Tool Much Fun 15
What else would a blogger say besides that they hope you all had a relaxing break. But we know many of you wouldn’t have had one. So many Christmoss parties, catch ups, family gatherings, holidays that take a lot of admin to get to the chilling out part. All the while you’re thinking about trying some new 3D modelling technique, how you should really be tagging your clipart library or even what you need to do to fix that song on the back burner, or graveyard as some people call it. Plus when you get back there will be a batch of updates that you should do, and all this new stuff to check out. If this is your first time on this ride, welcome to Tool Much Fun, the blog I always wanted so had to make it myself.
This edition offers:
Music, Samples, Kontakt, Presets, Mac, Writing, Work, Video, 3D, Promotion, iOS, Fonts, Training, Graphics, Motion Graphics & Animation, Social Media, Development, and AI.
Take note of your MIDI
Music
Open source “audio Plugin for Audio to MIDI transcription using deep learning.”
I wonder what it is about compressors and amps that made everyone good at electronics think to themselves: oh I can do that better than the last person. This is a compressor made by simulating vintage tubes. I’m sure it’s great, as Kazrog makes good stuff.
It’s not easy being green
True Soul Vibes Chord King VST
Access a library of over 600 chord progressions when you need some new ideas for a song or part of one that needs a new part. Drag and drop your pattern into your DAW. This is fine for some types of songwriting, but can slow you down if you like doing live jams. Yes I know you can drag into a new MIDI clip in Abelton, but that’s not the same as having a few patterns setup which can then be triggered by notes or CCs from a controller while you fool around with other stuff simultaneously.
History never repeats
This seems to do what it says in the title- the repeats are inserted into the channel and you have control over the repeat speed which will be locked to the DAW tempo so it’s all in time. Also includes some onboard effects such as pitch shifting, compressor, widener and soft clipper to save making complicated chains.
Mash those keys
Seems to be an effects based instrument. “play all of your mutations, glitches, squashes and explosive washes via your keyboard controller in realtime. Then quantise, edit and re-order your effects just like you would notes!”
Where credit’s due
Music collaboration platform, or site if you prefer. Includes producer agreements, IRSC code maker, file sharing, time stamped comments “have the buildup here!”, lossless playback, version control, usage analytics, credits management, pre-release listening parties, data export to over 95 formats and destinations.
Peturbate your sound
Waveshaper distortion which allows moving between multiple distortion styles. Includes am LFO creator and a submodule for looping from FKFX’s plugin Influx. Weirdy, the main product page wasn’t appearing for me, but the item still appears on the shop page. They also make a few other plugins to get trippy and/or modern sounds so check ’em out.
Seems to be a 7 band EQ but includes some other internal magic to include some compression to add everyone’s favorite impact, punch, as well as an Air band to get some high frequency crispness without harshness.
They push you towards the subscription model as do Waves, although they get almost no flak for this online, but it is available as a standalone but for a quite high price.
The greenhaas effect
Audio collaboration site. Includes chat function built in, plus paywalling and invoicing. Compare with Notetracks and Highnote.
Makers of Allcomp compressor and GreenHAAS widener, which has a very playful interface that will disturb some users.
Multi FX Plugin. I knew Cymatics was in the plugins game now, but I’d missed this one somehow.
SubMission Audio ArchitectsBass
Submission claims to have captured “Ali Dean’s [Dingwall] Super P bass”. I don’t know who that person is or what’s special about that bass as I’m not in the metalcore scene. They offer this instrument as DI, Clean and Distorted signals. It appears Submission is dedicated to making the most extensive range of digital bass instruments, plus they make a few plugins on the side. The website also includes the little “you’re missing out — others are frenetically buying this plugin worldwide” FOMO popups.
Beneath every lime is the sublime
For making sounds “bigger, louder, wider, clearer and punchier”. It’s unclear how this affects the wideness as there does not seem to be any controls for mid-side. But the other stuff might works as this looks like a compressor/limiter type of thing. Includes automatic gain compensation, so Wytse will love it, and up to 32x oversampling, so Dan Worrall will too.
