Well, the folks behind this page have ported a whole lot of the some very cool formerly Windows-only code over to Mac.¹ Some of it’s AU, most VST. All of it is freeware/donation-ware, so like Rainbows pay what it’s worth to you. (Don’t ask me, I haven’t even heard it yet.) But there are some nice tools/toys in there, including some Smartelectronix collective plugs, daHornet which I remember to be a pretty fun machine (note to self:…), and some BigTick stuff that is quite quality.

So perhaps not the Motherload, but at least a motherload. Probably stale news to those who will most benefit from such things, but I thought it was pretty cool.

^{1At least, I think that’s their/his/her role, the page is pretty lo-tech and scant on info. Which can be my favorite sorts of pages. Seriously. I sometimes love web pages that look like the were built in a text editor.}

In the inbox this morning: Zebra V2.2 released!

So, while most user have been using the beta for a few weeks (months?), developer Urs has nailed down the last of the bugs and made it official.

Requisite purloined update feature list after the jump:
(more…)

The final top 3:

1. Elements of Nature
2. hypercyclic
3. The Element of Surprise

In 2006, 3 of the 4 I singled out were the top 3 placers.

This year, I’m batting 3 out of 3!¹

A keen eye for quality and innovation? An influential opinion among the members of KvR? Or am I merely some sort of idiot savant?

I suspect it has something it has something to do with this², but there’s no way to back that argument up without sounding like a complete jackass.

But, obviously, I believe three very worthy digital contraptions were awarded their due. Not the order I would have put them in, but why quibble?

Anyway, some morning-after notes:
Because of my recent adventures in system maintance none of my initial downloads got beyond a 2nd chance. So, yes, I may have overlooked some gems, but apparently I was pretty damn close.

It’s interesting that a SynthEdit plug took the top spot. And the 3rd spot. I would have thought that the cross-platform plugin would have drawn in votes the SE plugs couldn’t get. Then again, hypercyclic’s genius isn’t quickly apparent: it’s a MIDI tool, a smart and unusual MIDI tool and one that benefits from strong host MIDI-routing, but not as gee-wiz apparent as a snyth or DSP.

About the SynthEdit plugs. It’s great that this development environment is out there and lets some real artists do some fine work. We now have access to all sorts of plugins that commercial developers wouldn’t come up with on their own. But its bugs are becoming more and more limiting, for both the developers and the users. Even if te SE developer releases a new version which fixes the dual-core bugs that apparently plague it (I haven’t had my dual-core long enough to encounter this myself) and the “all notes off” bug, that leaves a lot of plugins out there that were created on the old version that need to be recompiled. Nevertheless, this is a real victory for the necessity of VST development platform that is available to the enthusiast as well as the more serious coder.

As rekkerd says “…it is a well deserved win. xoxos has released tons of cool freeware plug-ins over the last few years, more than doing his part in the community.” It’s a cool idea, thoroughly executed, though it’s actual long-term usefulness is still a question. Kudos to Ugo for his exploration of simplicity in the creative process. And cheers to the hypercylic devs for giving me a tool I look forward to exploiting more fully.

^{1Look below the list, in the notes, at the bold text; the bold formatting was inserted at the time of writing.}

^{2The link is to a google lecture on the paradox of choice. Watch it while thinking about your workflow, your plugin folder, all the things about you current setup that you think could be better. Really, it’s enlightening.}

I’m more or less back to square one. Or, rather, 1.5.

I’ll tell you, I was a lot more sternly judicious in what I installed this time. Because my sample storage was intact, I was able to save myself a lot of time re-installing libraries like BFD and SampleTank. Even still, it was fuckin’ tedious. And there were a lot of recent updates that I didn’t have burned to backup so tracking/downloading files and registrations, logging on the various websites, only adds to the chore.

Here are some thoughts/observations on DAW-oriented pre-crash recovery. This is may be real 101 stuff but they’re lessons I’ve learned.

• Know you’re sequencers’ default audio storage location. Even if you immediately change it, or have been working from the same per project directory structure for years, make sure you check it during backups periodically. I know that mine had accumulated a fair degree of crap over the years for various reasons. I corrected it when I came across it but never really addressed the WCS. So I’m not sure how deep the damage, and hopefully it will be mostly on projects long ago abandoned, but nevertheless…
• Futher this: When working with plugins, particularly softsynths, and you’re shutting a project down for the night, it’s a good idea freeze/render/bounce/whatever before closing out. If it’s a complex multi-out instrument you could just bounce to a temp track, just so you have guide. I’ve had this nip at me occasionally just as it is, you load up some synths and it has suddenly detuned itself or reset all its parameters. But when you start changing plugin addresses it’s a really recipe for things breaking.
• Maintaining a simple text file of all your registrations and address information will only get you so if you’re audio rig isn’t connected to the internet. A thumb drive is essential. Nevertheless it’s still cumbersome.
• Some companies need to take a good look at their web-based registration strategies¹. And thank you to those companies who make it easy.²
• Keep your drive image software up to date. Otherwise it’s just useless.
• Do not attempt to “slipstream” your install unless you really know what you’re doing.
• Simplifying is not over-rated.

