Tool Much Fun 22
Wow, that was a long time between posts. At long last it’s done, and now you can dive in to a huge batch of resources, assets, apps and sites that can make your creative work easier, fancier or quicker. Buckle up and keep your hands within the vehicle for the duration of the ride.
This edition offers:
Music, Samples, Kontakt, Writing, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Animation, Video, Development, AI, Promotion, Training, File sharing and Media Consumption.
Music
Green and mean
From the name alone you can tell this one has been modelled on the Pultec EQ. But this one includes a built-in spectrum analyser so you can use your eyes as well as your ears.
“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid”
More than just a distortion plugin, this one uses sidechained signals (where you feed one track into another) to get different sounds and more control.
A mean-looking amp to get you a mean sound. Also includes an overdrive, OctaFuzz, crunch booster and 6-band EQ to sculpt your sound.
It looks more like a channel strip than a studio to me.
For those of you I’ve seen with like 8 plugins in your vocal chain, this one is for you. Save your CPU from overloading by using this all-in-one plugin. Includes tube modelled drive, de-ess, gate, compressing, EQ, and FX like Widener, Delay and Reverb with ducking included.
That’s a lot of letters. VAPolyTZFM is a “Through Zero” FM synth. This seems mot be a method to make the sound "more musical" and less weird and toneless like FM can get. Inldudes an analog style step sequencer, two oscillators, a mixer, resonant low and high pass filters, an amplifier, two envelope generators, and two LFOs. Also available for iOS. Check out their other 18 synths and effects products.
This is a plugin which creates MIDI melodies and rhythms using AI, but it doesn’t write the music for you.
"Stop” being an initialism for Sonic Nostalgia Output Processor. This one has cassette tape simulation, “decimation”. Wobbler, delay, bandpass filter, stereo width/phaser/chorus, noise and tape stop functions for lo-fiing (lofication?) your sound.
Inspired by submarine sonar equipment?
Ewan calls this one a “real-time particle playground”. Basically a granular based effect which can work on live input or samples. It includes 6 unique effects plus you can set it up to control it with your hands, using a webcam and other software. Two sample packs —totalling 990MB of samples — are included. Please note this requires installing the free Plugdata sound engine plugin to work.
Another multi featured mega priced plugin. It is listed as a Modular Wavetable Synthesizer. Possibly competes with your workstation style ones like Serum, Omnisphere, Falcon, Current, maybe some Krotos stuff mixed in. There was a discount offered for owners of their former flagship software HeatUp (one that I’ve never seen anyone recommend to anyone else or say they own it) but that’s one of theirs I don’t own.
An analog “preset synth” plugin including 32 vintage presets. It looks like they mean a ROMpler? Maybe they don’t think the young folk will know what that means.
There’s four thingies, it’s rad, therefore Tetrad
A hybrid instrument combining physical modelling and granular synthesis. There are four buses for effects and a matrix mixer to combine them for lots of control. You really can’t do justice to how these sound by trying to describe them in terms of other synths — they are not like your standard 70s oscillator synths, think more like the wavetable stuff.
Everyone needs more space
A mixing utility to simulate various environments in which your music or audio piece might be listened to. For example someone’s living room, kitchen, a club, a car or even some studios like White Sea.
“My god, it’s full of stars”
“The Ultimate Reverb”. Simulating spaces is a big business. There are tons of reverbs ranging over various styles, and this one purports to simulate the various field leaders such as Lexicon, Bricasti and TC Electronics.
Cymatics Omnivox Harmony Engine
A plugin for adding up to 33 extra layers of your sound to create a lush choral effect. Includes saturation, width, reverb, low octave and tone controls. An additional $10 gets you four sample packs from Cymatics, including Guitars and Vocals. They also make a number of other plugins now, such as
This one is a granular effect with six main controls for the grain size. An additional $10 gets you four Cymatics sample packs and one MIDI pack.
Free Spectre Analyzer, Spectrogram, Goniometer, Band Analyzer and Multiband Correl utilities. They are listed as “For Logic Pro” which I assume means the plugins are AUv3 format only.
Livin’ in a gangster’s paradiso
Samples
Buy Beats and instrumentals, or sell your own. Search by moods such as Ambient, Cool, Dark Carefree and so on.
