Tool Much Fun 12
The wonders never cease, as the saying goes. This edition offers:
Music, Samples, Kontakt, Podcasts, Fonts, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Animation, Video, Development, AI, Social Media, Training, File sharing and Media Consumption.
Music
Free delay. Not the most amazing name, but it has a few features that might be missing from your stock DAW.
While you're there, this rising plugin company also make F(l)after, a multi band compressor, SSF, a dynamic filter, Further, a clean reverb, Cramit, an OTT-style compressor, Clips, a dynamics processor which seems to be a clipper and/or compressor and Nase, a widener. Looks like the freebie worked. I got something and found out about the rest of their range.
Above the air is space
Create “rich sonic spaces & lush, evolving atmospheres” with ModeAudio’s first offering to the plugin world with this hybrid reverb and delay.
Limit your visits to the Kwik-e-mart
How loud our media is is quite important, whether it’s understanding dialog or getting the right energy for dancers to dance to. This one says it can “support multiple loudness types simultaneously. The limiter can be configured to use LUFS, True Peak, RMS, and/or Peak loudness types.” It’s a multi-component package that can be purchased in various combinations of limiter, compressor and optimiser.
United Plugins offers a full-featured reverb where you can choose two different reverb types in the one plugin, which saves CPU and reduces setup complexity.
Verbs A-F were no good. But this one…
TAL’s reverb fully declares it’s artificial rather than using Convolution algorithms. They offer grain control to add color to the effected sound, and Freeze to make dreamy ambiences, as well as more common features like wet/dry mix.
Modern Upright Piano. They make good quality stuff. Please note they use their own audio engine, so you have another to neighbor for Kontakt, Soundpaint, Halion and so on.
Spitfire LABS Intimate Grand Piano
I’ve never read a bad thing about a Spitfire product, only complaints when they went subscription based. I will therefore assume a good quality sound based on their reputation alone.
“KO is a VST3/AU plugin delivering heavy saturation for drums and bass.” Oh and “Analog grunge, digital precision”. Now you have a companion tool for XLN’s drum plugin XO. I like that one of the knobs is called “Wut”.
Yet another drum library from a musician I hadn’t heard of. If you have not yet chosen a drum library then give it a look. At first glance I didn’t notice anything unique but it sounds well produced.
Guys… that’s a Centaur, not a Centurion.
Saturation plugin, modelled after and designed to look like an unnamed guitar pedal. This one appears basic at first glance with three knobs: gain, treble and output, plus the useful wet/dry mix. However, you’re given more control with High and Low-pass filters for both input and output, oversampling and preset saving.
Add warmth or angry saturation with Kiive’s tube modeling that features three circuits. Also includes wet/dry mix and oversampling.
Get your tubes tized.
If convolution reverbs still aren’t good enough for you…
Continue the pursuit of fooling humans into thinking they are in various sized spaces with this high-end acoustic modeling plugin. Might be overkill for Plain Old Music unless money is an object that you have. Perhaps more suited for movies and game work.
Become your own boss
With no indication it’s from Melbourne, Australia this rounded-rectangle designed service will give you tasks, social media management and analytics to try to help people listen to your tunes rather than revisit their collection of ABBA and Justin Timberlake songs.
3D version not included
Designed by another musician you may not have heard of (Curbi) this delay removes the barriers between you and “lush, evolving textures”. Complexity is not a worry as the interface seems straightforward, with only four main values plus once again the wet/dry mix. This type of delay can add a lot of new resonances and tones to percussive sounds, so bland percussion tracks can be a new source of inspiration.
Although well respected in the audio community, Acustica turned me off their range with their choice of a clunky installer years ago. This one has multiple circuits for clipping, so you’ll get louder-sounding tracks. Up to 1024x! oversampling to get clean output.
Doubler and widener in one. Now before you reel back and say “I don’t need this, I already have a doubler and a widener” just remember there are tons of beginners running out of CPU because they overload a channel with too many single plugins. Each one not only adds its own overhead and thus latency, so combining functions into one can help. Softube makes quality stuff so if you don’t have a tool for these jobs then check it out.
