Bargain Center: discussion, gossip, etc.

[BeeDog]

For anyone that has bought the Bitwig Upgrade Plan during the promotion period (where you get that Arturia plugin at the same time), how does the Arturia license work? Do you get it immediately when placing the order or do you have to redeem your upgrade immediately for them to provide the license?

Also, if you immediately add the upgrade plan to an existing one, does it replace the existing one or simply add +1 year to the already-running plan?

[WatchTheGuitar]

For anyone that has bought the Bitwig Upgrade Plan during the promotion period (where you get that Arturia plugin at the same time), how does the Arturia license work? Do you get it immediately when placing the order or do you have to redeem your upgrade immediately for them to provide the license?

Also, if you immediately add the upgrade plan to an existing one, does it replace the existing one or simply add +1 year to the already-running plan?

The latter, it adds 12 months to whatever the license end date was going to be.
I have no idea about the other question, sorry.

[Ceej]

MDrummer is also on sale for 50% off for the next 13 days. It's still a bit pricey, but with the four free expansion packs it's pushing 80GB of content. I should take a look at some videos and see what the working method is like, and if it might be an interesting alternative to Jamstix ...

Would be interested in your conclusions. FWIW I think that as of jamstix 4 - you get pretty decent results for most genres bar any kind of electronic music. GUI is still pretty bad though.

So I've gone through the fairly extensive MDrummer video tutorial series, and I have some thoughts about comparing MDrummer to Jamstix. Note that I own Jamstix but only used it a few times, and do not own MDrummer, so size your grains of salt accordingly.

The big thing that Jamstix has over MDrummer is the whole "brain and four virtual limbs" thing. It has a much more extensive and configurable AI for generating patterns. MDrummer can certainly do pattern generation, and it does so with a lot of detail, but it doesn't seem to have the same kind of concepts about "how a real drummer would play" let alone any way to make it work like a variety of different real drummers. (Or, at least, if it DOES do anything like that, it's not really exposed through the UI.)

In pretty much every other way that MDrummer and Jamstix are different, though, MDrummer seems better. There are significantly more and significantly better-quality included sounds. It's got drum synthesis on top of the extensive multi-sampled acoustic options. You can easily create your own sampled or synthesized drums. It has an enormous arsenal of included effects. It gives you a lot more control over creating patterns and variations, and the UI for doing so is much clearer. The way you control third-party drum VSTs via MIDI seems easier to set up and more flexible with MDrummer. It's got much more useful controls for being played live from your own MIDI controller. The list goes on. MDrummer also has that video tutorial series on YouTube which is quite good - there's almost nothing there for Jamstix and what little there is is somewhat out of date.

Both programs have a number of important features in common. They both have a concept of "level" or "intensity" to bring in variations on the drum patterns, and they both can even adjust that level in real time based on your MIDI input so you can jam with it (Jamstix can even do that based on audio input). They both allow you to build up songs in sections or to trigger various patterns from your main sequencer (although MDrummer makes the latter much easier). They both can output MIDI to control other programs, or let you drag-and-drop the generated MIDI pattern/song data to your DAW for more editing.

They both also have pretty awkward user interfaces. Melda is well-known for having dry and generic interfaces, and in MDrummer's case it seems a lot of important features are tucked out of the way while several things you might not want regularly are prominently available on multiple pages. The way MDrummer labels things is in some cases confusing as well. Jamstix's UI is in many cases pretty inscrutable, in particular when it comes to controlling that "brain" which is its primary defining feature. The song editor in Jamstix is much more awkward and click-heavy than it should be too.

Price-wise they're a bit hard to compare. Jamstix entrypoint is significantly cheaper ($99) vs. MDrummer ($275), but the full-fat Jamstix Ultimate with all the various brain models and samples is $299. At the current half-off ($145 - oo, $122 at DontCrack in the "Private Deals Zone"!) MDrummer is clearly the better deal, though.

So which would I recommend? I think it'd have to be MDrummer these days, especially on the current sale. The Jamstix brain stuff is theoretically very cool, but in practice I'm not sure it always gives better results and it's exceptionally hard to control at anything deeper than a superficial level. MDrummer is much more approachable up-front and seems to have almost bottomless depth to dig into later. I think MDrummer is clearly the best choice for anything electronic or dance-related. It's a bit harder if you really want to focus on acoustic rock and similar genres when the Jamstix brain could really shine, but be prepared to sink a pretty good about of effort into getting the most out of it.

If the Rayzoon people could bring in a UI specialist to really overhaul their interface and make it cleaner and clearer, and put out some quality tutorials about getting the most out of it, I think it becomes a much more interesting fight though. I'll be keeping an eye out.

[Scotty]

Fantastic post Ceej. Keep us updated. I own jamstix 4 and haven’t done much with it. I haven’t been motivated enough to get past the user interface and really dig into it. I’d own a lot of Melda but not Mdrummer althoughI have been tempted ... that too has a less than optimal interface in this application. I do like his approach to the interface for effects as it is manageable once you get used to a few plugins.

I’d be interested in your take on Groove Agent but I feel it also suffers from an arcane interface.

There is an opening in the generative virtual drummer space. I am looking at iOS apps to see if there is something there that can bridge the gap.



