Which freebies (and near-freebies) encouraged you to buy a paid product?

[chris.r]

Many free and paid Kontakt libraries made me buy (crossgrade) Kontakt full version. Does that count?  

[Jeremy Oakes]

Yep, Melda did it for me. Funnily enough Mr Krupa, my go to Compressor is MCompressor from the  bundle. Nice piece of kit.

J

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

5 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

18 hours ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

The top of my list is Magix Music Maker.

I'm surprised by this.  I seem to have plenty of these versions and never installed them.

For me, the Song Maker feature in MMM, coupled with a good palette of soundpools has a very high entertainment value. Soundpools are expensive at full price but, through Humblebundle, Fanatical, soundpool DVDs from eBay, etc., they end up around $2 on average

[Starship Krupa]

6 hours ago, dubdisciple said:

treating it as a synth patch for pop/EDM\Lo-fi and various other genres is another story.

This. I, like @msmcleod, use it as a writing/arranging tool, and I also use it in this way, as a "guitarish" sound for EDM. Like the Solina/ARP string ensemble, the Mellotron, and "brass" patches on synths, it falls short of its (presumably) intended mark, but has a sound all its own that's useful. In "note" mode, they're good single note pluck sounds.

Not useful enough to trigger an upsell to the full verson, but one of my Humble Bundle soundpacks was "Pop Rocks," and I've figured out how to use the Strum soundpacks in Player.

Quote

Funnily enough Mr Krupa, my go to Compressor is MCompressor from the  bundle. Nice piece of kit.

Although my go-to is now elysia mpressor, I still use MCompressor for basic things like sidechaining. It has HP and LP filters for its sidechain (as well as a more complex EQ if you want to use it), which makes it great for sidechaining drum loops and stereo-only drum machines. I dug deeper into it and found that you can draw your own compression curves, like turn it into an expander. Freebie or not, it's one of the most versatile compressors out there.

Edited January 16, 2022 by Starship Krupa

[Byron Dickens]

I forgot to mention Voltage Modular. I started out with Ignite to play around a little. I got the MS Vintage and Vintage Voice bundles when they were on sale b/c I thought it would be cool to build virtual Eurorack versions of the Korg MS20 and ARP 2600/Odyssey. 

Not long after that, I saw I could get Ignite for $25. No-brainer! Not long after that, I saw I could get Core for another $25! Another No-brainer! With a few other modules, I might be $100 into this thing altogether.

[sarine]

It looks like I'm the odd one out with regard to how I got pulled into the Meldaverse. I hadn't used their free plugins before I stumbled upon the MSoundFactory intro offer and started digging what that thing was all about. Something about Vojtech's methodology and design philosophy resonated with me. I also like his contentiousness (I could be in the minority in this regard too, as I'm quite fond of his "trash talking"). MTurboReverb and MDrummer were next, and I was now also using his free plugins (I still do although I have all their stuff).

MDrummer is one that I hate to hate, as the pattern triggering is just broken. I could export the pattern MIDI into the DAW but that just wrecks the whole organization and workflow that was concentrated into the plugin which I had already grown accustomed to, and if I have to depart from that then I might as well look at other options for my beatmaking. My wet dream is Steinberg salvaging Acid from MAGIX and integrating it with/into Cubase/Nuendo.

[kitekrazy]

18 hours ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

For me, the Song Maker feature in MMM, coupled with a good palette of soundpools has a very high entertainment value. Soundpools are expensive at full price but, through Humblebundle, Fanatical, soundpool DVDs from eBay, etc., they end up around $2 on average

So does this program work like Acid.

Sad that they crippled Samplitude Studio,

[kitekrazy]

 I'd say IK leads the league. There's also PA and Waves.

[abacab]

Free: AAS Player; Ample Bass P Lite; Arturia Filter MINI; Cherry Audio Voltage Modular Nucleus; IK SampleTank 3 CS; iZotope Elements;  NI Kontakt Player; Spitfire BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover; PreSonus Studio One Prime; Soundpaint; Synthmaster Player; Tone2 Firebird; Tracktion Free; UJAM VG Sparkle; u-he Zebralette; Vital; Waves.

Almost Free: AIR Xpand!2 ($1).

Bundled: Arturia Piano V; XLN Audio AD2.

[Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann]

4 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

So does this program work like Acid?

Yes and no... It is loop-oriented like Acid, and MMM can load acid loops, but MMM is oriented towards using soundpools, which are quite different from typical acid libraries and loop libraries in general.

