Bargain Center: discussion, gossip, etc.

[Fleer]

And yet, Soundtoys trumps all three for special FX.

[Tappistry]

And yet, Soundtoys trumps all three for special FX.

Can you clarify by what you mean by “special effects?”

[dusted william]

I have the soundtoys bundle and pretty much never use it.

[Fleer]

And yet, Soundtoys trumps all three for special FX.

Can you clarify by what you mean by “special effects?”

Sure. Even their “normal” FX have a tendency towards creative usage, like Echoboy (delay) or Decapitator (saturation), taking you way beyond what you’d expect. Lots of vids will show you how far. Together with the FabFilter and Zynaptiq bundles, Soundtoys is up there with the best.

[budd1405]

Anyone bite on the Soundtoys bundle upgrade offer? Pretty generous price at $209 considering I only have Little Plate.

Though, I also saw a lot of the bundles for sale recently in the Sell/Buy forum, so I wonder if people are replacing them with other things?

Soundtoys looks like a clever bundle inspired by some vintage hardware, but I also feel like I’m pretty well covered by other plugin suites: Blue Cat, Kilohearts, and iZotope.

I find use for them on everything, the best effects I have, infact I them

[Tappistry]

Well then the next question is, if Soundtoys were to give away other freebie later this year around Christmas, would that lower that upgrade price even more?

And to Fleer’s point regarding “creative” usage of effects, kilohearts’ system is pretty robust. You can make interesting chains of “normal” effects in the snapin host, which are laid out in a way that’s easy to understand. Or do multi-band with the Multi-Pass host.

Or with Blue Cat Late Replies and Destructor, you can do all kinds of bizarre delay/reverb/pitch-shifting and distortion as well. Load them up into MB-7 and do wacky multiband things with them as well, or any other third-party effect.

[budd1405]

I think the price they are at is a really good price to be fair. All their plugins just add a little something, honestly echoboy is dream to use. I like the way their chain system works it almost encourages you to experiment. I don't work for soundtoys by the way

[Fleer]

I do. I wish.

[shonky]

Well then the next question is, if Soundtoys were to give away other freebie later this year around Christmas, would that lower that upgrade price even more?.

Was thinking the same. Passed on the sale as I already have enough stuff that does similar to what they're selling. Was thinking that if I'd bought the Soundtoys bundle and Komplete in sales when I started purchasing 3rd party plugins I would have saved myself a fortune in the long run.

[mgw38]

I got "I Wish" super cheap at a Musiciansfriend 'Stupid Deal of the Hour' sale. Watch out for those as well.

Did Polyverse offer you an upgrade to their bundle at some point?

I don't think so but I think I had already bought all three before they started doing the bundle. Got Gatekeeper with the intro discount right when it came out.

[mgw38]

Looks like Plugin Alliance is sending out bigger coupons again. Surprisingly little excitement about that...

[dandezebra]

Did they double the coupons for this month?

I spent Black Friday and Christmas finally getting to a $35 voucher! Then after using it once, it went back to $25 because of their new system. This April I got a $50.

Anyone know what's up?

[MogwaiBoy]

I don't know I was getting $50 vouchers last year but just got $25, again. Don't talk to me about your big vouchers, I'll get voucher envy

I see the TE-100 is $49 which even with a $25 voucher is truly awesome value. Guess that also means they are still going to be having some great discounts on occasion!

There's a PanEQ / DynEQ bundle going too. I have DynEQ so wonder what the crossgrade price will be - hoping it's half of the bundle cost. Let's see tomorrow when the sale starts.

[xerisonic]

As I always have trouble making my mixes sound good on anything but my studio monitor speakers... does any of you kind people have experience with Audified MixChecker? The 44% discount is tempting...

MixChecker is a good product. The profiles are fairly realistic (captured acoustic models, not just designed EQ filters) and the old-school interface makes it easy to make quick selections.

One suggestion for Audified: With certain speaker hardware (car stereo systems, boomboxes), excessive bass can cause speakers to rumble vaguely instead of reproduce signal. In the current version of MixChecker, however, for profiles of hardware devices that can't reproduce lower frequencies well, bass frequencies seem to be ignored/rolled off to match the hardware capabilities. But in real life, those lower frequencies can cause huge distortion and rumbling. Would be good to see a simulation of this effect in a future version.

But that's more of a corner case. If you're dealing with reasonable mixes, MixChecker can help you not have to check via so many speakers and run back-and-forth to the car.

[xerisonic]

I've been wondering when a bunch of other companies will come out with their own version of a mixchecker and do it better for a reasonable price. I mean Audified isn't exactly tier 1. Don't know why they think they can charge so much for it when it's a toy and their reputation is out of date low end pedal emulation.

If you haven't checked out their latest work, Audified may surprise you. The RZ062 Equalizer and U78/Saturator/U73b Compressor are on par with more widely acclaimed products from competitors. Steven Slate was so impressed, he's licensed the U73b as a Virtual Mix Rack unit plugin: http://slatedigital.com/audified-u73b

The new DW Drum Enhancer, developed in collaboration with DW Drums engineers, is an excellent, streamlined drum processing tool that offers the configurability, flexibility and sound quality needed for professional use while simplifying drum processing workflows. And the new Synergy hardware is quite impressive.