Loom II has landed!

[shonky]

They're wasting their time doing upgrades of all their other stuff.

These wouldn't necessarily have been a waste of time if they had added extra functionality and improvements based on user suggestions as to what was lacking in the original (e.g. It's a PITA if you want to change the order of modules). You can still get some pretty unique sounds out of it but it doesn't seem to have been designed with the end-user in mind.

In total over 50 new features have been added all from users most common requests.

Except, as noted, dragging and dropping of modules and increased polyphony. Given that this isn't exactly an intuitive synth to program, it's helpful to have the ability to move modules around, rather than having to re-enter all of the information to a later slot, and remove the information and modulation from the previous slot.

Like I said, I don't think it's a bad synth, I've managed to get some good sounds out of it but it can be incredibly frustrating to program and I might have bitten if that was included. Most of the additional features weren't on my radar and aren't big selling points to me so I guess I'll pass on the update.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

I'm running a 27" IPS Monitor at 1920x1080 and everything functions perfectly here and my eyes are shyte. Hence you don't see me complaining about GUIs

I also chose a "27" IPS Monitor at 1920x1080", as to me it is the sweet-spot between size and resolution, and everything does look great. However, these days, anything over 24" seems to default to higher resolutions which are a real issue for the kinds of apps we use, and only start to look readable above 32".

The truth is that most are going to fall outside of where these aged gui's are comfortable to use. You don't care, but perhaps AIR should

[lnikj]

Topic, anyone?

Indeed! The thread has dissolved into a spat about screen size.

Simon - I would love to buy Loom 2 off your company, but you are not listening to what people are saying, either now or for years.

Some posters at KVR seem to think companies should offer a 24/7 hotline, $9.99 products, no copy protection etc personal setup. This as a business just isn't feasible although we try to be fair about this.
When we do charge for items we keep the cost as low as possible for users.

I certainly don't think that you need to offer $9.99 products (you painted yourself in that hole with that stream of sales and offers!). But I think that for $50, I would have expected much larger polyphony improvement from just 2 additional voices - that is indeed laughable, sorry but it is. Make it 32, for example. Today's CPUs can certainly take it! Marking it "by popular request" is also laughable. 2 additional voices are simply NOT ENOUGH. You can do better and it certainly doesn't take you two years to add 2 additional voices of polyphony. I am 100% certain in that.

And then yes, you guys desperately need better (tag-based with filtering) patch browser. What's in there is unfortunately not really good enough for a VSTi nearing year 2020. Even doing this by means of NI's NKS would have been much, much better...

So yes... color me disappointed. I would have gladly paid $50 for an update with more polyphony, better patch browsing, and a resizeable GUI, with drag&dropping of modules around. And typing time values into envelopes (they are IMPOSSIBLE to edit accurately as they are now, we cannot even hold Shift for finetuning the values! Wake up!)

Evil Dragon sums it up perfectly. Please address these long standing and often raised issues and I'll buy it!

Oh, I'm 100% with Wags on screen size

[plexuss]

I like the AIR instruments. I bought the bundle for around $100US and feel it was worth the money. I don't use all the tools but of those I use I feel it was well worth the $100. I do use Loom but also feel that the limited polyphony, lack of usability (drag and drop, preset manager) limit my use of it.

I would have bought the $50 upgrade *if* the polyphony had been expanded to something like at least 32 voices *and* there was drag and drop and a larger GUI. As it is, I feel that if I were to pay the $50 to upgrade, I would end up having to pay again *if* the features I mentioned get added. In other words, the upgrades in Loom 2 are not enough to justify the $50 to me because it doesn't correct issues I need.

It might be prudent for AIR to do some customer insight research in order to determine the best roadmap for upgrades. Of, if they did, use a different methodology because they clearly missed what most people want (based on the data so far collected in this thread). Not meant as a slight to AIR but rather some customer feedback.

[starflakeprj]

@sbangs_air

Any updates on AIEP4? Or what it will be called? I would be interested upgrading the whole package, but not just Loom individually I guess.

[ThomasHelzle]

Cool

Quick question I couldn't find in the "what's new": I seem to remember you mentioning a while ago that Loom 2 may have the ability to load longer audio samples. Is that the case?

Cheers,

Tom

Yes that is supported 15 day trial is now up on the website

So what is the new maximum wave file length now?
It's not mentioned in the docs that come with Loom II demo either AFAICS?