All the loops in the soundpool (with the exception of drums and some effects/adlibs/solos)  are provided in 7 variations corresponding to scale degrees, nearly always CdeFGa plus a 7th (a# or b. I haven't seen any soundpools using the "correct" bdim). The loop variations sometimes have small divergences and aren't just pitch shifts

MMM has a "pitch bar" that allows changing sections across multiple tracks to a different scale degree. What I like about MMM is this "vertical dimension" that better enables me to think about the song in terms of scale degrees, and it is also the building block for the Song Maker feature that uses a template for the vertical dimension (song structure) and "intelligently" randomizes which loops are used from the soundpools. Unfortunately MMM is not a good DAW in other respects (plugin management, etc) and it is a little unstable for  long sessions. My workflow is to first use MMM for generating tracks that I then export, and process in another DAW

 

Edited January 16, 2022 by Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

[sarine]

17 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

So does this program work like Acid.

For the uninitiated, he means something like this:

 

Edited January 17, 2022 by sarine

[Starship Krupa]

11 hours ago, sarine said:

Something about Vojtech's methodology and design philosophy resonated with me. I also like his contentiousness (I could be in the minority in this regard too, as I'm quite fond of his "trash talking"). MTurboReverb and MDrummer were next, and I was now also using his free plugins (I still do although I have all their stuff).

In agreement with all of the above (except not a fan of MDrummer, I tried the lite version and it just wasn't for me). I got MTurboReverble in the Essential bundle, and it's the only reverb I've tried that can touch the Exponential ones, Phoenix and Nimbus. I could happily mix and master using only my Meldaproduction FX, no compromises.

I think his stuff appeals to a certain type of person who appreciates great engineering and a sense of excellence. Also those who agree with him that there is no need for modern software FX to be constrained by the limitations of vintage hardware. Not that his stuff doesn't sound great, it certainly does in most cases. Once I realized what he was doing with the core and shared modular code, I was hooked. I've never seen anything like it. He can make an improvement that propagates to the entire line of over 100 plug-ins without having to touch the code that's unique to each of them. It's the way that every developer should be doing it, but he's one of the few, and the only one doing it at such a scale. And it's all bug-free IME. For stuff that gets new features as often as his does, this is amazing.

The depth of the products, you could take just one of them and spend a week figuring out all of the under the hood stuff with modulators and multiparameters. And of course you don't need to do that to get perfectly good use out of them.

I also dig his personality, he's a character, and dedicated to his own way of doing things. The fact that he's personally engaged with the user base is great, and I'm charmed by the way he'll tell someone who makes a feature request "I don't really have the time to do that, maybe in the future," then said feature shows up in the very next release. I was the beneficiary of exactly that when I requested a tap tempo for MMetronome. Yes, he added a feature to one of the FreeFX Bundle plug-ins by request.

He's had some blind spots, but seems to be moving past some of them, if the new pretty device graphics in the Turbo FX are an indication. I've hammered him about my frustration with the documentation, even suggested that he set up some way to have user-contributed tutorials and cheat sheets, but still no go. He said that he doesn't have time to teach someone about compressors, to which I said, fair enough, but what about your FX that are unique and that people can't be expected to already understand? I have MDrumLeveler, for instance, and I'm sure that it could be more useful if I understood how it's supposed to be used.

[Joakim]

Softube saturation knob, echoboy jr., Arturia plate, Kilohearts snap heap, 

[sarine]

47 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I think his stuff appeals to a certain type of person who appreciates great engineering and a sense of excellence.

[ ... ]

Once I realized what he was doing with the core and shared modular code, I was hooked. I've never seen anything like it. He can make an improvement that propagates to the entire line of over 100 plug-ins without having to touch the code that's unique to each of them.

[ ... ]

The depth of the products, you could take just one of them and spend a week figuring out all of the under the hood stuff with modulators and multiparameters. And of course you don't need to do that to get perfectly good use out of them.

[ ... ]

I also dig his personality, he's a character, and dedicated to his own way of doing things.

A hundred times this.

To build and maintain such a codebase requires certain demanding personality traits, dedication and immense self-discipline (besides the obvious intelligence, but many garbage-coders have that and sometimes intelligence and creativity are just there to facilitate and excel at laziness). I like that he's been at it for 15 years or something, and still pushing forward with enthusiasm, it makes me feel good about investing in him. Also goes to show what one determined individual can achieve when there's no team to argue with and no boss to impress.