Tool Much Fun 10
If this was written by Apple, it would be Tool Much Fun X, amirite? Almost every new thing I encounter goes in this blog. It started out as a list of things I wanted to check out. Then I thought “why not share it with the world?” A one-stop shop for tools for creative peeps. So there won’t be a lot of Excel plugins or other corporate stuff where you can’t even figure out what it does after reading the home page copy.
Remember, I don’t endorse these unless specified. If I bought something myself I’ll generally say so. If they’re good or not you are welcome to say so in the comments.
Forgive any layout issues, I’m still battling Squarespace’s bafflingly annoying layout engine.
This edition we have Graphics, Fonts, Music, Kontakt, Presets, iOS, iOS Music, Podcasting, Productivity, Samples, AI, Video, CRM, Mac, Animation, Home Automation, Social Media, Marketing, Presentation and some things I found that have been sadly Abandoned.
Graphics
“Like a mail merge on steroids”. If you need to publish a document which consists of a large data set of items, such as a catalog or directory, this is a solution. Automation ensures your items “pour” into the appropriate slots of a template and it includes features like dictionary-style references in the header or footer.
Find more than American forests on Kaboompics
Free classy-looking stock photos in 13 categories, including Still Life, Interiors, Travel, Home Decor, Beauty, Things, Office, People and Urban.
Find ‘dupes’ of photos you are after by uploading one of your own. They call categories “aesthetics” and have them labelled things like granola, goth, euro summer, artsy, wellness and one I’d never heard of ‘coastal granddaughter’. Seems aimed at the Pinterest crowd.
At face value
Fonts
15 modern workhorse faces. One looks like a reboot of Impact, and the other of Apple Garamond.
Say yes to SN Pro
Open source and free font, reminiscent of Souvenir but without the 70s vibe.
Racing inspired display face. Three other attention-grabbing faces to check out while you’re there.
You want Moore fonts I hear?
Easy on the eyes, hard on the ears
Music
Having run out of new ways to sell use more compressors, Izotope has turned towards Dynamic tube Saturation in a followup to their popular Trash plugin.
Plugin Alliance Trinity Shaper
Transient shaper (enhancer). These both look good and if I didn’t already have tools that did these jobs I would go for them.
Keep track of bookings, invoices and projects.
Learn film audio editing. One week trial period offered.
Community builder platform. Chat, activity feed, events, membership management, courses, livestreams.
A suite of 3 effects: Obscene, a multimode distortion, Filter, a dual multimode filter and Shimmer a reverb “for bright spaces”. There is a discount for owners of Vast (Reverb), Fury or Punish (both distortions) so that seems a nice gesture if you are just starting out in your effects journey. However I have already got Vast and Punish, so what more can these bring me? Is it lower CPU usage, like Sonible and zplane’s Lite versions? There already exists a Punish Lite so I’m a bit confused as to where Obscene sits in their range.
“Explore, create hear and play microtonal tuning systems” If you are interested in alternate scales, this one lets you search for then try out a bucketload of scales. Multiple octaves supported, and you can even send MIDI out from the browser to a synth. If you choose IAC Midi driver, your synth app will "hear" the MIDI on the bus and you can test the scale in the synth or instrument of choice.
You can also download Scala files for those apps that support it, then play the scale with your fingers or a sequencer.
Generate midi based on choose Scale, Key, Bars, Tempo, Note Duration and Octave.
DJ app for iOS with an IAP for lighting control using the DMX protocol.
Free (PWYW) tape simulator
Free tone, dynamics and “dirt”.
Mixland UTA-D UnFairchild 670M mkII
A Fairchild compressor with many settings. High end sound for a high end price.
Sibilance Control - it’s not a de-esser, according to them. It tames the volume of the sibilant components of the audio. I guess if you find de-essers hard to run or don’t like the results you’re getting with yours, check this out. I want it of course but I just bought two De-essers recently so this will have to wait.
In Flite entertainment
Modern-looking synth/sampler including many effects. >2.5GB bundled sample library. Free player version to try out.
303s look complicated, but there are harder things than this
303 style bassline synth. Includes a talented sequencer with 32 pattern slots, and onboard Reverb, EchoVerb, SynthVerb, Stereo or Mono Chorus, 4 Band-Fuzz and Flanger.
Plugins or MaxforLive device which is an instrument derived from a bird’s chirp.
Tribe Instruments Dimension Chorus
Hey a free chorus!
Maybe people don’t use chorus much, so they don’t buy them much because they just use the one that came with their DAW and they go “oh, it’s orright innit” so when the plugin vendors want to give something away it’s often a chorus because people weren’t buying it anyway.