Bouncing automators for Logic Pro
Sometimes us Logic users need to bounce out our tracks so they can be used in other DAWs or mixed by other people. But there are some limitations. These apps use automation to reduce the hassle.
Automate Stems and Mixes for Logic Pro
Automates Exporting In Pro Tools, Logic Pro X, Cubase, etc.
Based on the filters in the Polivox synth from Russia, this effect plugin lets you combine multiple filters to get great wah-wah and moving resonation tones. I bought it so it should be in a future What Did I Just Buy post if I ever get time to make more of those.
Web based instrument which morphs between two different instruments. I had a quick try with Firefox and it didn’t seem to load the instruments into the player after I’d selected them, so I bet that’s because Google wants you to use Chrome.
Effects plugin with 7 modular effects: Delay, Neural Amp, Autopan, Phaser, Glue, Neural Reverb, and Filter Pulse. The term Neural does mean they use AI, but don’t run screaming if you’re a Hater — they have used their own in-house training data rather than the Library of the World.
WaveMind Tone Suite - Distant Amplifier
Heavy sounding 3 amps and cabinets, plus 3 virtual distortion pedals, delay, reverb, EQ and gate.
Lots of DIY or “bedroom” musicians can’t afford a professional mixing engineer, but used to just release their dry tracks to the world and they sounded a little rough around the edges. This type of plugin offers you a way to polish your tracks to get them more balanced and commercial sounding. It has been designed to be aware of drums, bass, keys, guitars, vocals and other, so it appears simplistic but under the hood it is balancing the other 5 items when you drag the slider of one of them.
Neyrinck V-90 Symphonic Plug-In
A specific hardware modelled chorus/doubler that is more a doubler than a chorus, so no phasery effect.
I haven’t seen this announced or discussed anywhere! Send audio from your phone (via Airplay on iOS) to a plugin in your DAW, but lossless at 44.1kHz 16-bit quality!
To further refute Brian Eno, SSL’s lo-fi offering ”features built-in jitter, adjustable bit depth, and sample rate reduction”. I can tell you one thing though, when making media that’s set in the past but the budget and schedule don’t allow use of the actual old gear, genuine- or accurate-sounding distortion, glitches and poor quality can enhance the production and reduce anachronism.
All-in-one plugin tweaked for vocals, with noise removal, de-essing and de-plosing (is that a word?), compressor and spectral balancer which is a “soundgoodizer”. Plus it supports ARA technology which I don’t trust as a Logic user because Apple never quite got it working and I lost work once because of that. It could be OK to use ARA in other DAWs, I’ll find out some other day.
Voice transformation plugin, with modelling compute done locally on your computer. This does not use training data from the public Internet. You can also contact them if you want to submit your own training data.
In Case You Missed It
Full-featured vintage spring reverb with six devices to choose from, plus saturation, filters, presence and ducking. Also, you can twang the springs virtually to get sound effects, a feature I haven’t seen in other string reverbs.
A sense of direction
High-end plugin for making sound move within a virtual 3D space. Draw the trajectories with curves like you’re used to from graphics software then assign points where you can do things with the sound. Includes a convolution reverb and supports Ambisonic immersive sound technology. Pricing seems to be aimed at movie, stage or art installation budgets rather than the bedroom producer .
Perfect your pitch
Free voice-to-midi plugin with pitch detection, key and melody tracking and scale enforcement. Pay for the big sister Transkr if you want to use instruments instead of only voice, polyphonic notes, beat and chord tracking, a fretboard window interface.
These folks have their thumbs in many pies: samples, plugins and Kontakt instruments. The theme is Nordic and Scandinavian, with sound packs named after Iceland and instruments such as Birch and Cow Horn, Jouhikki/Tagelharpa and Kantele.
Don’t techno for an answer
Largely samples but some Serum presets and MIDI for techno (melodic, dark, acid and house), rave and bigroom.
Loopgems Most Wanted Melodies Vol.1 Loopkit
21 samples and MIDI for music in the style of musicians with “Lil” in their names that I’m not familiar with.