I also misplaced my Sonar 2 CD case serial number (perhaps temporarily; I might be able to dig it out yet, there’s some boxes in the closet…). So I don’t have the Timeworks EQ and Compressor at the moment. While I certainly have a lot of things that can replace ‘em ably, I used them a lot for many of years.

So, yeah, a lot of this is due to my glacial working pace. And my stubborn refusal to hook my audio computer up to the internet teat.

So, I’m looking at my hard drive crash as my computers way of telling me it was not happy, and I needed to streamline my process. I plan to get a good disc imaging program and make a good clean go of it.

^{1Spectronics comes quickly to mind while I wait to hear back from support on just how to re-authorize StylusRMX. But there a couple others whom I won’t slag off here.}

^{2Anybody who generates their serial number from a unique user name or user account - Melodyne (particularly sophisticated), SonicCharge, AudioDamage - and while NI I believe is machine based they’ve pretty much nailed the engineering of the activation control (YMMV).}

^{Photo courtesy of Jim Hankey. (See comments.)}

Loudness wars aside.

This morning I decided I’m no longer going to refer to my final stage before burning to CD or ripping to MP3 as “Mastering.” Cause really, what I’m doing probably in no way resembles mastering. It’s “Finalizing.” Yeah, that makes sense.

Someday, I look forward to actually getting a finished CD mastered by someone who knows what they’re doing, has a good acoustic space, and won’t squash the crap out of it.

Until that time I do it myself. (Right now I’m looking forward to finishing a CD.)

For a long time I’d brought my bounced 2-bus mix into SoundForge and worked from there. I’ve always mixed low so I always have a fair degree of headroom in which to work. Using the plugin chainer I would run the wave through Vintage Warmer+GlissEQ+dbMasteringLimiter - though I’d switched to iZotope Ozone mastering limiter included with version 9.

But with the new version of Sonar, I’ve set up a much more flexible finalizing template. I can having two tracks of different mixes running through 2 busses that I can mix and match, so I can play with different DSP chains. To be honest, I pretty much run it through the same sequence; though I’m using the new Boost10 included in Sonar which is a really great plugin. Plus Sonar has great dithering options. And with my new Sonar-template setup I can run all kinds of eye-candy and tools - VintageMeter, analyzers, and now this.

Ozone has an option for killing intersample overs, but as quickly as I gained that knowledge I it became unavailable to me as it’s tied to SoundForge. So this will slot in nicely to my new finalizing template. So, yea! for SSL for this nice freebie. And some day I’ll have the resource to get one of these.

Cheers to AI for the heads up.

I’ve now spent some time with the 2 Soniccouture sample sets I’ve purchased over the last few months, specifically Konkrete2 and the Hang Drum libraries. So, I feel fully qualified to rave about these products, and in general develop a bit of a gear-nerd crush on the company.

General fan-boy notes: Slick, well-functioning web-site, with a good eCommerce business model. (Some other payment options might be advised but I’m fine with paypal.) But, more importantly, insanely well-produced content, that is as specific as it is flexible, and it’s reasonably priced; in terms of sample libraries (and music software in general) they’re downright cheap. You’ll need a Kontakt so there’s that; I mean, most of the titles are released for other sampler-players as well, but what they do with Kontakt is where these libraries really shine - the scripting is insanely good.

Konkrete Drums 2: It took me a little while to figure out how to make them usable. Obviously, it’s not EZDrummer - not any sense.¹ And it’s far more extensive and varried than your bog-standard x0x sample kit. But the mapping vaguely recalls your standard drum-kit mapping (kicks and subs down around #36). And most of the hits seem to be single velocity - caveat: I say that not having fully explored the library: it’s really frickin’ huge. The range of sounds is really expansive, from organic to completely inorganic, metallic to completely warm and squishy. And this is cool but really I purchased it for the glitch-script it comes packaged with. Go watch the video, you’ll see what I mean. Nice, right? And with Sonar’s new multi-lane controller view makes short work of this.