On the (mountain) road again
In Case You Missed It: Mountainroad DSP Lumina Delay
The world’s first parametric and fully immersive delay. Independently control Volume, Pan and EQ of each delay bounce.
In 2019, Songtradr became the largest music licensing platform in the world. It purports to “provide music creators and owners with [a] free content management system where all of their music assets can be stored, discovered, curated and monetized.” A very slickly-produced Color-graded motionVFX- looking hero video demonstrates things like searching for music you can buy rights to use in a video editing program, and also using natural-language (read: reverse AI) search to find music you need for Sync Licensing.
Before you have music to sell on Songtradr, you need to write it first. Many people do that with others. Sessionwire is a high-end/deluxe collaboration system which includes features like text or voice messaging your collaborators, and a separate voice channel so you can chat about the work while you play it and I can tell you this is an issue so I’m glad to hear there’s a solution. Plus file sharing and session recording.
All this is too hard for their team to implement across multiple browsers, so your collaborators must use a Chromium based one.
REW - Room EQ Wizard Room Acoustics Software
Software to calibrate your speakers to your room you’ve shoved all your mixing gear into.
Kontakt Instruments
“Analog-inspired textures.” Instruments including keys, guitars, strings, woodwinds, brass have been sampled to multiple tape decks and slowed down to drop them an octave and reveal rich details.
Layer up to three sound sources simultaneously to create your own unique sounds. There are >250 sound sources and >300 presets
“A loop based sample player that extracts the sounds from your dreams and injects them into your music” They also make Glasis, a 1950’s glass xylophone.
Acoustic guitar “octave tremolos”. I’m sure they sound nice, Sonic Zest makes some quality stuff.
Not just for Metal
Impact Soundworks Hyper Metals
”clangs, slams, and textures” made from metal hitting things.
Pasttofuturesamples Sp12 Drums
Emu SP-12 Drum machine recorded through an API preamp to Lynx Aurora N. I don’t know what that is and that’s OK.
actual harmonium not included
Presets
If you’ve been following this blog since its inception, you’d know I’m not a great resource for presets. I have nothing against them. The lack of their appearance is more me avoiding them somewhat as there are so many standalone products I lust after.
Organ, 2 harmoniums and a Sur Peti
Typos included at no charge
100 presets for epic pads, textures and soundscapes using Infiltrator.
iOS
For helping find the photos you want to show others, or just look at yourself.
What will you find?
Free app to search for text within your image library.
Fly over a plane consisting of all the thumbnails of your photos so you can see them with Godlike powers.
File transfer between almost any two devices. Size of files that can be transferred is only limited by your device’s upper limits. Files are copied privately and your files do not get compressed, so no loss of quality.
An extensively featured shopping list app, with the usual stuff like sharing but also barcode scanning with food expiration alerts — great to reduce food wastage, item grouping, and AI powered suggestions. I use AnyList at the moment but that's starting to look dated compared to this one, so they might need to up their UI and features game.
Not be be confused with this GroceryBot:
Somehow the ugly duckling of chat apps Discord has stuck around, and since people can runt heir own servers, they use it for nonstandard functions such as file transfer between devices. This app lets you add a grocery list function to your Discord server. Weird, but here we are.
iOS Music
(Link is to main page in case you’re interested in the other platforms) Out on macOS for a bit, this is now ready for iPads. It’s one of those all-in-one type grooveboxes that you really should watch a demo video of to get the full idea. Congburn calls is a “4-Track Granular Looper, Sequencer, Synthesizer”
It’s not new for iOS but is for macOS. And there’s always someone with no iPhone, no iPad but with a mac* for whom it was not available. And ICYMI, it’s a playable instrument with high levels of realism. Many add on instruments are available. The quality is very high, so get these when they have sales.
*— Yes there are a few Mac owners with Android phones.
A collection of items for Drambo, AUM, Koala including templates and scripts, plus other creative endeavors. I must admit the Ko-fi site does not seem to have the categories easily discernible.
Monitor your mix “directly from [your] smartphone”. Competition with ListenTo. Free trial offered.
“back up your entire music library on Hezel and your playlists, songs and music videos are safe” I understand about backing up the playlist, but for subscription streaming services they have all the songs anyway. Maybe they mean the local copies a few people still use?
Create cover artwork for playlists. Template driven and full features are unlocked with an IAP, but it’s kinda pricey to be a no-brainer.
Deal them some cards
Podcasting
Smart Links for Podcasters. Includes attractive design and analytics to see where your podcast is being shared.
It’s tomato colored for a reason
Samples
Sevens are black for some synesthetes
Small library of samples, Abelton templates and Courseware.
Drums, loops, presets and VSTs. The VSTs include a few I'm not familiar with such as BigWerks Chop Shop and Hot Sauce, which is sometimes derided for being overly simple. Samples across 24 different genres including Dirty South, Chill Out and Dubstep. Free items available.
