Tool Much Fun 17
Greetings and welcome — hopefully back — to Tool Much Fun, your one-stop resource for finding out about creative software tools and assets. If you have your fingers in many pies, so to speak, this will give you an overview of multiple categories without having to wade through full length reviews or visit multiple sites. I’ve gathered a mix of newly-released items with others that people mention all over the Internet. I hope you enjoy it. This edition offers:
Music, Samples, Podcasts, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Animation, Video, Development, AI, Work/Productivity, Training, and Media Consumption.
Excite’s Bloom series combines a sequencer and sampler in one to make a unique instrument with a fun, inspirational interface. This one is, of course for basslines.
A high-end audio analyser including the usual; various kinds of spectrograms and oscilloscopes but it supports up to 24 channels.
Antares presumable makes high quality plugins, but they are priced in such a way as to make their subscription appear more attractive. This one is their De-Esser. It doesn't look like it has as many features as SSL’s.
Close the gate, mate
A one trick pony plugin. If you need to chop off the tails of a sound, you need a gate.
A tool for spatial audio/3D panning.
A vocal track alignment tool, in the style of VocAlign. Includes functions for pitch matching and vocal doubling effects.
Two jammy instrument/looper/music makers for NI Reaktor, or just buy the engine. I don’t think it lets you load your own loops, the text isn’t clear.
This one analyses your track in real time then normalises and applies EQing to balance your mix.
Quagliardi Pro Audio BoomBlender
A compressor plugin based on the Quagliardi 576 FET. I was told there was a free lite version but I couldn’t find it.
This one “adds tailing sound textures to your audio. Using granular self-mixing, it rearranges your sound into grains to create new layers.”
A music management platform, including a link-in-bio type page and project sharing functions. A free tier is offered. Upgrade for losses audio sharing and unlimited projects.
ICYMI
Music and beats sales site. Has a free tier.
Spring goes ding
Over 10GB of 96KHz recordings of percussion hits of various springs and metal objects.
100 handcrafted sounds including drums, analog basses, synths, and atmospherics.
I hope they use all three digits for the volume number eventually
For chasing pods
A database of over 5.5 million podcasts. Curated lists by category. A pro upgrade gets you access to reach of each show, demographics of listeners and over 2 million contacts of the creators.
Mac
A menubar app that lets you control the microphone priority queue, so if you are an AirPods user you can get your Mac to use your nice external mic rather than the builtin ones.
Use the dynamic island function from the iPhone on your Mac. This offers a few more functions than the one Apple made for iOS, but the website isn't clear on what they are. There is a chance this might be Sherlocked into a future macOS, so caveat emptor.
Welcome… to Dynamic Island.
Some people really like it when windows from the apps they work with are in the same place every time. Or they want to save time by moving them with one quick command. This one lets you save and restore window layouts so all your app windows are just where you want them. I’m not sure if Adobe apps are supported.
A tiling window manager for macOS. Compare with Amethyst.
iOS
Stock Calendar app letting you down, or you just don’t like how it looks? Try this modern-looking calendar app.
A combination of todo list and light project manager which lets you assign due dates to tasks. Unlike Todoist, this one provides a Goals & Notes field to keep them in mind more easily.
This one is for when you need a reminder of whether or not you’ve completed a task to appear as a widget on your Home Screen, so you can't forget it.
A “Social creator hub” for posting videos (long or short), audio, images, stories, or live streams. You can set a cost for your audience from US$3 to $99.
Did you buy Did I Do?
iOS music
“a distortion effect based on the CP3 modular mixer”. Both harsh and smooth distortion options are included.
Frequency Shifter and stereo delay effect combination.
An emulation of the JEN SX1000 vintage Italian synth.
One day, son, all these apps could be yours. But how will you find ‘em?
A generative music maker for ambient soundscapes. It doesn’t come as an AUv3 for using in host apps, but I confirmed with the developer that the sounds from this app can be used in your compositions. I requested AUv3 support and they didn’t reply to that.
This one lets you find the plugin you need faster when you’re in a host DAW like apeMatrix or AUM.
Graphics
Choose from a library of 9072 (at press time) icons for your diagrams, presentations, apps or wherever you want. Plugins for Figma and Sketch available.