A pack including over 500 melodic loops, 200 vocals, 150 MIDI patterns, 1000 drum kits, and 500 presets for Omnisphere, Serum, Sylenth and ElectraX (which I am not familiar with).
These folks also do Serum presets, but because I don’t own Serum I am biased in favor of sample packs because they aren’t tied to a specific plugin of course.
Presetground Jabari Afro House Sample Pack
Over 250MB of samples comprising of arp, bass, tom, shakers and “Africa Loops”.
Dan is a drummer and sells a bundle which includes 7 of his rhythm packs plus a delay plugin- Yak Delay by Safari Pedals.
This one contains 444 breaks/loops, 160 other breaks, 30 hi-hat loops, 154 oneshots and fills and 100 melodic samples for making groovy songs.
David is a sound designer who works in the games industry, and his store includes samples for magic, fantasy, melee weapons, robots, monsters, explosions and so on.
Foley for making sound effects in videos. As an observer of the sample market it is fascinating to see how different sample packs are aimed at either musicians or video makers. Sure, foley isn’t as popular to use in songs as it obviously is in video, but there is plenty of crossover.
Drummers are not there to keep time for you
Kontakt Instruments
Based on their creepy artwork and the all-you-need-to-know word “aleatoric” in the description, this instrument would seem to be for tension-creating soundtracks, or perhaps atonal music if you’re into that sort of thing. The sounds are created with “violin, cello, viol da gamba, modified Spanish guitar and a selection of bowed metal and ceramic resonant objects.“
These folks make eat least 11 Kontakt Libraries, and also make presets for Genealogy (which I hadn’t heard of before), Soundbox and presets for the Vital synth.
A vendor that offers Cello, Violin and Viola Glissandos, plus Horror textures which I assume are unnerving and aleatoric sounds.
If ever I doubted my investment in the ubiquitous sampler Kontakt, I keep finding resources like this one. However if you are not one of those people there are still libraries for Decent Samples, Halion and even the one built in to Logic Pro, plus other items like Impulse Responses.
Gholem if you got ’em
Writing
Being alive is a prerequisite to purchasing this software
Another system that goes beyond the concept of the simple word processor with features tailored to authors. Use on the web, Mac, Windows, iOS or Android so you can write anywhere. This one includes drag and drop section reordering, notes, boards for plots, elements and research, outlines made with AI software but your work is never used for training data, auto-suggestion of characters, goals and stats.
“The Storyteller's Toolkit”. Not a word processor replacement, this writing assistant offers a grammar checker, paraphrasing tool, manuscript analysis, chapter critique, “sparks” which is probably inspirational and writing reports. Moving from US$7.50 a month to $9 provides up to 50 sparks and 3 chapter critiques a day plus bonuses like live workshops with “top authors and editors”.
Software specifically for writing novels, available for Mac, Windows and Linux. A free “community” version includes unlimited projects, premise, fabula, setting and narrative strands, characters interview, locations, chapters and scenes, analysis, export (pdf, docx, txt, archive) and automatic backups. A one-off purchase of US$59 gets you mind maps, timeline, groups, unlimited notes, objects, profile picture for characters, places and objects, customized questions for character interviews, prologue, epilogue and parts, moving scenes to another chapter, export to EPUB and more.
Mac
If you keep your menu bar hidden, you can no longer see the clock. This utility gives you a permanent clock in the corner of your screen regardless of what the menu bar status is. Customise the appearance to your preference.
Make pals with pasting… like you did in kindergarten
Lusting after multiple clipboards? There are lots of options — sadly many of them are text oriented and don’t show thumbnails for graphic items. This one appears to. It’s universal meaning it works with Macs, iPhones and iPads. One off purchase of $23 for the pro version, not a subscription.
“Organize Your Files Automatically With AI” Not to be confused with the popular auto-update system found in many Mac apps. File sorting was something that we wanted computers do to for us, but for whatever reasons AI was taught how to write text and create images first. This one can also remove duplicates. US$99 per annum or US$179 forever. Apparently only your filenames make it to their servers and this data is deleted every 30 days.
“Command line power, natural language ease.” Although this uses AI (GPT-4 mini) to work its magic, I am entering it into the Mac category as it is not for generating new pieces of work. It uses natural language queries to perform common functions. This is something Apple should have been aiming towards when AI software started to show promise, but as usual they are reluctant to make any significant changes to the Finder.
