Tool Much Fun
It’s a big world, and every day or two I find something interesting to enhance your creativity. Here’s a round up of a few things I have found. I considered adding the audio items to the next What’s On The Wishlist post, but today they are in a subsection. Just a disclaimer that these are just on my radar and I may or may not have tried them out. I doubt anyone’s online travels are exactly the same these days, so I hope you haven’t heard of at least one of these. I can tell by your twitching eye that you can’t wait to see the goodies below:
Web stuff
A link-in-bio site. I use Biosites and I also have a personal About Me page that I should add to the about me page of this site.
A video editor customised for social media. It seems to be online only as I don’t see a link to download an app. Includes a free tier which thankfully is not time-limited. (I hate that, as I always sign up and get too busy and then the time runs out)
Video
An alternative video hosting site to compete with YouTube to some extent. Or just to give us more choices than that, Vimeo or pure hosting such as Wistia. Flipboard.video is an example of a channel that publishes there.
An online tool for creating short animations, most likely for attention-grabbing social media posts.
A site for searching bits of dialog to find a matching video clip. Will this replace animated GIFs? Probably not for now, but still useful.
Writing
IaWriter is an app for writers full of tools to make writing easier. It even detects AI written text so you can avoid that. Includes focus/distraction-free writing environment, style check, syntax highlighting and Markdown support.
Onetap screenshot
iOS Apps
…is a special kind of keyboard which lets you trigger Shortcuts from within the keyboard interface. I occasionally want the kind of functionality offered by Typinator which lets me take the contents of the clipboard and paste them inside some string of text rather than using Text Replacement, which is static.
For creating mockups of your future app.
Mac Utilities
DynamicLake Pro and NotchNook. These are inspired from the iPhone’s Dynamic Island, a feature born out of what could be considered a design flaw but was more a result of design decisions. Mainly that People Don’t like The Bezel. I don’t have an issue with it. Tech has to go somewhere, right? But we’ve all been watching too many sci-fi movies. So then the MacBook gets a Notch as well, but Apple doesn’t bother ensuring everything matches across their product lines. So we have thrird party utilities for that. As I mentioned on Threads about the above app, these two are in mild danger of being Sherlocked as early as next year, if Apple doesn’t find a way to hide the camera better. My take: NotchNook seems to have extra features which make it more like FilePane which is a drag-things-to-the-menuExtra type of utility. You can drag draggable items there and perform actions on them.
Graphics
Rightfont promo screenshot
Since Font Manager Pro has been discontinued — it still works on my Monterey machine — I will eventually need to get a replacement font manager. FontBook is just too basic for my needs. Fontbase appears to be free so I’ll check that out first. If money were no object, I would try Extensis Connect, the boringly-named successor to Suitcase.
Free but ad-heavy text effect generator. Create your item and download it quicker than firing up Photoshop and searching through a bunch of Actions you bought 3 years ago, or using ArtText.
A resource and good old fashioned website reviewing and discussing titles from TV shows and movies.
Find pros to evaluate and critique your tunes.
Music
Music feedback and promotion site. The way it works is that you buy scrip/credits from them and they’re used to buy time from the reviewers who will give you feedback on your song. Should no one reply within 7 days, you get your credit refunded so you can try again I guess?
An all-in-one online solution for sharing your music and/or collaborating with other musicians. A sponsor of Logic Pro devotee musician Seids but I couldn’t find if she has an affiliate link.
No, not that Lister. Talent-finding/hiring site for audio workers. I’m not on there yet but I’ll have a look when I have time.
An “Interactive audio solution”. I’m not sure what that means but it looks like they have big plans. They also appear to make plugins: Mastering Suite, Channel Router, Convolution Reverb and so on. But they’re not for sale separately like a normal plugin vendor. There seems to be a free tier, but the pricing plans look like they’re not for bedroom producers or even small studios. We're talking about movie and large-company games projects.
If I were them I’d take that intellectual investment and release the separate plugins for sale, even as lite versions acting as a promotion… ensuring that before you are allowed to buy and download them you know all about the upgrade to the full deal.
A music distribution platform along the lines of Distrokid.
Davinci Resolve plugins
Although I haven’t used Resolve for a project yet, I came across a couple of plugins that look interesting.
Audio Apps and Plugins
Theaudiopunks Telefunken Echomixer
Possibly the coolest named plugin this month. It's a preamp, distortion and spring reverb all-in-one.
They also make The Great British Spring — a spring reverb only. Both on sale at the time I’m writing this.
Autochroma. No chrome detected.
Granular based effects. How could this be bad?
MIDI coming in or leaving your computer sometimes needs a little guidance, as it doesn't take long making music with MIDI to find out that the device or app you’re using doesn’t give you all the options you need. This app acts as a filter/processor to make the MIDI do what you want. Compare with apps on iOS like MidiFire by Audeonic and Midiflow by Johannes Doerr.
There’s also an iOS app but it mentions connecting to BomeBoxes, which seems to be competition to the Blokas Midihub I’d already bought a Midihub before I knew about the BomeBox hardware, and I haven’t used it yet so it wouldn’t make sense for me to order one.
I bought the mfx series of plugins for the Mac but I couldn’t get them to work in Logic Pro, possibly because of Logic’s odd handling of MIDI. Apparently the latest version improves this so it might be worth me having another try.
Samples
I have read a lot of people posting “where can I get samples?” I have never found that to be a problem, but I suppose it also depends on what kind of samples. I’m considering creating a page of only sample sites so I can just post them the link.
a search & shop site for sound effects.
this one includes a link to some free downloads. I haven’t checked if they’re also royalty free.
That should keep you off the streets for a while.