Everyone’s talkin kpop music
I don’t know anyone that writes Kpop but if someone told me they were interested I’d send them here. Drums, loops, MIDI, breaks & buildups, accents and textures.
Immense Sounds Hard Techno Madness
187 × 24-bit WAV Stems. 52 MIDI Files. 52 x Serum Presets. 152-160BPM.
The Warehouse Sounds All Access Bundle House 2024
Over 8,300 House samples, presets, songstarters, MIDI, and melodies. Isn’t a melody also a songstarter?
Teknovault All Access Bundle 2024
Over 17000 files, presumably for Techno.
100 melodic compositions — I guess that’s song starters again — with loops separated into stems for easier manipulation. MIDI files included.
Vital Presets, vocals & samples
WAVgrind Emotional Essence Library
Aimed at people itching to get started making some tunes, this one includes melodies, chord progressions, drum samples, arpeggios, live vocals, live guitar and drum loops, and basslines. Emotions include sad/melancholy, energetic/bouncy, joyful/happy, chill/peaceful, dark/mysterious, and romantic/soulful.
Drum Samples presumably recorded in a live room.
Kontakt Instruments
“Nuclear Wessels”
“extensively sampled” analog and digital synthesisers that have been recorded through their collection of amps to get a range of textures and tones. 460 presets give you many choices.
This one claims it “combines and layers both acoustic and electronic sound sources to create a vast variety of instrumental sounds as well as unparalleled sonic textures and environments” Aside from one screenshot there are no demos linked. I assume they’re on their Youtube channel.
In Case You Missed It
A range of instruments including Strings, Brass, Woodwind, Choir, Solo singers, Special Effects and Cinematic stuff.
Presets & Sound Packs
Melodic House & Techno, Organic & Afro House.
A sound pack for the Tomofon synth by Klevgrand.
Dream Music Temple Sunrizer iOS presets
For the venerable iOS synth Sunrizer.
Mac
A simple outliner. Remember MORE? macOS 14 minimum but also available for iPhone and iPad.
When you click an icon in the Dock, all of its windows are brought to the front. Click it again and usually nothing happens. This utilise changes the behaviour so that clicking an app's Dock icon the second time will hide all the app’s windows, toggling this each time you click so no need to use the Hide keyboard command. It may be useful for product demos to keep the screen clear of unwanted apps.
A utility which allows you to switch Function keys' mode based on the active application. I used to use FunctionFlip for this, but that went to the great hall of abandonware. I own the venerable Keyboard Maestro which kind of has this feature so I don’t really need to install this one as well, but it sometimes is simpler to use a one-trick pony when one trick is all you want at the time as they usually use fewer resources than things like KM.
Add Christmas lights to your desktop. Various customisation options are being added regularly.
Coding for cyberpunks
A cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer.
Do you tire of switching audio devices manually depending on what equipment you connect to your Mac? This one lets you do that automatically and includes a priority ranking system for further control. Compare with Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource which lets you set independent volume levels for each app rather than device. Direct link.
Scratch your switch itch
Writing
Not just for dabblers
Book writing software for Mac and Windows. Keep track of characters, scenes, locations, plot development, notes all hierarchically or drag-and-drop Kanban card style and include graphics to keep your mental pictures consistent. Collaborate with editors, track word count and daily targets. Subscription based.
Browser based tool for collaborative writing of reports, research papers, essays or other complex documents. See your peers and collaborators working in real time. Use templates created by professionals to get your document started.
What you typst is what you see
AI for the workplace. I would have pit this in the AI category but because the two names are identical I wanted to avoid confusion, and lots of tools have AI these days so it’s getting harder to separate them. This one has the AI functions you would expect such as content writing and summarisation, analysis and in addition some automation features. Aimed at “the enterprise” but I guess ones that don't want to use the offerings from Microsoft or Google?
“Business management software for creative studios”. Every industry can only go so far with off-the-virtual-shelf packages, so it’s nice to see one for designers.
Converts voice notes into text. Free tier available. They also make an iOS app but Android users have to use the web app.
Here’s a few voice-to-notes dictation apps that I found when someone asked about this.