Kiive Audio V-Comp by AudioScape
Wow, this modelling thing can get quite pricey. Although it’s not much to look at, the magic will be in the sound. Includes Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), wet/dry and oversampling.
Lets you detune up or down in a range of granularity, plus an onboard 3-band EQ, mix and pan control. Rated at under 5ms latency.
Twenty eight effects modules that can be loaded into seven slots in a semi-modular fashion. If you’re not sure what that means it is largely to do with reordering the effects and choosing which outputs flow into which other effect or get sent directly out to the main output.
Control your Drums with this combo of saturation, compressor and harmonic enhancer. Also available in a bundle with The God Particle. The first demo track does sound punchy. The second fails to impress me. They also make The Spirit and The Prince, plus a suite called state machine, none of which I’d heard of before.
Samples
From the makers of Beastverb and Beastdelay, these packs are heavy on processed guitar, but there are also some keyboard and bass offerings as well. Largely loop based, you are given a choice of 8- or 16-bar varieties for convenience.
Kaifu Audio TOBER 2023 Sample Pack
280 samples, including 36 new guns, lasers, various fx and more.
236MB of “bent, spliced and warped” pianos, synths, pads and other soundmaking things.
A range (arrange?) of grungier, dirty loops and one-shots with much character due to being recorded using AMS Neve 1073 preamps, an Empirical Labs EL8-X Distressor, and 1/4 inch analog tape (unspecified).
Self-paced training for beatmakin’
Largely training/courseware oriented, these combo packages include samples and plugins, all by musicians you mightn’t have heard of that have all been asked to wear black for the photoshoot. They have been built to use the free UVI workstation. Sample packs are also offered, in over 8 genres. No affiliation with the text editor that no one seems to be able to exit.
Keep the sound flowing
These folks look serious. A system for realtime collaboration between audio and video teams. Includes transcription tools. Plus a cool feature is you can create a page with 54 buttons to let clients add notes to timecodes of a piece using an iPad so they don't have to retype items repeatedly or use text replacement. Integration with Sample, Frame.io, Avid Media Composer. They also make Bounce Factory, an add-on tool for automating bouncing different version of your sessions automatically. Subscription based.
Yes we did cover Eby in the last one, but hey why not support the smaller companies. This pack includes 175 loops (including fills and crashes) and 420 One Shots (including multiple velocities and round robins).
Mainly cinematic samples aimed at either movie making or darker, brooding, or disturbing pieces. For example Cello, Drones, Bells, Rhythms & Pulses, Pads, and Soundscapes. Some freebies offered if you sign up to their newsletter.
1.4GB of samples from an Ensoniq Gizmo.
Kontakt Instruments
A Kontakt version of a Roland synth from the 80s, unnamed probably due to licensing or legal reasons.
Fluffy Audio Echoes of the Earth
A large library of world music samples.
Podcasts
Find good pods with goodpods
A global community for podcast lovers. Over 100 categories to browse. I already have so many podcasts in my queue that I may never catch up. An iOS app and Android app are offered for convenience. I don’t think this is trying to keep podcasts within the app like Spotify does.
G-type to go with your G-Verb (see music section above)
A range of faces, both headline sans-serif and not-too-crazy display faces that have some personality.
A range of strong faces, all 100% free for personal and commercial use.
Medium sized range of faces, both headline and display that are modern, but in their quest to stand out have a few quirky or questionable glyphs. A few freebies are offered.
A library of faces ranging from readable workhorses to zany display faces. The ones I tested downloading all took me to Github (ugh) so they appear to be free. One was covered by the SIL Open Font License for example. Please check each license prior to using it in a commercial project.
Mac
Show what appointments are upcoming in a nice big, clear font. For those with vision or concentration problems perhaps.
Remote desktop (suing Microsoft’s RDP) and Terminal Server for macOS.
Those controls don’t look that advanced
iOS
Guitar amp sim, including a host of onboard effects such as compressor, overdrive, cabinet IRs, chorus, phaser, delay, reverb, noise gate, filters and a tuner.
