff in S1 is excellent, particularly the Fat Channel. I couldn't believe it when they introduced it. It has 3 EQ's and Comps using hardware modelling and I can't tell them from the stuff I paid a lot of money for from Softube and Nomad Factory. And zero latency. The only 3rd party stuff I use when in S1 is Melda and iZotope.

Quote

On orchestral  libraries;  I thought the violin samples were tinny in one recent library I bought so I decided to try the same samples in several of my other libraries. Guess what? They were all tinny. 

I've demo'd a few and agree with you. I still go back to the few that came with Dimension Pro and Studio Instrument Strings. They are the only ones I use. I can manipulate them in almost any way I want using PRV in CbB. I still do all of that in CbB and audio in S1. I dread the day I have to set up a new DAW because Dim Pro and Rapture are a nightmare to get running. I still use both regularly. Another thing I use in an unconventional way is Z3TA. You can use it in your FX chain and get some cool results. My best mixes all use those older samples and synths.

And some of the SF2 stuff was great too. There was a web site called Hammersound.org that had tons of SF2's people recorded. The site is still there but all the links are dead. There was some really great stuff there that thankfully I have backed up.

[Shane_B.]

3 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

3 - Yet another LA2A, LN1176, Fairchild 660/670, VariMu compressor emulator that claims to be the dog's balls. There's probably more emulations or those than particles in the known universe and they're all the same thing with a new face on. Flour from the same batch on different packaging and names.

S1 started including the LA2A and LN1176 as well as a Pultec EQ and 1 other EQ I can't recall the name of as well as their own modern comp and eq. The one with square buttons on the face. All using hardware modelling they call State Space. You can also buy other bundles to add to it but I get along fine with the free stuff. I already had all the EQ's and Comp's that are in the Fat Channel that I paid for from Softube and Nomad Factory before they came out with the Fat Channel. But their free stuff is equal in sound quality and better in performance with zero latency.

I mention it because it proves your point. There's only so many variations of these you can have. I never would have bought the ones I did if I knew the FC was coming.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

4 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

S1 started including the LA2A and LN1176 as well as a Pultec EQ and 1 other EQ I can't recall the name of as well as their own modern comp and eq. The one with square buttons on the face.

I think I have those. They were offered for free some time ago. Only issue is that they're for Fat Channel XT and I only have Studio One Artist 2. The EQ with square buttons is most likely the Neve 1073 EQ.

[Tezza]

Non stick frypans, I hate them and they are completely unnecessary but if you go to a shop to buy a frypan, they are all coated with these cancer causing chemicals. I won't use them, just use uncoated skillets and woks which I have to get from special shops. I worked in a Chinese restaurant from about 14 to 18 and that influenced the way I cook. I've always enjoyed cooking whether by myself or for others. With woks, it's about knowing how to treat the wok and with non-coated pans it's about olive oil and heat control. If you use the heat correctly, you won't get sticking.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

13 minutes ago, Tezza said:

Non stick frypans, I hate them and they are completely unnecessary but if you go to a shop to buy a frypan, they are all coated with these cancer causing chemicals. I won't use them, just use uncoated skillets and woks which I have to get from special shops.

Is there a word for the audiophile version of a cook?