A utility for measuring anything on your screen down to the pixel level. Possibly should be in the Graphics section of this blog, but you could use it to determine the coordinates of buttons for writing macros in things like Keyboard Maestro.
iOS
You’re my hero (app)
Big batch of apps this edition. They just kept popping up, mostly in ads. I think Meta’s algorithm finally realised that I am interested in apps so it started showing more of them to me. Here are the ones that looked interesting.
This is a text-to-speech app, but for the US $149 per year it also includes access to curated news and entertainment content from a few publishers, plus “classic” i.e. public domain audiobooks. Several celebrity voices have been modelled — some of which are deceased — so I’m hoping that these have been licensed properly with these people’s estates. It doesn’t state that in the description text. Over 32 languages are available.
AU$76 per year lets you consolidate data from all the various apps you've been using to manage all the stuff your family needs to do. The school emails you notices and approval slips. You need to add various sundry items to your shopping list. One kid has sports practice appointments. Did your husband pay that bill? This app lets you gather all this stuff into one convenient place.
Similar to the above, this is another organizer app that includes appointments, todo lists with sharing, shopping list, notes, daily summaries and more. Other features include importing data via screenshot or voice using a Widget.
“Get the Smartest Map on the Planet.” Direct App Store Link. These folks want AU$200 a year for similar features to the above, but this one includes “Leslie” an AI agent to whom you can ask questions about your appointments. It also seems to be more location oriented, as there is an integrated map which shows you where your appointments are, so this might be better if your thing requires a lot of travel where you have to be somewhere at a certain time.
Another pretty-looking app to organize everything: appointments, journalling, todo list, this one has a finance and habit tracker, routine reminders and a focus timer as well. The top tier requires $92 annually, next level down is $76.
For editing text files. You can do things such as Find and Replace, Remove blank lines, every Nth line, new lines, non-alphanumeric characters, Sort and Trim lines.
If you find you often need to move batches of items between devices and doing it blind and one-at-a-time is not working for you, give this one a look. AU$19.50 a year lets you send yourself messages, images or links which you can arrange into categories. I used to use one called Copied which was kind of like this, so I know this type of thing is useful.
A utility for adding timestamped notes to audio that you record on another device. An Apple Watch version is offered for convenience.
Although this blog is aimed at creative tools, we all need to rest at some point, and this app asks AU$100 a year for customized music for calming, focus or sleep.
Tiimo is an Australian-made app which asks AU$66 annually for a task organizer, todo list and planner that is aimed at neurodivergent folk such as those who have ADHD or Autism. AI software is behind the scenes to help break down tasks into smaller more achievable chunks. Plan your tasks on the Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad or web.
get your stuff sort of sortified
It’s Tiimo time
We need to save a lot of things in our daily travels: links to articles, phone numbers, notes… this app is for none of those, because it’s where you put stuff you want to buy later. I used to use a website called Kaboodle for this and I did find it useful to have those items separated out from the rest of my stuff. This one has item sharing if you want to discuss gift purchases with friends or family and has price drop alerts. I wonder how well it would do with music plugins and apps?
Thinkspan says it’s a secure notes app, password manager, file vault, Al assistant, and private organizer. Privacy via encryption is boasted, they claim their AI can’t see your data. Then how does it work? Also, there does not seem to be a monthly fee listed, so who is paying for the AI work?
A media player that has a huge list of supported formats. It can play local files and it supports a number of network protocols and streaming formats. If VLC is acting clunky or giving you the irrits, give this one a look. There’s a free Lite version, a standard version and a separate purchase for the macOS version.
Clever pennies on your eyes
Investing AU$22 a month will get you a fancy looking, modern app for tracking your business-related trips. Export to PDF or Excel for later incorporation into your Tax Return.
A difficult-to-classify app that combines creativity both solo and collaborative with mood tracking, inspiration, self-development/workout/wellness coaching, life planning and training in a number of categories.
Another category where developers want to get some of that sweet cash that content creators are earning, so the market is almost 100% subscription based. This one seems a bit steep to me at AUD$230 annually. What is your favorite Teleprompter app?
Pausa wants AU$40 annually to have an unnamed LLM get access to your journaled data so you can ask queries about it.
An app designed to encourage hitting daily writing targets.
