Black Friday 2022 deals of note

[Piet De Ridder]

Trackspacer is useful for many other things besides vocals, Tanuj. In any situation where you have to temporarily make room for something by suppressing something else, or when you want to avoid ugly build-ups of frequencies, Trackspacer is the tool to reach for.
Yes, you can get equally satisfying results with side-chained multi-band compression or dynamic EQ’s, but, like Guy already said, it’s the well thought-out “it just works” of Trackspacer that makes it such a great plug-in.

WavesFactory’s Quantum — also on sale, but still quite pricey, some might feel — is another good one. Very versatile, clever and well-designed transient shaper. Well, it’s much more than that, in that it separates the transients from the sustains (according to how you decide it should) and allows you to process each separately with a choice of 16 quality processors. And even that is just the start of what this tool can do.
Again, there are other choices for this kind of thing, but you’d need to combine several plugins to accomplish the same, or similar, thing that Quantum lets you do.

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[soundbylaura]

You can get AudioThing Things: Bubbles (and 3 other freebies) for 70 cents (USD) if you purchase this drum pack at Loot Audio: https://www.lootaudio.com/category/samp ... mr10-drums.

There are other super cheap products too; this one is the cheapest I could find.

[soundbylaura]

Free Sonuscore pipe organ

https://sonuscore.com/shop/free-pipe-organ/

[Lawrence]

Free Sonuscore pipe organ

https://sonuscore.com/shop/free-pipe-organ/

Damnit, Laura. You’re forcing me to consider spending…well…nothing.

[bryla]

Feels like they're coming thick and fast now. Arturia have V Collection for $299, EFX for $199 and Pigments 3.5 for $99 for new customers. I own V Collection 8, and they're throwing it at me for €99 and €69 for the effects (I have a couple of those).

https://www.arturia.com/black-friday-22

I also have the offer for €69 for FX. Really tempted! But still: Can someone say how they hold up to Soundtoys, U-he, Fabfilter?

[Guy Rowland]

Kush's sale is on. Discounts across the range inc the mighty Clariphonic for $99.
https://thehouseofkush.com/collections/plugins

[Tanuj Tiku]

Trackspacer is useful for many other things besides vocals, Tanuj. In any situation where you have to temporarily make room for something by suppressing something else, or when you want to avoid ugly build-ups of frequencies, Trackspacer is the tool to reach for.
Yes, you can get equally satisfying results with side-chained multi-band compression or dynamic EQ’s, but, like Guy already said, it’s the well thought-out “it just works” of Trackspacer that makes it such a great plug-in.

WavesFactory’s Quantum — also on sale, but still quite pricey, some might feel — is another good one. Very versatile, clever and well-designed transient shaper. Well, it’s much more than that, in that it separates the transients from the sustains (according to how you decide it should) and allows you to process each separately with a choice of 16 quality processors. And even that is just the start of what this tool can do.
Again, there are other choices for this kind of thing, but you’d need to combine several plugins to accomplish the same, or similar, thing that Quantum lets you do.

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Thank you Piet for the details. I have just had a play with track spacer yesterday and now I understand it. Great tool!

But, I think Quantum and Spectre are something unique that I have put on my list. Quantum is a beast and certainly can do a lot of creative things! I have decided to give tape a pass as I already have Satin from u-he.

Tokyo Dawn Labs however looks irresistible. The Molot GE compressor and Slick EQ GE sound fantastic and I can't believe I never paid attention to them all this time.

Plugin Boutique is running good deals for Tokyo Dawn Labs, substantially lower than the developer website.

[Lawrence]

Simple Sam’s grand sounds pretty darn good to
me-$49.95.

https://simplesamsamples.com/virtual-in ... ianos.html

[Guy Rowland]

Spitfire's Black Friday deals are up:

The Ton - Fragile String Evolutions, Spitfire Studio Brass (Air) and Abbey Road One Sparkling Woodwinds. £100

Black Weekend Core - Alternative Solo Strings, Ambient Guitar, Orchestral Swarm £177

Black Weekend Professional - BT Phobos, Orbis, Symphonic Strings Evolutions, Woodwind Evolutions, Hauscka Composer Toolkit £499

Classics Bundle - Goldfinger Percussion, Trailer Giant, DC Noisemaker, Joey Santiago Guitars, Martyn Ware NIC, Aluphone, Smuel Sim - Chrysalis, Igneous Electric Cello - £199 (nb - some of these are available individually at very deep discounts)

There's also single product discounts, far too many to list but some of the more notable:

BBC Professional - £539 (reg £899)
BBC Core - £239 (reg £399)
Abbey Road One: Orchestral Foundations £299 (reg 399)
Appasionata Strings £149 (reg £199)

Log in to see deals depending on what you own.

https://www.spitfireaudio.com/instrumen ... ndles=true

NB - there is still no realistic option to refuse cookies on their site . They've twice told me they're working on it, but many weeks in it seems beyond their technical ability to actually do anything about it. Hmmm.

[Guy Rowland]

Even by Waves' standards there are some very cheap plugins to be had there - several at $6 if you can use 'em. There's a new free plugin tomorrow.

https://www.waves.com/specials#sort:pat ... g:number=0

[Guy Rowland]

Toontrack have 3 SDXs and EZXs at 70% off. New York Studios 1-3 SDXs are all €55, Action, Metal Machine and UK Pop EZXs are €27.

I seem to recall all these SDXs on offer last year too. Still waiting for Hansa to get its discount day in the sun. UK Pop might tempt me though.

[soundbylaura]

Sure.

https://soundiron.com/products/rainsong

[Guy Rowland]

UK Pop might tempt me though.