Hang Drum: I said to my producing partner last night, “The problem with these libraries is that in about a year you’ll be hearing them everywhere.”

Let me revise that. In about 6 months you’ll be hearing them everywhere. I’ve already used them on 3 tracks.

It’s amazing how they’ve approached putting together a multi-sample of an unconventional instrument. And, as everyone notes, it’s easy to just sit there with the “Jamming” script turned on and just muck about for hours. So, here I am, once again, giving away the game. For a while these are going to be like Reason and you’ll be watching TV or playing XBox and some piece of music will drift by and you’ll think to yourself, “Hey, that’s the Hang Drum library.” For a little less than $100 US - less if you’re European, you can sound like every other producer for the next, oh, 7 years. What will be interesting is the people who really start pushing the library in unconventional ways. But even if you don’t use it in a single track you should buy it just to experience its musicality.

And if you act now you can get their Abstrakt Bass for a discounted price. Honestly, when I first was poking about their site I thought, “Yeah, whatever, another bass instrument.” But, again, this thing appears hugely deep, covering all manner of, erm, basses. And, once again, they top off a really extensive but economical library with a batch of Kontakt-scripting goodness. Right now I’m so glad I could never afford Trilogy.

And for you lechers and freeloaders, they have a well-stocked freebies/demo page so you can taste their brilliance. But, really, this is a company we want to be around for a while so buck up and buy some new sounds.

¹I’ve edited this for clarity, and to make a feeble joke.

I got into a discussion over at the mighty fine rekkerd blog (log-rolling in our time) regarding the reasoning behind huge multi-instrument, multi-sample libraries, specifically the just-announced Sample Logic Elements.

As I said there, it’s an interesting idea for a multi-sample collection, and I’m sure there’s lots of cool, useful sounds, but, jeeze, $300? Who buys this stuff? What kind of market is there for these cover-all-the-bases, huge and expensive sample libraries? The perks are an interesting touch - Virtual Instruments Magazine, how was I not aware of this? - but I don’t understand the market behind these libraries.

A few key companies keep making these huge sample sets that seem marketed at people who are looking for a one-stop-fits-all (to mix a metaphor) sample library, and I just wonder how many of these buyers there really are. Most people who are going to be interested in this are users who already have all of these sounds well covered, and are probably more interested in specific instruments. Having to sort through 100s upon 100s of presets, no matter how well organized, is not a great trade-off. So what they’re doing to their customer is making us shell out for the whole friggin’ thing whether we’ll use it or not. And anyone who has been working with sample libraries for awhile will tell you, that with these huge multi-instrument libraries you use maybe 40% of them more than a few times and a good 60% once or twice if at all. And that’s it.

Why not break it up into smaller custom sets and sell them at 40 bucks a whack? Oh yeah, physical media.

You know, like Soniccouture. So, while we’re on that subject…

Okay!

Further my earlier post concerning this year’s Developer Challenge.

While I haven’t come to any truly informed decisions, here’s what I downloaded:

• Alien Artifact
• Blip
• Bouncer
• Flicker
• hypercyclic
• Najnaj
• Rasta Box
• Rhythmic Tangent
• Shaker Maker
• Sounds of Nature
• Speak & Pluck
• The Element of Surprise
• Tiny-Q
• ?

Like I said in my initial post this time ’round, it’s a very Book-by-its-Cover year. So apparently I passed over a lot of the synths and a lot of GUIs that just aren’t to my liking. No offense to any dev who I might have overlooked through my aesthetic prejudiced - let me know if I completely missed the boat on your offering.

A couple of off-the-cuff notes:

- I was most looking forward to hypercyclic & The Element of Surprise. Both have proved to be worthy of my anticipation.

- I especially like the conceptual approach of Sounds of Nature & Element of Surprise. (Coincidence?)

- Again with tEoS: Really, read the manual. Even if you don’t grock with the sound, it’s a good piece of writing and a helpful approach to actually getting music done.

- Sometimes concept and results part ways. A few of those that I’ve tried have proved this sadly true.

- Since I’ve purge my VST folders and cleaned up my audio drive, I’m testing everything out of eXT2 rather than Sonar or P5.

- Except hypercyclic which I’m using in Sonar because of its internal MIDI-routing.

- The “?” isn’t the name of a plugin (someone snap that up for next year!) but means I might have downloaded one or two others but either they didn’t install correctly or I they got lost in the purge. The list reflects my notes so far.

And a special call out to one of my readers with a Mac: Have you tried the mac plugins? Do they work? Are they useful?

