Tool Much Fun 9
Massive — or should it be massless as it’s software— pile of stuff this edition. You’re spoiled for choice as I’m well into the following edition once again. As this is being published around the time of the iOS 18 launch, let’s make this one less item random by putting the iOS apps first. This batch includes iOS Apps, Fonts, Music, Samples, Animation, Promo, Writing, Retrocomputing, Developer, Maps, Mac, AI, Social Media, 3D, Video, Language, Web Dev, Graphics and Training.
iOS Apps
For the uninitiated RSS is a secret power known by the technorati to “listen” or subscribe in the old parlance for new items posted in blogs, news sites or podcasts. This lets you peruse lists of your chosen media and browse items quickly and in a consistent format.
Client for Mastodon, Threads.
Add background & shadows to your screenshots to make them look spiffy. Do you get the reference for the company name?
I’m not sure of the use case for this. My first thought was to use it with an iOS screen recorder that doesn't include this feature.
An unofficial privacy-focused web scraping Reddit frontend built for iPhone, iPad and Mac, or “a better way to browse Reddit”. Requires macOS 14 on an M1 minimum.
Juice Box Monkey Designs Just Apps
Makers of Just Shopping and Just Jot, an easy to use notes app which supports Ask Siri and has a companion Apple Watch app.
Fonts
Try new forms of sans
Seven fonts on offer. Roko and Nufarm Sans are modern sans serif fonts.
Timbertype
I had this in my list, but didn't capture the URL and when I searched I was offered actual timber product companies or fonts that look like wood. If you know of their link or run this foundry, let me know and I'll update this post.
We want the funk
No GT Auto?
26 faces in various styles including calligraphy, vintage, eye-catching display and clean sans serifs.
33 classy faces from Denmark. Great if you're bored of the Bembo, Bodoni, Caslon etc. and a couple of more friendly or fun ones.
A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?
Fifteen workhorse faces, both serif and sans. Give Helvetica and VAG Rounded a rest.
Please find below ample whitespace because Squarespace’s drag & drop editor has no idea how I want the page to look, and I’m tired of fighting it.
Music
Not new, but it’s getting nearer to a release. Joining the paid Patreon gets you access to the alpha version.
If you work with voice based audio such as podcasts, documentaries, interviews or other dialog, this is designed to clean up problematic recordings. For example low grade, band-limited POTS or video conferencing calls, background noise or boomy reverb.
MAG Signature Sound Crystal Clear
An enhancer that seems to be a combination of saturator and frequency tamer or cleaner —its bringing in ‘good’ harmonics and suppressing unpleasant ones. Includes wet/dry mix and oversampling.
Signature Sound also makes samples, presets for Spire and Dune, Midi packs, templates for DAWs and tutorials.
A clone of Melda MMorph. Needs the puredata plugin to be installed, or some other puredata host.
Some would say you can have too many equalizers, others refrain.
Virtual Modular synth
What we thought might happen eventually… type prompts to describe the sound you're after and Sistema will create that patch for you, if it can I guess. This stuff is still in the early days compared to the visual folks, and they're already on to short videos.
Modalics enters the plugin host scene with this offering. It can only host VST3, which makes code maintenance easier for them I guess. So if you've ever found a plugin that is VST3 only but you want to use it in Logic, then you can use this as a wrapper.
PWYW/donationware. A no-frills sampler
They won't or can't name it in their marketing, but it didn’t take me long to realise it has something to do with the Trident hardware. This is a modern interpretation with then-dreamt-of features including Mid/Side bands, Gain Scale, Auto-Gain, and multiple saturation colors.
El Capistan tape echo and DIG dual channel digital delay. I'd love to get these, if money were no object. As the old joke goes, it's certainly no object that I have.
Alkane, all the time
A “Quad-circuit Harmonics processor” the quad being tube, tape, transformer and synth circuits. Avoid aliasing with up to 8× oversampling, and visually monitor the changes you make with the built in spectrogram. I haven't demoed this, and I'm sure it sounds great but I already have a range of saturators to use, even though they don't have all these features. If you. Haven’t bought one yet then give it try.
Free Utility plugin for checking your channel or 2-bus, but because it is a band splitter you can use it to make any other effect work on an isolated band if it doesn't have that feature itself. Or make your other effect multi band if you set up multiple buses — messy but it could work.
