The usual brief bit of preable: Wusik Station VSTi, which is a download-only, Windows-only* sample synth. What is a sample synth? Well, I don’t know if anyone has coined the term, but basically it’s any plugin instrument that is a synthesis architecture (Filters, Envelopes, Modulation) but rather than conventionally designed oscillators it uses samples to generate sounds. Think Rapture, SampleTank/SonicSynth, and, I believe, Atmosphere. Sample playback synth, ROMpler, what have you. Anyway, the market is lousy with these things, and many of them are very good.

Wusik station is the primary concern of developer WilliamK, who was first involved in the creation of Eve and running the DashSignature company. When he parted ways, with some rather public dramatics, with the other half of Dash (who I believe primarily created a lot of their other products) he took the Eve design and rebuilt it as WusikStation. From their he is constantly updating, fixing, optimizing the code, and really building it into a machine that works really well, can be used for a wide variety of sounds. Along the way he has flirted, with varrying degrees of success, with different business models, coming to build a subscription based income stream to keep developing and refining the plugin and the WK brand. These days he has begun distributing an online magazine, that includes a lot of sound-content. While I don’t subscribe myself, I’ve gotten a bunch of early issues as add-on from my last upgrade. Most of the content is user generated, and the sounds contain a lot of demos for commercial soundsets, and, honestly, I don’t really read/print out documents unless I really believe I’ll need it (my docket is pretty full). And now the next full-point update is pretty much available when you subscribe; or by upgrading you’re getting a complimentary version of the magazine, depending on how you look at.

As developer, I find WK a little exhausting, and the installer/update routine is tiring, but a digital lo-fi tool WusikStation is pretty hard to beat. He truly listens to his users, kept the architecture open and extensible, and built up a user base of some smart users who generate some great sound tools. While the initial price point is pretty reasonable, it does add up over a while. But it’s still cheaper than a lot of other Kontakt-based products, as well SampleTank. And, unlike SampleTank and a lot of other samble-based instruments, you’re not locked into one particular architecture if you want to develop your sounds elsewhere.

Here’s a YouTube link that demonstrates the basic synth-architecture of whatever current version we’re on now.

*He has a AU version in pre-development. (Which I guess means he just bought a Mac.) Also, I believe there is a purchase option of physical media, i.e. a CD-ROM.

As I’ve written, I am a user who got onboard with digital lo-fi production using some free version of ACID. Since I upgraded to 3.0 Pro at a time when Sonic Foundry was just throwing its products onto the market like it was a fire sale, I got Sound Forge for a cheap price. I also got CDArchitect, the Noise Reduction Bundle and the Batch Converter, all really cheap. So after updating to the first Sony versions, Sound Forge 7, I believe, I swore I was done giving Sony my money. Partially a principled stance for their part in the RIAA, rootkits and DRM disasters, and partially because it seem that what the updates mostly provided were the other parts of the Sonic Foundry IP re-branded and offered as incentive.

I recently relented and upgraded to version 9. Why? Well, apparently I’m not a principled person. Technically, the frustrations of ver. 7 were getting in my way (lack of custom key-bindings, poor plugin performance, various editing limitations), and none of the free alternatives are quite there in terms of interface and flexibility. And there were seemingly some other nice features that it looked like I could use, so I took advantage of the $99 upgrade offer. Already, it’s proved to be worth it.

While performing some edits in Sound Forge 9, I discovered this:

Previously when editing from the Process menu once that model window was open you were limited to its controls, and if you didn’t have the sample you were editing selected just so, you had to cancel out and start again. Or, more likely, undo and then redo. So pulling down the volume of a transient, or dropping a reverb on an ending, usually resulted in clicks at zero crossing of the sample edit region or one sample drop-outs.

No more. Thought the screen-cap below (click the image for full size) doesn’t show the mouse, if you roll-over the edit regions you can completely edit the fades and level right on the sample section. You can even tweak the edit region’s start and end points. Leveling out wild transients and normalizing small regions is a breeze. It works with a lot of the Process menu and Effect menu items as well as any plugin. So you really can do very percise audio editing small sample of audio and really get it right the first time.

It’s possible this showed up in version 8; I’m just discovering it now.

(Oh, and the audio in the screen cap is demonstration only. I wasn’t actually leveling the audio.)

There I go again, spam baiting my post titles.

Anyway, over at the ever-busy Create Digital Music site, the editor has posted about a massive giveaway they’ve launched. Nice way to juke the stats, guys!

Seriously, it’s a great site that covers a wide range of stuff, and unlike others (myself, namely) it’s updated frequently. But then if you’re reading this you’re probably already aware of that. So for the cost of a legitimate email and your name you can get in the running for all sorts of drool-worthy gear, most of it crap I would love to play with here in the studio.

Good luck and tell us how you like what you win.