While Audio Damage gets ready to unleash the next and final plugin in its mod trilogy, I’ve had a chance to put their last creation, Fluid, to the test.

As I said previously, my experience with chorus units has either been of the cheap(er) guitar pedal variety or whatever came bundled with my software or “onboard” with my softsynths. In other words, the expected watery wooshing. In other words, something I didn’t use deliberately very much. In other words, it’s certainly been on synth patches or amp I’ve used but I’ve never thought to myself, “Gee, you know what this needs is a chorus.”

But the first thing I strapped Fluid across sounded so markedly better it was really quite astounding. I was working on a remix project, so the synth pad was already a fixed audio file, and since I was stripping the track of all its more traditional rock/pop elements, I was shifting the focus to the synth parts. I routed all the synth pads to a bus and put Fluid in the bus FX. As the attached audio clip of the solo’d bus track demonstrates, a fairly static synth part became a swirling, harmonically rich sound.

Fluid on the Synth Bus

Note about the demo clip. This is a synth bus, but after I heard how beautifully Fluid gave movement to the track, I sent the vocal “double” to the track as well. I was originally going to remove the vocal for this demo clip, but listening to it I thought it would be far more interesting to leave it in, to hear what Fluid did to both parts. While in the dry clip the vocal is slightly more “present,” keep in mind that this isn’t the “main” vocal bus, so the slightly blurring of the transients doesn’t really effect the full mix. But what is noticeable to me is that the vocal part of that bus doesn’t just get washed into the rest of the sound on that bus. So while the synths take on a more characterful sound, the vocal retains its clarity.

There had been this one glitch that had crept into my audio production that I had been working around for months.

In Sonar 6 certain plugin went missing from plugin menus. So we had gotten this great plugin manager but I was losing menu access to a lot of my favorite plugin instruments. I first noticed with microTonic, a synth I use a lot. I could see it in the list of installed VSTs, and I could add it to the menu editor. But in the actual menu they just weren’t showing up. Oatmeal & V-Station were two others I know of off the top of my head that went MIA. I could get to some through track templates (yea for remembering to create them), but some were apparently lost. to Sonar. I was hoping 7 would be the magic number and it would all be good. Nope.

And not only that, there were a lot of ghost plugins showing up in the Sonar plugin manager and SoundForge, listed weirdly, some of which probably dated back to when I was using the fxpansion VST wrapper.

Yet I was hesitating going back to a completely blank slate, wiping the system and buiding from scratch. Why? A lot of reasons I suppose: because it would have been tedious reinstalling all my plugins - digging out installers, updates - not to mention having to reregister a whole lot of ‘em, but also because I was just curious to see if I could figure out what was wrong.

So in frustration, I ripped all my versions of Sonar off the computer, along with a whole lot of old software. Old Project 5. All those versions of Sonar I had going back to version 2 - outta there. Gone. I didn’t touch my plugins too much, including Dimension Pro and Rapture, but I washed the registry several times with two different registry cleaners, including by hand. I was careful but thorough.

But no luck. The plugins were still not showing up in the menus and the ghost registry entries were still there.

So I started thinking of strategies to clean out my plugin folder. I knew there was a lot of detritus in there. I’m pretty good at deleting what I don’t want, but it was way too easy to tuck stuff out of the way and not really think about it. Freebies I thought might be cool, mag-ware I might have used once or twice, some of lesser SynthEdit creations. I whittled it down to just the commercial plugins and the free/donation-ware I know works and use a lot. I created a 2nd vst folder that sits right next to the current where I moved everything else. So I can still use these miscellaneous VSTs in other programs; perhaps bring some into Sonar using eXT as a plugin. I also tossed any overall folder structure (”c:\program files\audio_plugins\instruments\samplers\..”) and went with just splitting them up by developer and project (”c:\program files\audio_plugins\u-he\zebra2\..”).

Then, with the very helpful configuration information that the Plugin Manager provides, I used a block of CLSID numbers to ferret out where they were sitting in my registry. (I used Registrar Lite 5.5.1 if it’s helpful.) Just a huge block of dead info. So scappled it out. Did a complete update on XP (using the quasi-illegal post-SP2 updater).

So now my Sonar 7 is a lean, mean plugin machine.

Seriously, it’s easier sorting through them, rescanning them, changing properties, and the whole plugin manager just operates faster. Whatever your platform, whatever your host, I highly advocate getting a good handle on what’s going on in your plugin directory.

I’m not a big advocate of moderation when it comes to plugins - whatever you can afford, why not? - but there is something both cathartic and useful in really simplifying your plugin structure.