I bought the full suite of Soundtoys plugins on 12/1/2008 evidently.
Since then I’ve paid for upgrades here and there, but for the most part they’ve just remained amazing reliable and relevant the whole time. It kind of wild that I still love how the whole suite sounds with perhaps the exception of the filters.
IMHO Space Blender is a great direction and I can only hope that was a teaser of more to come. I’ll gladly keep giving such a reliable and innovative company my money.
It’s a cool plugin but seems a little iffy - not a fan of this thrid party platform it relies on, which itself is in beta. Doesn’t feel like a commercial release to me because of that but at £10 I won’t grumble.
I’m waiting to hear back from the dev though as I’m getting a crackle/pop artifact every 20 seconds or so when using it.
I’m still not sure what buying all the soundtoys plugins offers me over the 5.4 rack, space blender, superplate, and a few little versions I got as freebies over the years. $59 is still quite a bit if there’s no real need.
The update puts Space Blender ‘in the rack’ (with 70 new pre-sets) so it isn’t just stand-alone… As I almost always use the rack over standalones this is worth it to me (although I don’t benefit from resizing!)
I would say potentially the one thing the resize gives value for is the ability to more easily customise settings. I’m thinking of something like Tremolator here which was quite hard to handle in its previous form. I’m hoping that blowing the interface up will mean an easier time getting into the weeds.
However if that’s not a concern and you don’t care about the rack integrating Space Blender then it’s probably not essential.
Head’s up for anyone who owns the 5.4 bundle and SpaceBlender already: you have the 5.5 update in your account (check version on the downloads). No need to pay for anything extra so far as I can tell.
Confusing, isn’t it? Hence why I posted here trying to alert people about it if they don’t want to pay to upgrade. The $19 deal must be there for a reason though.
It’s confusing. But I think I have understood it. If you watch the first comment on Soundtoy’s YouTube video about the 5.5 upgrade, you will find an explanation. Here is a screenshot of it:
In short, owners of version 5.4 can upgrade all individual licences to version 5.5 for free to make them resizable. However, you will miss out on the integration of SpaceBlender with the Effectrack, as well as the 67 new presets for the Effectrack. You can only upgrade the bundle as a whole to version 5.5. (to get these two features) by paying.
It’s good and has some unusual features + it’s kind of a pseudo DAW/song builder also, but most other software that has stem separation capability seems to be catching up with it.
I think all the stem separation software might use the same algorithm technology, so not sure which one sits on top of the list for best sound quality capability.
Maybe the top tier Izotope product or similar from other manufacturers might have better tools to polish the separation.
With all these products, it depends on the quality of the original recorded material in terms of what you get out the other side.
Last chance to get it for $10 before its full release.
If you already own MiniMeters, v1.0 is a free update . As always, I aim to keep MiniMeters affordable and accessible, however upon release of v1.0 MiniMeters will increase its price to $20 USD.
Looks like a great deal. I know a little of SSL and their provenance, but how do these plugins rate for those in the know? They’re not ones on my radar.