Chop Shop didn’t make it into this edition, but also did
AI
Access CGPT, Claude, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Gemini, PaLM, Mistral, Meta Llama, Bard and more all through one portal.
Create AI chatbots from your knowledge base. We are living in the future.
A “revenue intelligence” platform. Not sure what that means. Seems to have been chosen by larger companies. Looks like it uses AI to forecast and recommend workflows to boost sales?
Your own echo chamber?
This one got a lot of flack online. What it does is creates an environment that looks like it’s a social media site, but it’s just you and AI-generated profiles that all reply to your post in slightly different ways.
Free tier offered. Works with Teams, Zoom, Google Meats, Slack and more. Good luck trying to convince your IT department to hook it up with Office365 though. Most places are resistant to 3rd party tool integration. If you’re the boss, that’s a different story.
“makes your meetings, emails, and messages more efficient with AI-generated summaries, transcripts, playback, and highlights.”
Watch out Read, Apple and Microsoft have you in their sights
Video
“Lightroom presets and profiles, After Effects presets, storytelling tools, Apple Shortcuts, and more” Some freebies offered.
Web based video editing.
Orange you glad you said Olive?
Video editor to challenge Davinci Resolve. Still in alpha, so you wouldn't want to rely on this for a proper project yet. Works on the 3 major platforms.
CRM
a platform that helps you manage your clients, automate your work, and grow your business. Create contracts, invoices, forms, workflows, and client portals with customizable templates and features.
Mac
Give apps their marching orders
Automatically close apps you aren’t using. Menu bar based. On social media I see many former Android users lusting after this feature, unaware that on iOS only certain apps are permitted to run in the background, such as if they’re playing music. But on macOS these restrictions don’t exist and it is possible for them to take up RAM and CPU in the background. If you forget to close apps on your Mac, check this out.
No relation to the 90s game
Maybe more for people who do Mac Admin than home users, this utility lets you download specific versions of macOS installers automatically and can also download Firmware updates.
A camera app to make meetings more fun. I love these apps to alter your camera stream with effects, but not everyone does, plus they do tax your already-taxed CPU. At least back in the Intel days. Apple Silicon probably has some power to spare.
Add branded overlays with logos or text, create an eye-catching away screen plus control all the usual parameters such as highlights & shadows, saturation, hue and exposure.
Free version offered, then subscription for the fancy features including presentation enhancements. I get some of these features in Camo Studio so I’m not personally convinced about the monthly fee.
Animation
Open source 2D animation software, available for The Big Three. It’s nice when they do this, but if often means the Mac version suffers from feeling like a ported version.
Not just a tween fad
Frame-by-frame animation in the style of “Disney & Warner Bros.” No Hanna Barbera? Three tiers of pricing, the highest of which gets you 1920 × 1080 resolution.
Home Automation
Add HomeKit support to devices that don’t support it, such as Ring, Nest & Nest Cameras, TP-Link Kasa Smart Home, Belkin Wemo, SwitchBot and UniFi Protect.
Use your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac to control your Homebridge accessories and setup automations. So here’s something that’s alien to me, possibly because it’s outside my pay grade or just not as popular in Australia. This leads us to EcoBee and myQ… more smart home stuff. I don’t intend to make this blog about hardware, but here we are.
Social Media
“A decentralized social network”. Perhaps like Mastodon? Don’t know much about it except it has developers and artists who embraced crypto and NFTs.
Marketing
Internet marketing suite consisting of a site ranking comparison, keywords explorer, site audit, rank tracker and content explorer.
Presentation
”a tool for recording and sharing videos of your webcam and screen to communicate better at work.”
“The fastest way to record and edit videos. …The best parts of Loom, Descript, and Scribe in one tool.”
Free taster version, then subscription for features like transcriptions. That compute has to be paid for somewhere.
Get those dragons to earn their pay
Abandoned
Here’s a section I’ve never included before. Back in the heyday of Web2.0 tools, sites used to come and go like the weather. Some had the resources and courtesy to email you with a closure date, others would just vanish one day. I used to look at a section in Techcrunch called the Deadpool (he was just a comic book character then I imagine) to see what projects had failed.
A “back to basic [sic]” todo list. The website still uses the bird icon for X.
Audified inTone
This was — well if you own it, it still works on older systems I guess — a music app for playing live. Alas this has been discontinued. There is no labor of love. Programmer time is money, and they don’t think it will sell enough copies to make that money back. While they slept on it worked on other projects, we have Nembrini Nexus and Session (mentioned in Tool Much Fun 8) instead.
And so the adventure continues. I hope you found something useful to help you create, tell someone about what you created, or at least something amusing.