Well done!

[mgw38]

Logic has taken over that space on the Mac platform. I would expect that that functionality will also pop up in some other DAWs in one of their next releases. Personally, I came to prefer Superior Drummer as long with the Ujam series. They are not as „generative“ but I could not handle both Jamstix‘ as well as MDrummer‘s UI.

[aMUSEd]

For anyone that has bought the Bitwig Upgrade Plan during the promotion period (where you get that Arturia plugin at the same time), how does the Arturia license work? Do you get it immediately when placing the order or do you have to redeem your upgrade immediately for them to provide the license?

Also, if you immediately add the upgrade plan to an existing one, does it replace the existing one or simply add +1 year to the already-running plan?

The latter, it adds 12 months to whatever the license end date was going to be.
I have no idea about the other question, sorry.

You get an upgrade serial but can apply it at any time after you have bought it - the clock only starts after you have activated it

[chrisstiles]

In pretty much every other way that MDrummer and Jamstix are different, though, MDrummer seems better. There are significantly more and significantly better-quality included sounds. It's got drum synthesis on top of the extensive multi-sampled acoustic options. You can easily create your own sampled or synthesized drums. It has an enormous arsenal of included effects. It gives you a lot more control over creating patterns and variations, and the UI for doing so is much clearer. The way you control third-party drum VSTs via MIDI seems easier to set up and more flexible with MDrummer.

Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah definitely the samples and sounds in Jamstix are not as strong as they could be - though I think they are reasonably okay in some genres (though sometimes this is the result of a paucity of other options).

The control is an interesting one, because I'd argue that there is more variation in jamstix - but of course you are less in control of the final outcome, and I think the UI is sometimes a compromise drawn by the attempt to expose the 'brain' to the user.

[WatchTheGuitar]

You get an upgrade serial but can apply it at any time after you have bought it - the clock only starts after you have activated it

That’s true, but obviously you don’t get the benefit of any updates after your active license expires until you start that clock ticking again.

[BeeDog]

For anyone that has bought the Bitwig Upgrade Plan during the promotion period (where you get that Arturia plugin at the same time), how does the Arturia license work? Do you get it immediately when placing the order or do you have to redeem your upgrade immediately for them to provide the license?

Also, if you immediately add the upgrade plan to an existing one, does it replace the existing one or simply add +1 year to the already-running plan?

The latter, it adds 12 months to whatever the license end date was going to be.
I have no idea about the other question, sorry.

Excellent, thanks! Now let's see if anyone jumped on that Bitwig+Arturia deal

[LoveEnigma18]

Might be a silly question, but let me ask:

https://www.meldaproduction.com/MSoundF ... stallation

Does this mean all the free MDrummer content will work with the free MSoundFactoryPlayer? If so and it's worth it, I would download it, because I have an unlimited data broadband connection.

[WatchTheGuitar]

If it's an unlimited data connection and not too slow then I'd download it on the offchance. It took me about 3 hours and was throttled at their end (I'm on a 350 Mb/s connection) so should have taken less than half an hour.

[Vleker]

Waves just released V12 to force people into getting a new WUP. How long did it take to go from 10 to 11? I feel like 11 just released. Anyway, stuff is resizable now.

[Harry_HH]

Waves just released V12 to force people into getting a new WUP. How long did it take to go from 10 to 11? I feel like 11 just released. Anyway, stuff is resizable now.

I’m still on 10 - haven’t purchased a single Waves plugin since the 11 was releases. I own about 60 Waves plugins, most likely it stays in that number, if the Waves don’t happen to demolish the WUP, and free all updates (which is not very likely).

[Vleker]

Waves just released V12 to force people into getting a new WUP. How long did it take to go from 10 to 11? I feel like 11 just released. Anyway, stuff is resizable now.

I’m still on 10 - haven’t purchased a single Waves plugin since the 11 was releases. I own about 60 Waves plugins, most likely it stays in that number, if the Waves don’t happen to demolish the WUP, and free all updates (which is not very likely).

Nope, I wonder if they ever read the forums because I never heard anyone be happy about it. They finally came to their senses regarding multiple devices but.... only for products with an active WUP. It's nice they finally got resizable windows, but honestly it is nothing special in 2020. I wonder if I could apply for their marketing division, I'm sure I could do a better job.... I refuse to pay more for a year of WUP than for the full product in the first place. Same for the license transfer fees which are based off the "full" price which is ridiculous . So yeah thanks for reading my Waves rant of the month haha But here I am still using some of their plugins lol

[paolostylo]

Even though there are a lot of people complaining about waves,
they have some great plugins that are old but sounding really good, you have to admit that...
And because most of them are older, they have almost no bugs.
Ok, sometimes they renew the GUIs like some of the Renaissance stuff in the past, but who cares...
And their price and sales policy is also strange, we all know that...
The really best development since the last 2-3 years is the now resizable GUI. (Finally!)
But I doubt that this will be a reason for all to switch to V12 when you are happy with V10 or V11...
The sound of the plugins didn't change for years and that's the most important thing (for me)...

PS: but I agree with all of you: WUP is a crap and only a thing to generate extra cash...