Tool Much Fun 14
In case you’ve just joined us, a small reminder. Some of the items below have been briefly investigated, others browsed, a small number have been purchased. You’ll find comments but there is not enough time for full reviews. This edition offers:
Fonts, Motion Graphics, Samples, Music, Kontakt, iOS, 3D,Web, Communication, Productivity, Publishing, Mac, Training, Development, Video, Graphics, AI, and Social Media.
EDIT 10 Jan 2025
I figured that some of you might find it useful to have all these links in a table form, so I have created a Google Docs spreadsheet of the titles and links to each item. I am also considering using Raindrop as well, so they are all bookmarks you can save for later. Here it is, I hope you find it useful:
Enough opener.
Get to the goodies!
Enough opener. Get to the goodies!
Fonts
A large range of readable workhorses and some more exciting display faces.
Form an orderly queue to buy these
With great funkiness comes lower readability
An interesting range of fonts mostly in the useful/readable category.
Beasts of England Newsagent (via I Love Typography)
An old-school font with some delicious swash caps.
A range of fonts. The display ones are creative and are largely unreadable, but could perhaps be used as inspirational design elements.
Swash it as much as you want to
This boutique foundry creates a set of fonts ranging from classy remakes of classic fonts to more modern faces. I am fond of most of what I see. They also make a Font Starter Pack, which can be one-off purchase or subscription to continue getting new faces, but that’s just for personal use only. Usage examples are on their FAQ.
Filippos Fragkogiannis’ Vercetti Regular
Bored with Helvetica? Give this clean sans-serif a try.
Styles? We got styles.
Ten attractive fonts for impactful headlines and pleasant body copy.
Modern, retro, eclectic and “fashion” fonts to stand out from the crowd.
It’s hot at the emberline
An old-school font for vintage projects.
Over 75 font families (aren’t they called typefaces?) including clean headline fonts and wackier display faces.
Zachry’s favorites after The Fall
Not just TrueType… TypeType
A number of smart and useful fonts from New Zealand.
Install Sonoma in Sonoma for extra clout
A large range of highly readable open-source fonts, many headlines but some display also.
A mix of rough and sophisticated, which is what Australia is
A range of strong fonts from Newcastle. They don’t have an online shop, so you have to contact them to arrange licensing.
Motion Graphics
Marcos Silva’s AxisFlow for After Effects
“The easiest way to built your expressions libraries right inside After Effects”. Subscription required. Not to be confused with:
Go with it
This “gives After Effects an intuitive curve editor to adjust keyframe easing.”
Samples
It was a a bit quiet in the world of samples for the last edition, but we’re back with a vengeance. There are too many to write notes for each one so I leave that to the reader for now.
Includes 8-bit, hiphop, phonk, horror, atmosphere & liminal spaces, 90s retro and more.
Sample Packs, Royalty Free Sounds & Loops
Juice is good for you
Waveloaf Dark Ambience Volume 1
High Quality Samples, Packs & MIDI
Presets for Analog Lab, other Arturia, MIDI, Omnisphere, Serum, Output Portal (rare) plus drum samples.
Music
MyAudioFactory ProAudioDeclipper
If you have a poor recording with too much gain, this one enhances audio quality by restoring the original dynamic range of clipped and saturated audio, effectively eliminating distortion caused by clipping and saturation.”
Creative effects plugin which splits the incoming sound into transient and the rest of the tonal components so you can apply effects to each of the channels separately.
Samplescience Organic Padscapes
Just a reminder that with regards to food, “organic” does not mean “no chemicals were used during farming”.
“Audio Collaboration & Feedback Platform for Musicians and Producers”
At first this site appears to be for Windows-only software, but then I saw my preferred fruit logo. This app seems to be like Omnibus or the more well-known Rogue Amoeba Loopback. Donationware.
A few of their other apps like Voicemeeter are Windows only, but VBAN appears to be an streaming-audio-over-network app like BlueCat but it includes iOS and Android clients.