This is competing with another mix checking plugin that I can think of which was never quite cheap enough for me to grab. Compare with one from Hornet.
With a name like that I assume it's a company started by young people who want to sell to other young people. This one has 66 vocal “run presets” by both female- and male-identifying vocalists. So that says vocal rompler to me? Onboard ADSR, glide, chorus and distortion to make changes convenient and save CPU — I've seen the “vocal chains” by some of the people that like describing things as “fire” and they need to learn how to freeze tracks or use more buses.
They also make some sample packs if you prefer that.
Mistyblueproduction Building Blocks
Soulful jazzy MIDI chord pack. It was interesting to see an ad for this that started out like it was naysaying all MIDI chord packs, but then pivoted to telling me all the others were boring bloatware but his was the way to go. I don't personally have anything against them, but the market does seem full of grifters.
The boy who lives down the laney
Amp sim modelled from the 500W FET/tube bass amp. All the features we've come to expect such as a 10-band EQ, cab and mic selection, maximiser and others we don't such as 2 limiters. Dig it!
Just like graphic designers in the late 80s, mastering engineers must realise that beginners (and punks) weren’t really their customers and were doing it themselves, either due to cost or other concerns. In this case it will “master” your music so it sounds like a cohesive piece and not a collection of tracks in your DAW. This one lets you aim for parameters from 7 genres.
Compare with Initial Audio Master Suite. Other pressure in the market is from the old beast Ozone and the tools that ship with Logic 11.
Good on ’em for going up again the 800lb gorilla of FabFilter. There is lots of competition in this space, including DDMF, Eventide and Kirchoff. This one, however, includes features such as context-awareness and EQ learning and matching like Sonible (which autocorrects to “senile” I have just discovered).
Swedish pluginmeisters return with another reverb, claiming its uniqueness. This one is AI-free, instead replying on convolution algorithms to model Klevgrand’s choice of interesting spaces.
Presets
Utopia Expansion Pack for Heat Up 3
I don't own HeatUp as I always thought it was geared towards making hiphop and trap which is not presently my thing. I wish companies that have subscriptions would go back to the old definition - get something every month (or two) you can keep even if you cancel the subscription. Anyway this one is 1.5GB worth of extra sounds to compose with.
Samples
They do not seem to have a website of their own, but they can be purchased via Loopmasters or Producer Loops. Not to be confused with Thick Audio.
Focus on the sample you want
Search for your ideal sample in 29 categories including Funk Soul (brother check it out now), Jazz, Cinematic, Acid House, Synthwave.
Subscription-based audio library with 40,000 music tracks, 90,000 sound effects.
Data Dump by Gar Hoover on Wavetick
Almost 700 samples for several genres.
Melodic techno, house and Deep House. Loops, oneshots and midi files. Samples created with genuine hardware such as the synthesisers Dave Smith Prophet 08, Moog Sub37, and Korg Minilogue. Free tasters.
Over 50 genres including Glitch Hop, Grime, Trance and Wobble House.
Animation
Create 2D animations on Mac or Windows. Get started with their free tier, requires registration.
Writing
“a tool that lets you write together with others, track changes, and share your work. Whether you write solo, with an editor, or in a group, Ellipsus helps you create and organize your drafts, feedback, and final versions.”
Promo
Create smart product links to maximise your Amazon affiliate link revenue.
Get super landing pages with Supertape
Link in bio and marketing toolkit aimed at musicians. Includes analytics. Integrates with Bandcamp, Spotify and Songkick. Free tier offered.
From what I found this creates Subscribepage.io landing pages where people can sign up to a newsletter. Visiting subscribepage.com took me here. As most people seem to indicate they get too many emails already, I don't know how this can be a great way to get more contact with your audience.
Retrocomputing
Software to install on a Raspberry Pi as a kind of translator that then allows your old computer to browse newer websites whose technology is not compatible with old browsers.
A search engine tailored to work on old computers.
Developer
Add liquid effects to any site with CSS.
Get helpy with your cody
AI based code editor. Still in beta.
"Elevate your web designs with enchanting WebGL effects, motion, and interactivity — with no code"
Track downloads, revenue and other metrics for all your apps in one place. Plus keep an eye on the competition's keyword search results and used SDKs. Base price is US$8/month for 5 apps and 25 keywords, but only basic competitor analysis.
Design and prototype professional looking iOS apps which use Apple's native interface elements such as date pickers and text input fields, so you don't have to make them from scratch every time.