Become mpowered
iOS Media Consumption
This one claims to need your library card to access audiobooks, eBooks, comics, music, movies and TV shows. You can choose to stream the content or download it for offline consumption. It says it’s free and uses a borrowing system, however some of the reviews note some issues like not being able to return content once you’ve consumed it, and unexpected using up of the borrowing tokens.
iOS Media
I (like to watch) TV shows
Too many shows to watch? This app is designed for you to keep track of them, what’s around, what you’ve seen. I can see this might be useful as my partner and I have accidentally “walked away” from some shows, not because we weren’t enjoying them, we just got distracted by life and other shows. Does that mean they weren’t compelling? Perhaps they weren’t the best shows ever made but we still wanted to see them. This app would help curtail abandoning shows.
There has been several ways to watch your movie collection hosted on your computer on an iOS device. This is one I found while looking for something else. It may be handy for people who want to watch a show in bed, or use a spare iOS device connected to their TV using a USB-C or Lightning to HDMI adapter rather than buying an AppleTV.
The top of the line tier of AU$230 a year will get you a library of thousands of audiobooks, plus the ability to convert your own text into narrated audio. I assume that some of your cash goes to tokens for AI to do this work rather than a person. Basic access starts at AU$80 a year.
This one allows you to upload your existing music library and then stream that to your phone rather than paying Spotify etc. for access to their library.
iOS Music
It will be fun, I swayer
A combo system for Mac and iOS that lets you convert the motion data from the accelerometer of your iPhone into MIDI data, for changing a number of attributes of an instrument at once. This isn’t a new idea but it’s nice to see new ones in this category still appearing. Direct App Store link.
An iPad only, minimal interface app that can load up to 64 samples, or create new ones, then make them play in rhythms and arpeggios in up to 8 sequences. MIDI synchronization is offered.
Master your music while still on the iPad. This app claims to be able to add +4dB to a track without audible distortion. Very simple controls: high, low, loudness and width. It may not be real mastering, but if you use this your track should sound better than just posting what came straight out of your DAW.
Cat and evil lair not included
Waldorf has made synths for many years and it’s good to see them supporting mobile musicians. As this is an incredibly deep and full-featured synth I won’t dive in to the details, but I’ll mention that it is a wavetable style synth that allows sample imports and includes an arpeggiator.
A music utility app for iPad that analyses the chords and harmonies of music files. It claims to be able to analyze music playing in the background such as via Apple Music or Youtube. Includes a spectrum analyzer, oscilloscope and MIDI note display.
NAM stands for Neural Amp Modeling, a relative newcomer in the amp modelling world. This app runs standalone or as an AUv3 plugin and allows loading two Impule Response (IR) profiles at once.
Check out the companion apps by Reinhard such as Superior Drive.
Cam Olcay has made many MIDI apps for iOS. I believe this is his first synth. It’s an 8-voice polyphonic wavetable synth with two wavetables and two FM oscillators per voice. Cem has also provided a way to import sounds by other users or share yours from within the app.
This one’s aimed at Ableton Live users based on the interface, but it doesn’t “know” what it’s sending MIDI to, so it could be used to control other apps as well.
Mass hysteria
This is an app for generating midi sequences and loops by flinging virtual circles around, which then trigger events such as notes and CC values when they bash into the walls and each other. It’s not a new idea, but it does seem to be done in a well thought out way with a pleasant interface. Works as standalone or as an AUv3 plugin.
Graphics
This one lets you make a logo look like it is made of a highly polished metal. Currently there is no export facility so you need to use screen capture software. I use CleanShotX! If you want a full featured screen capture app, check it out here (affiliate link).
Taking aim at the market covered by Canva, this aims to be a one-stop shop for graphics. Their offering includes templates, graphics, fonts, mockups, and AI tools in one place, which could speed things up for you if you have been moving back and forth between several sites and apps to make what you make.
I’m highlighting Dither Boy, but this vendor sells a lot of graphics resources so check those out as well. The dithered look is what I got used to in the early 90s when that was how most bitmap images were displayed on 1-bit systems. However this one goes a lot further with the lo-fi retro effect by offering control over the color, other image attributes and how much pixelation is in the image.
A free and open-source image editor and drawing app. It includes the usual features as well as clone, recolor, magic wand selection and a range of effects. Available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
I’m not really keen on reviewing games in this blog but I’ll make the occasional exception for ones that are about creativity such as graphics, color or fonts. This one is a font recognition game. Also available for the Apple Watch.
