MAGIX/Producerplanet weekend wannabe - Across the board discounts on soundpools and MMM

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

2 minutes ago, kitekrazy said:

The Humble Bundle deal blows these away.   I've gotten away from wav only sample packs. Soundpool has stupid licensing which very few who create loops do. 

 

Thanks for the suggestion. Over the years I've already purchased quite a few loop bundles, from Humble, Fanatical, Cymatics, Ghosthack, etc. It's not the right comparison however. Soundpools aren't plain loop collections. They are loops arranged in keyed pitch collections, with metadata. My primary use case for soundpools is using them in MMM's Songmaker/Songmaker AI. I've tried, really tried to make soundpools out of regular loop collections. I even wrote a guide (several pages long) about soundpool structure and metadata, for other people trying to make their own custom soundpools.

The issue is that a vast majority of commercial loops don't provide these keyed multi-pitch collections. Creating a new soundpool by merging and recombining existing soundpools is moderately simple but, if you have to generate a keyed pitch collection out of a wav (or midi) loop by doing harmonic pitch shifts, then it is not that simple anymore and it takes quite a bit of processing and time. If you can do the pitch changes at the midi level (with the right virtual synth) the results may sound good (note that even from MIDI data it will still take a significant amount of work to generate the soundpool) but, if you need to do large harmonic pitch shifts on a wav loop the results are often unsatisfactory.

For use cases where you just want simple loops, the keyed pitch collections will actually be a disadvantage. The "700 loops" in a soundpool will become just a hundred loops for this purpose, making it a small library. If you want to use e.g. F# for your song key, which is not your soundpool key, you will end up with the annoyance of pitch shifts anyway. Yes, for these other use cases you're probably better off with other loop providers.

I agree, their licensing of Soundpools has plenty of stupid decisions baked in. Default to non-commercial.  Don't let you customize your own default. Continually steer you towards the non-commercial options. Don't let you easily see if the licensing of what you're using is commercial or non-commercial. Including non-commercial soundpools when you buy another product, without warning you what it is you'll get (the kind of misleading advertisement that makes you want to sue them). It is very annoying.

On the other hand, the commercial license (which is what I buy and what I usually post the links to) is pretty standard

[chris.r]

Hey Eusebio, I still have one voucher from humble bundle deal, I think it was a "creative universe" or something like that, and the expiry on year-end is coming close. Any idea what to spend it on, assuming I'm only interested in commercial licenses? Thx.

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

5 hours ago, chris.r said:

Hey Eusebio, I still have one voucher from humble bundle deal, I think it was a "creative universe" or something like that, and the expiry on year-end is coming close. Any idea what to spend it on, assuming I'm only interested in commercial licenses? Thx.

Sounds like you probably have 1 Voucher for Soundpools from Hip Hop, Soul/R&B and Funk for $9.99. Your Humble account should have your purchase history

(note to mods: the voucher code in the screenshot is already used up and cannot be used again, that's why I haven't blurred it)

If this is the case, you want to log on to producerplanet.com, go to the page with all the loops, then apply filters for Brand: MAGIX and Genres: Hip Hop, Soul/R&B and Funk, and sort by price. You can also click on this  link with the filters and sort applied

https://producerplanet.com/us/audio/loops-samples-250/?categoryId[]=298&categoryId[]=299&categoryId[]=301&label[]=magix&sort=price_desc

The price shown on the search page is for non-commercial, which is the annoying/confusing part, but just pick whichever one sounds better and is less than $5, either  from the large soundpools ($4.59 shown/$9.19 commercial) or the bundles of 2-part soundpools, ($4.13 shown/$8.27 commercial). Even though the bundles are slightly cheaper, in practice the number of loops is more or less in the same range as the others, my recommendation is to listen to the previews and choose the one that inspires you most, without paying much attention to the price difference.

If you got a larger bundle and the voucher that you have left is a $19.99 then you want to pick one of the collections ($9.19 shown/$18.39 commercial)

Important reminder: There is no "shopping cart" and you can buy only one product at a time. Any unused portion of the voucher is lost (and, unless it's one of the 2-part bundles  it's not possible getting 2 smaller soundpools and using 1 voucher to get both for free)

Note: Sometimes the website has tagging mistakes and you'll get an error indicating that the voucher cannot be applied. If that happens, contact MAGIX support. They seem to be short-staffed and can be slow but, in my experience, they really do their best to fix things for customers

[chris.r]

Ah yes, the ticket...  your link should do it.

Thanks a lot, this is very very helpful, appreciate!

[JT music]

Magix is a company not recommended at all, it has a non-existent personalized support service, you can't get in touch directly with anyone other than a ridiculous automated support system of printed questions and answers, you can't get commercial advice before you want to make a purchase, a non-existent personalized treatment that the only thing it provides is distrust when wanting to buy, it may be a very large company and many years old which does not make it clear that they are not market leaders and all that is a product of their wrong and horrendous commercial tactics.

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

Support may take time but, for MMM and soundpools I have had no issues contacting a real person. I log in to my personal service area and use https://www.magix.info/us/support/form/

[JT music]

1 hour ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

Support may take time but, for MMM and soundpools I have had no issues contacting a real person. I log in to my personal service area and use https://www.magix.info/us/support/form/

Well, I already think that you will have had no problem being attended by a person in real time if you are surely part of the company, magix has a lamentable customer service and it is demonstrated in the customer forums themselves that do not stop complaining about such deplorable customer service, or at least I personally did not have it.

[Technostica]

I have found them to be fairly quick to respond when I sold some licences and also when I had a pre purchase query.
I haven't needed to contact support though.