Sorry, the bland food-assembly devices from Star Trek aren't wth us yet. This lets you incorporate AI into your site using their API to generate images, text, music, speech and more.
Build, launch and scale your product. An “open-source backend for application builders. An all-in-one platform with thoughtful, product-centric APIs”
Maps
AI based site to find answers about geography. Free tier, but account creation required.
Mac
MacPlus Software Slides Window Manager
Unsatisfied with the current state of window management, MacPlus software has created a utility to switch between recently used windows, using machine learning to predict what window you will need next.
Full-featured screenshot capture utility including image editing, video recording & editing, iOS capture and audio channel separation to avoid complicated setups using Audio Hijack Pro.
“A tiny and fast mac screenshot tool with annotations, scrolling screenshots and cloud upload capabilities.”
It looks complicated, but it will make your instruction manuals better.
Not new for me, but new to this blog. This is in essence a screenshot capture utility, but the killer feature here is automation. It can be configured to automatically capture screens or windows as you click on them to ensure you never miss any crucial steps in your documentation. Add text, then export in several formats such as HTML or PDF.
I've known about Inkscape for a while, but didn't know that there is a library of browser extensions for it, including creating scientific graphs and even embroidery.
A classic two-pane file manager. Currently in beta. Compare with muCommander.
AI
So many products are incorporating AI into them that it’s getting harder to have these as a separate category. Funny thing is, you never read about the retronym, Natural Intelligence.
Use AI's “powers” to turn instructed data into actionable insights for “building” (developing) products. Integrates with Zoom Slack, Zapier, Teams (ugh) Google Calendar, Webex and Gong, which I hadn't heard of so it will get it's own listing. Looks like it's aimed at startups, as larger companies tend to move slowly with this kind of tech.
Video editing. Autocorrects to “going”.
Hard to decide if this should be in the graphics section or not, as AI is so contentious these days. AI image, pattern or video generation, style applier, upscaler and other tools. Free tier available.
Social Media
Rejoice! Another player enters the social media space to use the bird theme. It’s so much in beta it appears they haven’t tested it with Firefox because I could not get a response by clicking the Accept all Cookies button.
3D
The largest collection of visual effects (VFX) assets in the world - including explosions, clouds, magic, splashes, nebulas, and smoke, plus textures for Redshift and Octane.
ZBrush has been around for years - now the iPad hardware has caught up it’s now possible to paint on your 3D models with the Apple Pencil.
Video
Here's a feature sorely lacking from from Final Cut Pro: captions and subtitles. These two apps are here to help.
Automatic transcription and subtitles generation. Export in TXT, SRT, RTF or export to Final Cut Pro.
Language
Use web or mobile apps to learn The Big Three as well as Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and more. Native speakers are paired with you to help you learn.
Web Dev
It seems to be that “CMS” has become an outdated term even though they never went away. This one not only lets you design the site, but includes eCommerce, integration with Mailchimp, Salesforce and others, localization, user admin and plugins for even more features.
Some projects just need a simple single page. Make up to three sites per account using their slick templates. A free tier offered, with Pro subscriptions adding custom domains, forms integration, embedding functions from other sites like PayPal, Stripe or Gumroad and Google Analytics.
Graphics
Have trouble picking colors that complement each other? Tools offered include the palette builder, tester, font pairing and brand guidelines builder. Compare with my old favourite ColourLovers.
Add fog that was never there
Light rays and other overlays for Photoshop. They also do brushes and Depth Master Pro, which appears to be a proper Photoshop plugin for enhancing your images with the volumetric style lighting and 400 other effects like glare and fog.
Packaging mockup and preparation solution. Subscription based, but Includes access to 3D modelling software, templates and dielines for following through to the printer after your client approves your design. Pricing aimed at graphic designers with at least one customer a month who wants to preview their logo on simulated boxes, bottles, jugs, cans or tubes.
Comprehensive audio visualizer for the full version of Ableton Live. I have Synesthesia which is a standalone app.
Training
Over 1,000 hours of courses in animation, design, visual effects and 3D.
And that’s all you get this time. I had to save some for next edition or it would all be too much. Here’s a tag cloud because Squarespace can do it, but here’s the crazy thing: I can’t change any of the visual attributes. Get better, Squarespace! I don’t want to have to stuff around with your CSS.