And so it proved.

I remember when the EZX expansions were typically 1gb - this is 5.6gb, and shows I guess how much more detailed and / or varied that even the humble EZXs have become.

This sounds both detailed and varied to me - 11 different hi hat articulation variations on 3 hats with sticks and 1 with mallets is not too shabby (5 open tips, 3 open edges, closed tip, closed pedal and open pedal). And crazy-varied actually. They go from ultra-dry tea towels to live and roomy, there's sticks and mallets too. The Carnaby Street kit combo and mixer preset is instant Gary Glitter - questionable if anyone still really wants to be in his gang, but it's there if they, um, do. While that one has a deep and fat snare, the Gretsch Purpleheart is gorgeously flighty ringy pingy in the Bow Street Runner preset.

In general the sound has a pleasing age to it, and could be used for reggae, ska, funk, drum and bass, glam rock, indie and - oh yes - pop. Not 'arf bad, pop pickers, for 25 British quid.

[soundbylaura]

Ozone 9 Elements free here while supplies last: https://www.jrrshop.com/izotope-ozone-elements

[Guy Rowland]

Audiobro's sale is now live - 53% off Modern Scoring Strings; 58% off Modern Scoring Brass and Genesis Children's Choir; 34% off LASS 3 (23% off LA Strings Lite) and 77% off LA Drama Drums. If you own anything already, log in for deeper discounts.

https://audiobro.com/store/

[Guy Rowland]

Fluffy Audio have some big discounts inc Dominus Choir down from €379 to €169 (I can attest to the greatness of this), and the highly regarded Venice Modern Strings from €399 to €179. Other deals here - https://www.fluffyaudio.com/

[Guy Rowland]

And here's this year's Waves' freebie - Lil' Tube, a saturation plugin. Free today, RRP $79 (which will be $29 in practice I suspect, but still).

https://img.wavescdn.com/1lib/images/ho ... e-v2-d.jpg

[Tanuj Tiku]

I can’t say that I would recommend buying any waves plugins. Their whole scheme makes no sense to me. They sell many plugins at extremely low prices and then ask for money to update it. Licensing also doesn’t work very well and I just don’t like their waves licensing system.

It’s not smooth and intuitive. I had bought my first plugins a few years ago and then one day they just stopped working. I have no idea where my licenses went after migrating them onto my current system just two days ago after a while. The system makes little sense.

You can only transfer once a year etc - yikes!

I now need to pay $95 to upgrade to version 14 from 10 for a handful of plugins that actually have not really been updated at all. Just migrating to their ‘new system’.

Not going to buy anything from them ever again.

[Guy Rowland]

Tanuj - I've spent years fighting the horror that is Waves Central. It was a horrendous piece of software. But over the last year I have to say every single thing I've done with it has been seamless. It just works in the way it never did. It's kept all my old v9 licenses intact too, which I need for my old copy of Adobe Audition that is 32 bit only.

Not trying to convert you, but I feel credit where it's due - in my experience they finally got their house in order. And they've started releasing some outstanding plugins too, like Clarity vx.

[Guy Rowland]

I think this will vary by territory, but worth looking out for SSD / NVMe / hard drive deals. Prices do seem to have dropped significantly in the past year and there are good deals to be had. I've just picked up a Crucial P3 4tb NVMe that will replace my Samsung 1tb, it twas £280 or thereabouts. The old drive will become by OS clone to save me from peril. Also got an 8TB external WD drive for £140 for local archive of my large audio TV projects - they're all in the cloud but it's useful to keep local versions too.

[Mike Marino]

For anyone considering new monitors, Output's Frontier monitors are 25% off. That brings them down to ~$1,050.

[Tanuj Tiku]

Tanuj - I've spent years fighting the horror that is Waves Central. It was a horrendous piece of software. But over the last year I have to say every single thing I've done with it has been seamless. It just works in the way it never did. It's kept all my old v9 licenses intact too, which I need for my old copy of Adobe Audition that is 32 bit only.

Not trying to convert you, but I feel credit where it's due - in my experience they finally got their house in order. And they've started releasing some outstanding plugins too, like Clarity vx.

It is very much possible they have fixed some of the issues and it all works well but I am never paying $95 for plugins I already bought just to transfer them to a new system where the plugins themselves have not really been updated. The licensing still doesn't make sense to me. It is not very intuitive.

I got other plugins that cover everything that a couple of the Waves used to. I have no doubt though that some of their plugins are fantastic.

[Tanuj Tiku]

Universal Audio running a sale on their new Spark (Native) Subscription:

https://spark.uaudio.com/

For new UAD customers it's 99 cents for 3 months.

Some really nice plugins there, including newly released Hitsville which I have just listened to - it sounds great! I might look back into Universal Audio. I already own many plugins and their UAD-2 Octo but looking to cut loose from the DSP card and stay 100% native from now on.

[Guy Rowland]

Audio Plugin Deals have Audict's United Strings Of Europe at €99 down from €700. I'd never heard of it but it sounds promising, quite a comprehensive library - 7 mic positions, legato and portamento and a wide range of shorts too including a rather good sounding Sautille at 7'04.



Plenty more videos and demos on their website - https://www.auddict.com/use

Deal here (no 12) - https://audioplugin.deals/

[Piet De Ridder]

Yes, these don't sound too bad, don't they? Better than I remember, having bought the USOE Violins already once, separately, when they were first released some years ago (can't recall exactly when), but never having done much with them for lack of enthusiasm. And after that, I lost interest in USOE.

Rediscovering these strings however, listening to the demos on the Auddict website, this library appears to have been much improved since then. Tempting price too.

_