Xfer records Dimension Expander
From the makers of Serum, Cthulu and LFOTool, this one… expands dimensions? I couldn’t find a description. They also give away OTT, DeltaModulator, DJMFilter and 8-bit shaper.
WaveMind Audio Dead Horse Overdrive
In Case You Missed It, i.e. new to me or never previously posted on this blog but not necessarily new.
A free “delay based on a communications technique that uses our closest cosmic neighbor, the moon, as a reflector for radio waves.”
A free reverb based on the Bricasti M7, with 234 presets over 11 reverb types.
A “creative audio processing tool designed to transform your sound into ambient textures and spaces. With a combination of reverb, waveshaping, modulation, and spectral processing[…]”
Sauron called… he wants his ring back
A free cut-down version of their synth MYTH.
Boost your dirt
Add dirt, body, tape and boost to your bass track for free.
Shift your scape
A generative music tool for Reaktor which can create modern beat-based tunes dynamically, plus you can save scenes and use the built in sequencer to create a whole song. Also includes the ability to morph between said scenes in a variable number of bars. It’s quite remarkable, and for the haters, it claims to not use AI.
I find found Datamind back in TMF 6. This item lets you “instantly transform […] recordings and samples into a playable instrument” using machine-learned algorithms. Includes modulation features and stereo imaging.
Use AI to play a melody with four different instruments.
Here are some that appeared for Black Friday sales that I hadn’t heard of
Transcribe sheet music from recordings with Artificial Intelligence.
Lovely Rita
A low-latency metering system to keep an eye on the levels of multiple inputs simultaneously with 8 choices of algortims. The Bridge lets you host multiple instances of Massive Meter.
Here’s one that didn’t seem to make a big splash, but it’s still around
Billed as an “audio plugin multiverse” this one has a large collection of audio generators/instruments in its library which you then push though 43 different effects to make wonderful sounds.
“The best way to make comments, exchange ideas, and organize notes on any audio file.”
Kontakt
Cinématique Instruments Korn (free version)
Load your own samples to “turn your sound into a granular cloud or even create extraordinary textures”
iOS
General
Ambient sounds generator for relaxin’.
Music
A synth specially designed to make tonal kicks.
MPE & Polyphonic midi controller. Standalone app, not AUv3. It’s not clear how well it would work with hosts like AUM or apeMatrix.
Another standalone app, this one seems to be a modular synth type of thing. One purchase gets you an iPhone, iPad and Mac version. Doesn’t seem to have a feature to record the output as WAV so it could be tricky to use simultaneously with other music apps, unless you record the audio from a device with minijack into another device.
Once again a standalone app, this one a drum machine specialising in off time signatures and “asymmetrical rhythmic structures”.
Back to the world of AUv3 plugins. This one supports Abelton Link, and includes a sequencer to go along with its two oscillator synth.
Audio thing continues expanding their range of interesting noisemakers with this “test equipment FX & generator”.
Satoshi Kajii’s ShortReverse, StereoLoco & Jacquardi
Goes well with cola
shortReverse is a simple tool to reverse the incoming audio signal. One drawback is it can't be automated on and off, so you'd have to press the activation button manually or do something fancy with bus sends.
StereoLoco is a basic widener.
Jacquardi will send MIDI CCs in a wave, up and down those precious 128 steps, so it will “twist the knobs” of some other synth app you have, so you don't need to do it manually.
Photography
Track the position of the sun for shot matching and finding the golden hour.
Art
Overlay dazzling graphics on top of real world objects in real-time.
AR (Augmented Reality)
Capture a 3D recording of a person —or object?— and play it back in another location with Augmented Reality tech.
3D
Choose your avatar
Web
It “helps you save anything from your favorite websites: video, audio, photos or gifs.” Downloader of videos from Youtube and Bluesky. Free.
ICYMI
This lets you not only crawl a site for broken links, it can create sitemaps, discover duplicates and title errors and integrates with Google Analytics. A few features are free but US$259 a year provides a long list of webby goodness. Compare with Ahrefs mentioned in TMF10.
