If you want one commercial compressor to complement your DAW’s I think that’s pretty much Presswerk’s ideal use case, though maybe I would say that since I’m exactly the same.
You can do pretty much any type of compression with it, it’s very versatile. And the saturation is good by ITB standards, as has been mentioned.
I use the Nitro skin which I find a lot more appealing, u-he’s UI/visuals aren’t their strong suit IMO.
It is sad to see their products discounted so much, I’ve mostly switched to VSTs now but VK-2 is absolutely fantastic. If you’re a Reason user it’s a total steal.
I was about to post about this… for anyone who has a sample library, Sononym is like gold.
Even for those of us with Atlas and/or XO? I looked at the video and the use case wasn’t immediately clear to me.
Thoughts on where it’s value lies compared to either of these other 2 sample managers?
I like this. I guess it’s gonna add something (musical the blurb says) instead of being a bread & butter compressor? I’ve found Satin to be similar so far in terms of light tape effects.
Agreed on the skins. I almost alwasy use an alt UI, although I do really like like the multi compressor mode concept they implemented in Presswerk.
Quick question on this. The one thing U-he doesn’t seem to have (to my knoledge) is a semi-emulation version of an EQ, that would fit along with these 2. Is there anything out there that complements them?
XO and Sononym are my main apps. Both are superb.
Sononym excels at finding samples fast, and making full use of my sample library. It’s categorisation is way beyond XO (and Atlas), and it lets you organise LOOPS too (which is huge for me!). I use it to go sample hunting, then drag samples from it directly into Ableton Live (as clips or to Simpler or to a Drum Rack pad) and my MPC. It’s great for creating collated sample collections too.
XO is more of an idea generator IMO for beats/grooves, that lets you make use of your full sample library (one shots). It has sound design tools/capabilities, and lets you export original samples, rendered samples, pattern loop stems, full mix loops and all the related midi files.
It’s a sample groovebox essentially that lets you swap sounds out fast, and has some cool filtering features.
This thread covers a lot of it too;
Atlas and XO are both basically drum machines with the extra one-shot sample filtering.
Sononym is much more sophisticated in terms of analysis and categorisation. It makes it very easy to find many sound types, not just drums, and the filters are deeper.
I personally find it much easier to even just “casually” browse my samples because once it has indexed a whole top-level folder, I can still dig down into the subfolders easily and still filter by sound type, frequency content, pitch, harmonicity etc.
Given that many DAWs and plugins/samplers etc can accept drag and drop directly, you can use whatever DAW, sampler or drum machine you like and use Synonym to find the samples. You can even select part of e.g. a loop and drag that out and it will drop just the selected part (having saved the slice in the background).
For £40-ish at half price it’s a very useful utility for anybody who uses samples.
I knew I would be right.
Thank you both so much for the feedback on this. I went ahead and grabbed it based on the strength of these recommendations. Curation has great value to me and it sounds like this does something special.
Thanks again.
Yeah, I don’t put a lot of stock in the blurbs for these things I have to say! I’m guessing what it ‘adds’ is mostly referring to the saturation. It’s good-sounding for ITB, probably tuned somewhat to pair well with the compression and it’s nice to have it right there but you could probably get similar results adding something before or after, even with free stuff like CHOW Tape.
I think its value is probably more in being a Swiss army knife for compression than anything else. It does anything from light opto stuff to fully smashed and does it all well (at a bit of a CPU cost), chuck some drums through the presets on the demo and see how it does.
On the EQ thing, I’m mostly hardware these days so don’t really follow VSTs as much but one of the few I didn’t sell off (mainly because I’m not mad on Renoise’s own EQs) is CraveEQ. It’s pretty cheap compared with FabFilter etc. and does the job, whilst also having an ‘analog’ mode which is more non-linear and might be the sort of thing you’re after.
There’s also Spectre which isn’t quite an EQ but can sort of function like one. It’s more of a multiband saturation kind of thing with various models. Might be worth having a look at.
Thanks for these… Much appreciate the pointers 
I really REALLY wish XO would develop the sequencer part of their app. I love it and have created some cool loops with it but I find it very hard to go beyond that. I know you can export in a multitude of ways but I find that the stems never groove as well as they do in-app etc. Just a little more development in that department and I’d be moving at light speed with it! Otherwise it’s excellent and for my own needs I’m not that interested in other sample-sorter type programs, as good as they are.
Oeksound is having their sale right now. On the fence about buying Soothe. I bought Spiff last year and still haven’t gotten around to learning it other than using the presets.
Definitely considering upgrading to Ableton 12 - but this is going to be the ‘learn what you already have’ year of not buying anymore gear.
I have been eyeing the upgrade for like 3 years on a row lol. Maybe this year!
thanks for the heads up, just bought soothe. with that, sie-q and devil-loc from soundtoys, and the forthcoming ableton 12 i am absolutely tapping out of black friday and production purchases in general for a LONG time.
Just pulled the trigger on Soothe2. If you are in doubt, they have an excellent interactive demo on their product page. So far I’ve found it useful for heavy lifting on things like weird guitar amp resonance suppression w/o killing the tone.
It might already be posted but Gulfoss is on sale. They were good enough to reset my trial when I’m asked. It’s tempting, I fist their put my finger on what it does but it does sound nice…
This is great. Thanks for the recommendation. I played around just playing simple sine wave notes into the presets last night and was impressed by the textures that came out. Scratched my itch for something like a Microcosm!
For some reason that I don’t understand the demo doesn’t seem to work for me (I can’t activate).
It’s a shame because I had an eye on this one.
Sonic Couture’s Electro-Acoustic is 50% off. I’d not heard of it before and, after taking a look, I really like to clarity of the workflow and the included sequencers. I like focused drum machine sets that don’t offer a billion sounds. I think this will be really fun to use with Opal CTRL as well.
https://www.soniccouture.com/en/products/32-drums/g58-electro-acoustic/
Also, ToneProjects has a steep discount on a bundle of all of their plugins. Not cheap, but from what I’ve been reading, very good tools.
https://toneprojects.onfastspring.com/tone-projects-2023-bundle