As for how users perceive the update:
Air is at the forefront of making things in the industry (and itself as a company) "cheap".
If you sell Xpand for 1 dollar in a sale, you set the bar.
If the update to AIEP 3 complete from that is 50 dollar in another sale, of course the update from Loom 1 to Loom 2 is "crazy expensive" in comparison for the same price.


I'll check the demo now.
My main interest with Loom actually is vocals and spoken poetry and I think it does amazing things with that.

Thanks and cheers,

Tom

[exmatproton]

Some posters at KVR seem to think companies should offer a 24/7 hotline, $9.99 products, no copy protection etc personal setup. This as a business just isn't feasible although we try to be fair about this.
When we do charge for items we keep the cost as low as possible for users.

I certainly don't think that you need to offer $9.99 products (you painted yourself in that hole with that stream of sales and offers!). But I think that for $50, I would have expected much larger polyphony improvement from just 2 additional voices - that is indeed laughable, sorry but it is. Make it 32, for example. Today's CPUs can certainly take it! Marking it "by popular request" is also laughable. 2 additional voices are simply NOT ENOUGH. You can do better and it certainly doesn't take you two years to add 2 additional voices of polyphony. I am 100% certain in that.

And then yes, you guys desperately need better (tag-based with filtering) patch browser. What's in there is unfortunately not really good enough for a VSTi nearing year 2020. Even doing this by means of NI's NKS would have been much, much better...

So yes... color me disappointed. I would have gladly paid $50 for an update with more polyphony, better patch browsing, and a resizeable GUI, with drag&dropping of modules around. And typing time values into envelopes (they are IMPOSSIBLE to edit accurately as they are now, we cannot even hold Shift for finetuning the values! Wake up!)

+1

Although Loom is a fun and original tool, it lacks a modern approach (think Serum, Avenger, the new Tone2 updates and i could go on) in terms of GUI size, mod-ability, number of voices, integration (drag-n-drop for instance). This update isn't doing anything about that (well....2 more voices ). So, for me as well, 50 bucks is just laughable at this time.

[SHall1000]

Has anybody got the demo working? I have installed and the .dll is in my folder but it is not showing up in Ableton Live. I got an ilok activation request but I can't find an unlock code anywhere and one was not supplied when I requested the demo.

Seems to be a habit with some devs to not sort out the demo before they launch!!

[steff3]

Hi Guys,

AIR worldwide have nearly over 2 million users of our products now.

wow, 2 million users and no reasonable user area where user's can update devices and handle their licenses ....

Sorry, but totally unprofessional in this regard. I like some of the products, but not allowing the user (your customer) to handle his/her licenses reasonably and download updates in a reasonable way ....

Keep these synth up-to-date is a mess IMHO.

CRM?


best

[dangayle]

I really like Loom. It’s one of the good ones, not too many dedicated additive synths out there. A good alternative to Razor, as long as you’re not editing huge patches.

Most of the presets are decent, so I’ve always just skimmed through those and altered to taste, so module reordering is irrelevant in my case. It’s not for everything, but it does add some interest to some tracks.

I don’t think AIR’s developers have a say in the sales and bundling do they? It seems In Music bought them as a way to sling cheap bundled software into their stuff without having to deal with licensing from NI, Cubase, etc.

[SHall1000]

It gets worse! Re scanned my plugin folder in Live and Loom shows up .....but its the original LOOM not he LOOM 2 demo.

[shonky]

It gets worse! Re scanned my plugin folder in Live and Loom shows up .....but its the original LOOM not he LOOM 2 demo.

Yep, demo installed over original version of Loom with exactly the same name.

[ThomasHelzle]

Yeah, be careful, the Loom II demo overwrites/removes/replaces Loom I it seems.
I guess I have to re-install everything when I uninstall the demo.

(Edit: The Loom 2 demo does not uninstall Loom 1 but just overwrites it. Now I uninstalled the demo, Loom 1 is gone, but the Loom 1 installer only allows me to uninstall Loom 1. So I have to uninstall it just to then install it again. But at least it seems my Loom 1 presets are still there - I was worried there...)

So far it looks like a lot of missed opportunities.
The separate waves page would have been a good way to show large wave previews with interactive placement of markers but a.) it's only for the two-wave module and b.) it's mostly empty space showing the same tiny wave view.

I think I'll wait and see

Cheers,

Tom

Edit: also be careful, the new sounds come at extremely different volumes. Some almost blasted my ears off.

[SHall1000]

Well I didn't have Loom installed but I still got Loom 1 from the demo installer.

[murnau]

Another huge step on my way to recover from GAS!