Combobulator (DataMind Audio) - another AI assisted plugin

[nordickvr]

For the ones interested.

From them website:
"Combobulator, as of this version, only works on Apple M-series chips. We will be releasing
versions for Windows and Intel Macs in the coming weeks.
This version is a Beta, which means it is still buggy."

https://datamindaudio.ai/

[Vortifex]

..

[blortblort]

just discovered this one HAS been ported to Windows...I want to want it, but I'm still a tad apprehensive at being an early adopter...and the "artist brains" seem a bit pricey if they are of a similar nature to the two that come in the demo (yes, bless datamind for at least providing a reasonable demo!)

[zerocrossing]

Waking this one up, as it's been a while and it's on sale. Seems interesting, but I can't find a demo. How are people getting along with it? Useful? Not? Does it feel too limited unless you buy more models for it?

[DJDJ]

Waking this one up, as it's been a while and it's on sale. Seems interesting, but I can't find a demo. How are people getting along with it? Useful? Not? Does it feel too limited unless you buy more models for it?

I bought this last year when I was doing well financially, pretty sure it was more expensive then than it is now. I ended up returning it because I didn't have a use case enough where it felt warranted for the price (think I paid $350 for the plugin + models). Fwiw, they were responsive about refunding, so given that there's no demo, at least they're cool about refunding you quickly.

If you like heavily textured audio to the point that it sounds messy, this thing is cool. For certain types of IDM or techno where wild and messy is good, I could see it being cool. I tend to like the bass music style that most of the artist models are based on, so I was hoping for something a bit more clean and crisp in sound quality. But that's not really how this plugin sounds. It's much more blurry & messy, more lofi and FFT sounding (think Unfiltered Audio SpecOps) than well defined replacement of your original audio. No, it's not an FFT plugin afaik, but it has that sonic flavor. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I found it hard to find use cases for. If you want to make a breakbeat more interesting, it's cool for that. If you want to make little percussion beds, it's cool for that.

I found for say a main drum beat, it sounded too textured and took up too much room in the mix. Suddenly kicks are replaced with massive low end kicks, and snares have 4 layers of sampled noises over them. For bass sounds, it either didnt track the pitch well, or just added weird noise layers that didn't necessarily make the bass any cooler than the original sound I was running into it.

So I found it hard to use in most cases, and ended up sounding worse rather than better on most things I fed into it. But that's just my use case, yours may be completely different. I wanted to like it. I'm excited by this company's vision, and I think the idea is super innovative. It just didnt give me anything I wanted for my style of music.

Also, while the knobs are labeled for the most part with familiar terms for a plugin (ie, 'attack', 'sustain', 'hi, mid, low') the way that those knobs change the sound is hard to understand and very unpredictable in a not very useful kind of way.

TLDR: It sounds messy, blurry, not crisp, not well defined, and it's hard to understand how to control it.

Hope this helps.

[pekbro]

you can demo their stuff if you link your account to soundcloud, they are in cahoots with soundcloud i guess...

While I did not try this out, likely I'm going to pass on all of it, thanks to the other demos... ymmv

[zerocrossing]

Waking this one up, as it's been a while and it's on sale. Seems interesting, but I can't find a demo. How are people getting along with it? Useful? Not? Does it feel too limited unless you buy more models for it?

I bought this last year when I was doing well financially, pretty sure it was more expensive then than it is now. I ended up returning it because I didn't have a use case enough where it felt warranted for the price (think I paid $350 for the plugin + models). Fwiw, they were responsive about refunding, so given that there's no demo, at least they're cool about refunding you quickly.

If you like heavily textured audio to the point that it sounds messy, this thing is cool. For certain types of IDM or techno where wild and messy is good, I could see it being cool. I tend to like the bass music style that most of the artist models are based on, so I was hoping for something a bit more clean and crisp in sound quality. But that's not really how this plugin sounds. It's much more blurry & messy, more lofi and FFT sounding (think Unfiltered Audio SpecOps) than well defined replacement of your original audio. No, it's not an FFT plugin afaik, but it has that sonic flavor. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I found it hard to find use cases for. If you want to make a breakbeat more interesting, it's cool for that. If you want to make little percussion beds, it's cool for that.

I found for say a main drum beat, it sounded too textured and took up too much room in the mix. Suddenly kicks are replaced with massive low end kicks, and snares have 4 layers of sampled noises over them. For bass sounds, it either didnt track the pitch well, or just added weird noise layers that didn't necessarily make the bass any cooler than the original sound I was running into it.

So I found it hard to use in most cases, and ended up sounding worse than better on most things I fed into it. But that's just my use case, yours may be completely different. I wanted to like it. I'm excited by this company's vision, and I think the idea is super innovative. It just didnt give me anything I wanted for my style of music.

Also, while the knobs are labeled for the most part with familiar terms for a plugin (ie, 'attack', 'sustain', 'hi, mid, low') the way that those knobs change the sound is hard to understand and very unpredictable in a not very useful kind of way.

TLDR: It sounds messy, blurry, not crisp, not well defined, and it's hard to understand how to control it.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for that in-depth reply. That more or less confirms my suspicions based on what I could find on YouTube. My gut feeling tells me that it could be a cool thing for an occasional experiment, but not worth it for the $249 price tag (current sale price including all the models)

I wonder if it would be better as a stand alone tool that’s not forced to work in real time. Some preview mode like it currently has, but then a render mode that chews on the data for a bit and provides a higher quality render.

[pekbro]

Concatenator is pretty neat... It's the one I like best so far...

*mostly due to performance issues 'for me' with the granular plugin tbf.