Note taker and meeting assistant which uses AI software to do its magic.
Transcribe notes, meetings & ask AI
I know they have to pay for the compute time and still pay the developers, but AU$300 per annum seems a bit steep. I hope the costs for this type of thing come down soon.
Lock with load added at no additional fee
Video
For Premiere Pro >2022. Cut silence, add captions, zooms, chapter markers and so on.
Wobbly clips from your handheld camera? Try “the fastest and most powerful film and video footage stabilizer for Final Cut Pro”. Features include batch stabilisation, region of interest highlighting and automatic rolling shutter reduction. They also have a VFX Market https://coremelt.com/collections/vfx-market with a lot of templates for FCP and Motion. I checked out a few and some seem a little overcooked, but perhaps that’s due to their being quick demos that have to cram all their effects into a few seconds.
Pixelfilmstudios Fcpx Stabilizer
Get “silky smooth” shots in FCP for a third of the price of the above offering. They also make the FCPX Editing Suite, a bundle of all their tools which includes the ability to magnify details, create picture-in-picture effects, apply auto-zoom with ease, remove unwanted elements, track effects and lines, generate dynamic paths, and add customizable arrays and emitters. They also have an assets club, subscription based.
Allows Pro Sony camera users (note- the video/camcorder range, not their DLSRs that can shoot video) to view clips by various metadata, check focus, mark in & out points, create clip lists, transcoding and clip stabilisation.
1600 backgrounds to use with green screen work.
Ultimate Effect Ultimate Bundle
Cinematic Music, SFX, VFX, and LUTs.
Four editors only
LUTs, Transitions, effects, overlays and textures and sound effects.
This entry was going to be for Hitfilm but when I went to look it up I found it was discontinued. It’s sad to see a bunch of code go to waste. This one has over 100 editing tools and/or features and has some AI based software somewhere behind the scenes.
This was also suggested as an alternative to Hitfilm. Free tier offered, then two more to get to Pro.
3D
3D
Over 20,000 3D assets which will work in Blender, Unreal Engine 5, and Cinema4D. A free plan is offered, but the resulting work must be non-commercial.
Promotion
A link-in-bio site for apps
A link in bio for your Instagram and TikTok.
Link-in-bio and music marketing platform, so, landing page, affiliate accounts, Google and their own analytics, link redirection per country and an app for iOS and Android.
iOS
A “junk drawer“ style saving system, not just for bookmarks like my current favourite Raindrop but for saving anything you find, much like I used to use Evernote for before they did me dirty and would’t give me a single extra device seat even though I was an early adopter. Their examples are “news articles, recipes, restaurant reviews, financial reports, tweets, Instagram posts, YouTube videos”.
A simple scanner
Imprint… but what are you?
Photo-to-document scanner. This group makes my current favourite notes app Drafts so I know it will be good quality, and I'd buy it if I didn't already own Scanner Pro.
I mentioned micro.blog back in TMF13. Here’s an app for posting to it.
A graphically pleasing to-do list/ light project management app. Includes fields for comments and notes.
Pomodoro timer.
Compose your opus
Interactive learning in the subjects psychology, philosophy, history, finance, leadership, business, health, science and technology.
iOS Music
Graphical song composition tool. Assist you with different chord progressions and I think it includes some audio so you can hear your song structure without needing other music apps, but then can export in MIDI and PDF.
Time stretching
No soldering necessary
“a compact semimodular synthesizer, made in collaboration with Jakob Haq.” If you’re interested in modular synths but aren’t sure how to use one, this might be a good entry point into them. Or a gateway drug, if you prefer. Runs on iPhone, iPad and macOS, so it could even go in the normal Music section of this blog.
iOS Graphics
Compare two images to check for differences.
iOS Video
A video editing app aimed at beginners with a surprisingly long feature list. Unfortunately like many in this category it’s subscription based.
Forget about cap cutting with Vllo
Fonts
A collection of custom fonts by Mozilla, makers of Firefox.
A range of mostly workhorse faces, with a few display ones as well.
Type resetting
“a typeface carefully crafted & designed for computer screens.” Quite Helvetica-like.
