Any VST / VSTi / AU / relevant standalone sale happening? Post 'em here (if you like)!
Yeah, I go first! 
Voxengo 15% off purchases and upgrades from July → August: Summer 2020 Discount at Voxengo - Press Release - Voxengo
Ooorrr you can get 25% off Voxengo at Pluginboutique. 
Pluginboutique is insane. They’ve always got something. Now get Izotope Iris 2 (their SOTA hybrid sampling wavetable spectral etc. synth) for $10.
Nice! I think I bought Novaltech Character there for a ridiculous price coming to think of it. 
Waves is guess what? Yup, having a sale. This one seems to be extra sale-y, thinking about the PRS amp models for $35, don’t remember ever seeing them quite that cheap. Man I have severe misgivings about letting Waves into my life, but the PRS amp models are maybe the only instance where I have to say, well my existing setup just doesn’t do that, as the PRS does feedback modeling. Not aware of any other sim that does that.
Anyway. Yah. that. 
Pluginboutique is at it again, buy anything, plenty of $5 items available, and get your choice of the izotope elements packages; Ozone, Neutron, or Nectar.
I’ve been looking for a modern hyper-gain amp sim option. As it happened, the Joey Sturgis sims are on sale for $20 from $120ish, so I got the Toneforge Misha Mansoor. This is a very interesting, unique plugin, wide range of tones while focused on modern ultra gain, soooo much gain. Worth a look if you’re into that kinda thing.
Its on sale for free dollars… ‘WEM Copicat IC400 “Belt Drive” tape delay unit from the late seventies’
If the thread is ruined because you dont have to pay, give an email address or create an account, i can edit it 
He starts having some fun with it @ ~1:05
Everything! Everywhere! Blackcyber Frimonday in full effect. 
That being said, I’m gonna call out my fav lesser known big value brand, Hornet, which is offering some pretty advanced stuff for the price of a drink or so at the mo. Highlights: ThirtyOne balancing EQ, instant clarity for troublesome sources or mixes; Total EQ, 12 band visual parametric, clean or character, standard or dynamic, stereo or M/S, all per band, EQ, hence total; more more more, channel strips, mastering tools, etc. etc. Good stuff. This kinda thing wasn’t available anywhere at any price just a few years ago. Sale through 12/2, or 2/12 depending .
The iZotope Holiday Bundle is a no brainer if you don’t have them yet – $50 instead of over $1,000. RX alone is worth it.
I got myself a nice collection of solo strings:
- Tina Guo acoustic cello 1 and 2 (absolutely terrific for lyrical solo cello)
- Joshua Bell solo violin (Embertone)
- Expressive viola also by Embertone
and a room tuning kit by Sonarworks (including microphone).
There’s also a thread about black Friday sales on the Reaper forum, by the way.
Tracktion giving up to 65% off their shizzle with the BLACKFRIDAY2020 code.
It’s worth pointing out that Tracktion Waveform 11 is going to have a pretty big .5 update before the next major release.
Harrison Mixbus for $20? Sure, why not. Sorry, later than usual to the party on this one, you have 4 hours. Although their counter might be borked, I don’t know why they would end the sale at 3:24 AM.
5 hours later and there are still over 4 hours left on the counter here! Good shout, I’m going to get this one!
Where are these XT plugins starting at $1? I see the XT plugins at the Harrison site, but none at special pricing.
From what I remember years ago, Mixbus is essentially Ardour with with Harrison customizations, i.e, the mixer with it’s functionality / workflow and built-in plugins for eq, compression, and tape saturation. Maybe there are more distinctions in later versions.
A little reading says that Mixbus 6 is still pretty buggy, still a big cpu hog, and that the sound of the console component emulations aren’t anything to write home about.
Yeah, it’s based on Ardour which in turn would have a lot more devs working on fixing things free of charge to them if they spent a bit of time on the Windows build scripts. I’d imagine Harrison have got a more professional setup, which should help Ardour too.
I’ll give it a whirl and see if I like it anyhoo!
Ardour and Mixbus are cool, but the dealbreaker for some is that the time stretch utility is not up to the standard of those DAWs which have the ‘elastique’ algo inc Reaper.
Hats off to one of the Ardour lead devs who admitted such up front in a video of an hour or so duration.
Well, glad I didn’t spend $89 for it then.
I dunno, I am kinda getting a little sketched out on the whole thing. The timer is apparently pure marketing bullshit aka lying, mine reads 0 now but you can still get the deal, there’s no $1 plugs AFAIK, got some emails about half price plugs, another lie… in this kind of situation I tend to bite just because it’s not worth wondering if I should’ve if I didn’t lol, so whatever, but this is definitely not the way I want a vendor to behave. It’s either deceptive or sloppy.
I keep thinking I want something simpler/easier/whatever than Reaper, but then I keep being extremely unimpressed by the competition. I suppose I should just buy a Mac, GarageBand awaits. 
Are the fonts badly rendered on Windows for you? In Linux it’s all nice and swishy but the fonts are not anti-aliased on Windows here.
I’m pretty comfy using Reaper, but most of my uses of it these days are very simple. I like the hardware-like mixer layout of Mixbus, but if sound character and stability are issues, I don’t see any benefit to it for me personally.
I’m going to attempt to cover most of my repetitive simple recording and playback needs using ffmpeg on the command line. That probably isn’t a good solution for most people, but I think it could cover most of what I use a daw for these days, i.e., simple recording and playback configurations. For example, just straight up 4-track and 8-track recording and playback. Another common use for me is simple phrase looping for guitar practice.
Haven’t installed it yet, maybe this weekend. Hey do you know if the console emulation is printed in recording, or more like a plugin that’s always on?
Lol, that’s wild. Not an option for me. How would I use all my plugins???