Create iPhone app mockup/ad images interactively with this website. Yes, you upload what you want on to appear on the iPhone screen. Upgrade to pro to create animations. Output to Instagram and X image dimensions. It’s quite easy to use and well done!
About last Nitro…
Some photographers used to use Aperture and when Apple discontinued that they were sad. Some also used Lightroom, but found the subscription price too high. This one might be the perfect replacement for those.
Transfer your photos from one editing app to another, losing no data in the process. Move between Lightroom, Apple Photos, Capture One, Luminar AI, iVie Media Pro and Google Photos
This can handle stitching and other image tasks for large file sizes and HDR formatted photos (if you buy the Pro version).
Animation
Software to turn text-to-image generators such as Stable Diffusion into animation generators. This stuff gets really complex if you are not already a developer.
“Raymarching” which as a largely 2D guy I hadn’t heard of before and shaders in TouchDesigner without writing code.
Busiest dialog box award goes to…
Batch processing an Event of unsynchronized clips exported from Final Cut Pro. You can also trim them and adjust audio offsets. Audio files must have jam-synced SMPTE/EBU timecode, which as a casual videographer I don’t know how to get. I think you need dedicated hardware.
Two plugins — Lightforge and Path Tracer Pro for Unreal Engine, plus courses to learn it.
For filmmakers and videographers. “A platform for technical production: cinematography, lighting, and more.” Create lighting diagrams for equipment setups, actor blocking, databases of your equipment and then keep the crew updated with communication features.
Scenario: for the good kind of blocking
Development
A security focused development system that scans for vulnerabilities as you write code. Intergrates with existing IDEs, workflows and collaboration tools such as GitHub, IntelliJ, Docker, Kubernetes, Eclipse, PyCharm, Visual Studio, Jira and Slack.
Squarespace: give us Table of Contents management instead of this animated marquee!
Squarespace: give us Table of Contents management instead of this animated marquee!
Thanks to katagraphics_designs for inspiring me for the above marquee.
AI
An all-in-one AI portal. Use OpenIA, Midjourney, Gemini, Stability, Anthropic, Meta Llama, Leonardo, Cohere and Mistral, some of which I hadn’t heard of before.
This is a company that hasn’t bothered to make a landing page with any other information besides a short demo clip and a form to sign up. Seems kinda dodgy.
Create animated training videos and product demos. Record your screen, edit, annotate, and add voiceovers with AI narration. Create tours of your videos all with added branding.
Possibly should be in the Work section, this one uses AI to manage and organize the knowledgebase of an enterprise organisation so the staff can find things they need quickly.
An app aimed at kids to help them develop stories from their imagination.
Create images or short videos with text prompts, plus image editing such as background erasing, object removal and image expansion/infill.
Juno what you need to do
Nothing to do with the famous synthedizer by Roland, this is a project/todo manager with a clean and pleasing design aesthetic. Drag and drop emails into the planner to convert them to ToDos. Phone apps for iOS and Android coming soon. US$15 a month or $150 for a whole year.
Training
Learn how to make music and/or entertain a crowd by DJing with video lessons by musicians and DJs. Plus courses on how to survive and thrive in the music industry. Learn DAWs like Logic Pro and Abelton Live, with music genres like Drum & Bass, Hip Hop, Rap, Grime, House, Techno and Pop, and general sound design.
Media Consumption
Transfer and sync your music library for Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, Soundcloud, Deezer, Tidal, Youtube and around 120 other streaming services. US$4 per month, add $2 more to delete duplicates from your playlists.
You must convert
Here I must call it a day, to give me time to prepare for the next edition and for you to look through all the items that interest you. If you know of something great that hasn’t been listed, get in touch with me to let me know, especially if you’re an independent creator yourself. I’m happy to do a more detailed item entry highlighting your product at very reasonable rates.
Saw something you liked? Hop back with the table of contents, conveniently duplicated here at the bottom, or use the tags section to see other Tool Much Fun editions which include that tag.
Music, Samples, Podcasts, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Animation, Video, Development, AI, Work/Productivity, Training, and Media Consumption.