The inter view
In Case You Missed It
Fabricate good design
A foundry with a reasonable number of offerings in both the modern attention-grabbers and display faces, almost all with high readability.
Training
Blind Gallery Academy Introduction to Pixel Shaders
Course split into Basics, Color, Geometries, Patterns and Motion, this will get you all trained in Pixel Shaders to create abstract artwork using code in GLSL.
Photography courses and community, for Photographic skills then editing in Photoshop and Lightroom. Free brushes and presets included with membership.
Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 19
As you'd hope from a large company they have their own training courses. I just didn’t know about it.
Photography Presets and RAW files.
Lean mastering, then mixing and producing, using their proprietary “Reverse Engineer” method. Some free courses offered.
Although it’s mainly a review and curated article site, that may be to head you towards the courses on mixing, EQ, compression, and mastering.
Graphics
Free Online Photo Editing. Compare with Polarr.
Image Compressor. “Compress your pictures up to 90% without visible quality loss” for free.
Easy image uploads, for when you need to quickly share a screenshot or other image without the extra steps needed in other file sharing type sites.
Over 1000 gradients in grainy and smooth varieties. Great for backgrounds.
Creator Foundry Atmosphere Designer
680 atmosphere effects in Photoshop. 15 collections of atmosphere plugins including Dramatic Rays, Fog, Dust, Haze, Smoke and Directional Light.
Content Creator Cinematic Smartphone LUT Pack
Free LUTs, what more do you need to know?
Free Graphic Resources
Mockup Generator & 3D Animator
Over 200,000 open source free svg icons. There’s a nonzero chance that an app you’re using now has some of these icons in it.
Artificial-Sweetener/image-sweetener
Image manager for social media sites. Adds watermarks and automatically scales images to best settings for various apps.
Solution Presets Supreme Presets Bundle
400 Presets and 200 LUTs to modify your images.
Motion Graphics & Animation
After Effects Scripts to assist with a variety of tasks.
After Effects music visualizer.
Social Media
Grow your audience (they all promise that) with automated posts. “Repurpose” (read: repost in a different format) between Instagram and LinkedIn. Clean up reposts so your feed is free of duplicates (I like this). Inspiration and Sales Campaign management.
Hype things furiously
Type fully
Write better content for Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn (that last one won’t be hard). Includes a post scheduler, rewriting suggestions with AI powered help, analytics, write drafts to collaborate with your team, do the auto-DM thing to send people links to giveaways or other promotions, crop and frame images (nice- getting this right is a PITA), auto-split long text posts (this should be in the SocMed sites itself, IMHO) and see post previews.
Development
Video streaming APIs, Data, and Players
A framework for mixing colors in a more realistic way. Check the comparisons with popular paint programs like Photoshop, Fresco, Procreate and Clip Studio Paint.
AI
Image generator. The landing page linked above has a demo image and then logins for Apple, Google, Microsoft or Email, but no other information. The iOS app page has more info. The image generation compute must be paid for via tokens bought via IAP. The tokens persist for 3 months, so make sure you use them up!
Source.Plus Public Diffusion Private Beta
This appears to be an instance of Stable Diffusion but it’s trained only on public domain and Creative Commons 0 images, so you don’t need to worry about attribution or dispensing micropayments to all the artists and designers who have ever published anything on the internet.
ChatGPT client which needs you to own an OpenAI API key to use.
Portal for accessing a number of models, including MiniMax, Flux, Kling, Recraft and LoRA. Run diffusion models up to four times faster. Pay to scale up when your modelling needs more compute power.
You have reached the end of this edition. Congratulations for making it this far! I hope you found a few things to check out to make your creative life easier or more productive. If you aren’t using this stuff you can be sure someone else is. I'll update this post to add the list of links like I have done for the previous edition.
For your convenience here is the table of contents so you can jump back to any of the sections, or use the search box to search my whole site.
Music, Samples, Kontakt, Presets, Mac, Writing, Work, Video, 3D, Promotion, iOS, Fonts, Training, Graphics, Motion Graphics & Animation, Social Media, Development, and AI.