Communication
A communications (read:chat) platform consisting of an app and server backend which “provides an enterprise-grade control and management for the workplace to provide a compliant alternative to WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.” Includes video conferencing, voice messages, editable messages, polls, threaded conversations, screen sharing, file sharing and read receipts. Starts at €5 per user per month. iOS and Desktop app plus a web app at https://app.element.io This is actually an ICYMI for me as I used to use it when it was called Riot when trying out IRC capable apps.
Productivity
Looks delicious. No wait, that’s poutine
Publishing
Interactive Online Publications.
“Turn your PDF into interactive flipbook presentation that works flawlessly on all devices. Customize, share and track how it performs in real time” I thought the days of this were over, but unless you really really dive into web design it’s not that easy to make a document look like what you envision. That part is easier in InDesign or to a lesser extent Canva.
Mac
A free app to control your 3rd party monitor brightness like you can with Apple displays.
Full-featured EQ app and per-app volume control, plus supports AU plugins! Coming-soon pro version will offer a virtual audio device á la Loopback or Sound Siphon.
Create menus for shortcuts.
Make it sound how you like
Record anything - screen, camera, microphone. This seems to be a better designed OBS to some extent.
Github direct link. A replacement for Bartender — which everyone went sour on when it changed ownership— for controlling and organising your MenuExtras.
Capture those Polys
Bond never had this gadget
A diagnostic utility that provides a tool where you can click on a window and it will jump to the process that is managing that app and then you can use Console-like tools to inspect it more thoroughly. Donationware.
A lightweight tool used to smooth scrolling and set scroll direction independently for your mouse.
Mouse & Keyboard Metrics bundle
Track your mouse and keyboard usage and see heatmaps and graphs. There used to be another app like this I tried once, but I can’t recall the name.
Do Macs dream of electric sheep?
Allows you to graphically view your “Mac's sleeping habits, including when it didn't sleep, when it was pretending to be asleep (screen & sound were off, but the Mac never slept), apps that prevented sleep, apps that keep the Mac in insomnia, Insta-wakes, OS updates, restarts, settings were changed and more.”
A Safari Extension for automatically enabling Picture-in-Picture mode when switching tabs. Requires macOS >14
A utility for copying or moving files directly to a destination folder without having to open a new window to get there. Great for if you download a lot like me and have to sort it all. Compare with Hazel and Spotless which I shouldn't really link to as the developer seems to have vanished and won’t respond to requests for help on their forums.
Great with fries
Training
These people love colour more than Colourlovers! This is a community and site which includes “state-of-the-art educational resources” and links to lectures, forums and so on.
Talk to color fans in colorful language
Piccalilli Complete CSS
Advanced CSS training by seasoned developers.
Code begat code
Development
Chief Tools
A range of utilities such as DNS lookup, encoding, getting hashes for a given string and a pastebin function if you are bored of pastebin itself.
AI powered development IDE. We have reached the stage where software helps us write more software.
Shapes of things…
Over 100 abstract shapes — geometrical, flowers, stars and so on. Formats include SVG, PNG and JSX.
Stipple it, just a little bit
21 Plugins for Illustrator (it’s unclear), training and graphic design services.
A Portuguese designer. He sells a “Super Pack de Elements” but I can’t see what’s in the pack. Caveat emptor applies.
AI
“AI Singing Voice Generator” Lost your voice or could never get the hang of singing? Or maybe you can but can’t reach the high or low notes you can hear in your mind. This one lets you simulate a real singer without sounding as robotic as the old voice plugins do
More AI…
⑇ ⑈ ⑆ Please report to Dillinger immediately
End of line. At least for now. As you know people get busy socially in December so I’ll try to get one more edition out by the end of the year, but you never know. There is definitely no shortage of items to tell you about though!
Saw something you liked? Try the new clone of the table of contents but at the bottom!Fonts, Motion Graphics, Samples, Music, Kontakt, iOS, 3D,Web, Communication, Productivity, Publishing, Mac, Training, Development, Video, Graphics, AI, and Social Media.