Favorite plug ins, worth buying 🙂

[photofractal]

Couldn’t recommend Trackspacer enough.

[papernoise]

Seems like a useful thing for somebody like me who’s not really a pro at mixing. But also an excuse for not learning to do things myself, by using EQ and multiband compression.
EDIT: no I have to correct myself, it does seem like a pretty useful thing in general!

[bedhead777]

Izotope has a Mix & Master bundle that is Ozone and Neutron Standard with Tonal Control 2 for $149.

I haven’t seen any added deals for being an Izotope product owner for Black Friday deals. Unless someone can prove me wrong (please?). Otherwise, looks more like that only pays outside regular sale/discount periods.

[hermbot]

You have to log in to your izotope account page, they will be front and center.

[bedhead777]

Yeah. I meant no further discounts for Black Friday bundles. Loyalty discounts are mostly for crossgrade/upgrades on specific plugins.

[ypxkap]

i basically never buy plugins (if it’s good enough to be stock it’s probably better than my ears). but i just impulse grabbed XLN’s XO drum library/sequencer thing, half off this week ($70-90 USD depending on the version).

it solves a problem that was so entrenched into my workflow that before i heard about it, i lacked the capacity to even see the problem––the one where my interest in downloading free sample packs forever exceeds my interest in organizing the samples into any system that i will ever actually be able to use in the moment.

enter XO. you feed it your 9000 “these free oneshots seem interesting” folders, it listens to them all for you, color codes them by type of hit, and maps everything into a kind of star chart type thing which you can click/drag through to preview, filter out specific content, etc.

they don’t make it clear, but from using the demo for awhile it seems like the x axis is frequency (more low freq content on the left) and the y axis is duration (quick hits on the top, sustained ones on the bottom).

it also does a bunch of other stuff that seems superfluous to me but is maybe actually cool, idk:

XO - XLN Audio

maybe way too much detail here, i am probably the last person on earth to find out about this. it’s #5 in my paid plugin journey, joining ozone, neutron, and two valhalla reverbs (my most used plugin ever was the british clean preset on camel crusher, a free vst whose makers were bought out by apple and recently died of neglect, RIP!).

i was shocked to find out while setting XO up that i’ve downloaded 18,000+ one shots! i have spent my entire digital music life going to the same 4-6 folders i know are at least OK because i was never willing to spend the time listening to and organizing one shots lol. now i’m finding more appropriate samples in less time––like, so much less…

the whole experience has prompted me to start wondering if i need to update my ‘never buy plugins’ philosophy to take into account these newer audio tools where the value is coming from speed/ease of use instead of supposedly superior quality/fidelity. so i’m getting very interested in gullfoss/TEOTE/soothe type tools…

[bedhead777]

WOW. This is the most useful utility plugin I’ve seen all year.

I was just scrolling through some of my absurdly lengthy sample folders, thinking “I need to organize these better. But how to start…”

[Smapti]

I love XO. It’s the only drum sampler I use now. I’m really into the way you can random walk your entire kit through sample space – great for bouncing down lots of variations to audio in a way that would have been incredibly difficult otherwise.

(RC20 is a winner too – XLN knows what they’re doing!)

[level1]

XLN XO reminded me of Audiostellar. The concept is similar and it is open source. Not as complex perhaps, but maybe good enough for what it is intended.

AudioStellar

[dansimco]

RX users: Is RX elements worthwhile for general cleanup utility? or is it just a lite gateway drug to the pricier versions

[mattlowery]

Worth it for declick alone, IMO (double check that this is included, I can’t remember). A miracle tool for cleaning up the kinds of discontinuities that one runs into often when playing with time.

[makamqore]

wow thanks @ypxkap for your detailed write-up; it’s not a need I have at the moment but I can imagine a lot of electronic music creators who would see so much benefit from something like this! I agree that it’s refreshing to see newer kinds of tools.

[ypxkap]

really cool idea, thanks for pointing it out. similar starting point with the “sound files within latent space” aspect but taking a much more expressive direction rather than XLN’s utilitarian concept. found this paper of theirs with a bit more info than the site. i thought it was SO similar looking i had to check to see if i just accidentally bought a commercial knock off of their original idea, lol. of course i’ve never heard of any of these before.

1.1 Related software

Various software has been developed around audio similarity and corpus-based sound creation. Early examples include soundspotting [2] systems like Caterpillar (2000), Musaicing (2001) and SoundSpotter (2004).Unlike AudioStellar, these programs were mainly focused on experimenting different techniques for concatenative synthesis.

CataRT (2006) introduced an interactive 2D visualization which allowed to browse and play audio impulses using two user-selectable descriptors[3]. In our software and in the same way as FluidCorpusMap [4], the user doesn’t have to select which two descriptors work best for the selected dataset since X and Y axis are data-driven and learned by the dimensionality reduction algorithm (more on this in 2.5).

Recent software like Infinite Drum Machine [5], klustr [6] and XO [7] make use of dimensionality reduction techniques like t-SNE [1] to render a 2D map where similar sounding audio clips are placed near each other. The first one is a web experiment, the second one is for exploration only and doesn’t feature novel ways of interacting with the visualization and the third one is a commercial software not available for Linux centered around rythmic patterns creation.

Wekinator [8] is about supervised learning and live performance. Users without programming or ML skills can train models that output a signal for controlling any OSC compatible system (e.g. synths, DAWs or custom applications). While Wekinator is being used for sonic experimentation [9, 10], it is also an interesting tool for ML education [11]. This twofold aim inspires us to develop our unsupervised, sound specific approach.

[moogah]

Just bought this tonight as well, and my early review is that it is indeed a brilliant bit of software that I suspect will be a core element of my drum kit construction. The sequencing also seems like it may become a mainstay as well, the accenting feature has been something that I’m really liking a lot.

[Irving]

Both. I use it on its own constantly for cleaning up nutty zoom/Skype audio for a podcast I edit but it’s so good that it makes me constantly want to upgrade to tar high end version which does stuff that looks like pure voodoo.

[papernoise]

@mattlowery

Worth it for declick alone, IMO (double check that this is included, I can’t remember). A miracle tool for cleaning up the kinds of discontinuities that one runs into often when playing with time.

I did get RX Elements some time ago and declick was included.

[mateo]

@bedhead777

I haven’t seen any added deals for being an Izotope product owner for Black Friday deals. Unless someone can prove me wrong (please?). Otherwise, looks more like that only pays outside regular sale/discount periods.

It’s hard to say…I’m looking at the Tonal Balance Bundle, which is:

• $699 normally
• $299 on sale
• $199 with the loyalty offer, but that price expires on Dec 8th. It’s not clear what the price will be after, but it implies that that price is a combined loyalty/black friday special.

[mateo]

I haven’t used the elements plugins, but the full versions are highly rated and the elements version contains all the necessary functionality, so I’d say yes, they’re surely useful

[Smapti]

The only instrument I record is my modular – would it still be worth getting RX Standard? A lot of the functionality seems to be aimed at people recording acoustic instruments, so I’m curious if it could be useful for me too.

[xidnpnlss]

Unless you clip, I’m not sure it would be a great benefit to you.

I don’t have it (Yet) but i expect it would do wonders for my field recordings…