Over on Threads there seems to be an unending stream of people who want to complain about being unable to transfer files from iOS to Android devices, preferring to do this rather than actually try searching for any solutions. Instantly people rush to the comments and suggest several options, such as:
Transfer Files Cross-Platform. No Setup, No Signup
Free, secure, cross-platform.
Share files with a link, send to specific devices or use their plugin to use your old email-attachment-based workflows. I am not sure if I’ve heard of Rakuten. They sound familiar.
Former contender to Youtube's throne is back with an editor. Includes crop & fit media, grids and “easy audio”, plus stickers and text animations. An AU$12 IAP will get you more features.
Graphics
I still use staples sometimes
A range of staples to add grunge to your images.
Astrophotographers rejoice! There is a tool to geek out on all the star tracking data you’ll ever need, including our favorite big ball of burning hydrogen. Calculate exposure times, depth of field and all the gory details.
A range of phones and screens in various environments for you to showcase your designs.
Allows you to upload two images and use a slider to compare them, like you sometimes see on photography plugins websites.
This is an Austrian artist that does some eyepoppin’ stuff. There are items for sale on Patreon which you can explore via their Linktree. For example there is an 11GB item called the HIVE visual pack, but there’s no description and I don’t know which HIVE they’re referring to. If you do, let me know.
Animation
Vector based animation software that has a number of desirable features, including easing. Free starter, then subscription based if you need more features.
An alternative to After Effects. Includes layers, node editing and pinning. Export in movie formats. Free to get started, then up or subscription when you need unlimited exports.
Become a buddy of the famous tube
Manage and drive growth of your Youtube channel with AI-powerered tools that assist with optimizing thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and tags, plus analytics. US$3.75 a month (and they knew I was in Australia - nice!) and then $16.50/month for the real deal: over 50 features.
Development
Software for design, animation and prototyping. Integrates with Figma.
Companion iOS app is here.
Educational UI Kits For All Designers,
Reclaim tens of gigabytes of your storage used for various Xcode caches. Yes this is Mac-specfic, but I added it to the development section because normal folks are less likely to have Xcode installed.
Create pleasurable websites in Penpot’s pleasurable interface
Design, prototype and code web projects collaboratively with this beautiful looking platform. Includes templates and an API for connecting it to other things. Free to start, then $175 per month for “the whole team”.
Full-featured and eye-pleasing web design platform which competes with Figma, Webflow, Contenful, Unbounce and Ceros, most of which I was also not familiar with. Add-ons are available for even more features. Free for hobbyists, then US$8 per site per month to rise to the next tier.
AI
Don’t wait for Microsoft.
Presentation creation platform. Makes multi-platform presentations. Integrates with Gong, Salesforce and other services with cute icons. Free to get started but no AI features included in that tier, then US$16/month to get that plus analytics, >100 templates, PDF export and customized branding.
It knows what you want
Don’t write a saga with Saga
Use AI to reduce the tedium of writing notes and tasks. Write, check grammar, brainstorm new ideas and translate your text into other languages. GPT-4o powered and US$6/month.
User interface design. Integrates with Slack and Jira. Import from Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD.Free to start, then US$10 per month per designer.
Social Media
You can mix your posts these days
Self-hosted social media management. Free to get started, then US$299 per annum aimed at teams and agencies. Supports Facebook, Mastodon and X for free, then Pro gives you Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and Youtube. To reiterate, you need access to a server that you can install a Docker container or PHP app if you know how to do those things.
Post scheduling plus cross posting to X, Mastodon & Bluesky. Zapier integration and analytics.
Training
Photoshop and Creative Design Training
An international community site, perhaps aimed at removing some of the power held by Meta for their successful Groups feature.
A mixture of free and subscriptions, some of the rates seem quite high compared to what is around in Discord for free, or Patreon. I guess it depends if you get one on one support from the trainer/administrator.
Media Consumption
Streaming content finder. Find over 200,000 free on-demand channels from around the world. No added ads.
That will have to do, as there are too many items to discover, and the more I add to each one the longer you have to wait. I hope you’ll join me for the next instalment.