A new superhero… DitherBoy!
Animation
This app is for creating animated banners, icons, logos, and illustrations. Export as SVG, Lottie, GIF, APNG, Video, and other formats. Available for Mac or Windows as a one-time purchase — no subscription! But it is a reasonably high price at €130 ($232.80 AUD at press time)
Video
Captions have become crucial for modern video, and these next two listings help you make them all within Final Cut Pro
Intelligent Assistance Software captionAnimator
Final Cut Pro includes on-device transcription but this only leaves traditional captions which don’t look very exciting. This app converts them to proper titles.
25 Animated Subtitles for editing the subtitles you make with captionAnimator.
An online service for converting to and from a huge list of subtitle formats including .sbv that Youtube uses.
Flow state or fugue state?
Interfade Flowstate Collection
60 Wipe Transitions, not sure how long the duration is. Also includes Individual .WAV files for all SFX. Available in 4K resolution in LOG for US$88 or REC.709 for $10 less.
This group sells heaps of asset packs for the various video apps. For example LUTs, transitions and animated doodles.
A utility app for managing the preference files of the various video apps. I’m not entirely sure why this exists, maybe it’s for backing up and restoring complicated preference files you’ve spent time customizing.
Development
A fast search engine you can add to your site. Includes lots of features to help people find what they are looking for, such as Search-as-you-type, semantics, linked recommendations, autocomplete and fuzzy.
This starts by declaring it’s a “Image to HTML CSS converter” then you find it’s a webpage-making and -hosting site competing with DIY sites like Wix. You can then edit your site without touching any code. A freemium option has their branding on it and allows up to 3 users, then a first tier to a highly specific US$4.52 gives you a custom domain, unlimited pages over 1GB of storage and your branding.
If you can make sense of this demo image, this product might be for you
Although this has been mentioned in passing in other graphics or development listings, it never made it into this blog itself. This one is a design tool so could go in the Graphics section, but it is so focused on graphics for app, websites and interfaces for devices that I thought it should be here instead. With this you can work collaboratively and see the mouse position of your coworkers and exchange comments, plus create prototypes of your designs and then hand over to the coders to turn it into reality. A standalone one-time purchase is available for €108 (about $194 at press time) or there are subscription options.
AI
The age of virtual people is here: HeyGen allows you to create a talking host. I wouldn’t be too worried that actors are losing work, as we have seen this kind of thing for many years before AI could do this, except we had clunky animations and artificial, robotic sounding voices. These were commonly found in games and some educational software.
An AI music generator with a difference: it doesn’t write the songs for you. Instead it uses AI to help you make your songs — it actually has a graphical interface you work with along with prompts.
Lovable leverages a customized AI purely for building websites. As a result the examples seem to have a similar look, but then again you could say that about other template-driven sites.
This could have gone into the Development section, as it’s an AI customized for writing code. This uses an agent-like concept called a Droid which you can run many of in parallel, and they claim they learn from what you do with them.
H from Paris makes a slick looking site which tells us about their three AI agent products: Runner, Surfer and Tester which are for automating apps, doing stuff on the web and testing respectively. It appears to be more corporate-level so I’ll leave it to my readers to investigate further if that’s their thing.
Anything is possible at AnythingLLM
“The all-in-one AI application for everyone”. You have the choice of running your LLM locally, or in the cloud either by self-hosting (run in a Docker instance) or their cloud, which starts at US$50 a month but gives you 3 seats. Either way you can hook in to the commercial offerings of OpenAI, Azure, AWS and probably more with API connections.
Promotion
Combination social media management platform and “influencer marketing” platform. All the basics like link-in-bio and analytics appear to be included. US $16.67 (weirdly specific?) gets you started, but there is a free trial.
I doubt a large proportion of you —my faithful or new reader — are comedians but I came across this and found it interesting. Maybe you know someone who is. The app’s exclusively for comedians, or fans thereof. You can follow and engage with the comedians you follow, or if you are one yourself you can connect with your fans in a new way without the burden of traditional social media sites.
Training
Although a contender for the Music category, I have kept this in Training. It’s a 3 part interactive singing course. It’s not clear how the interactivity takes place or even what the cost is.
Nick Singh lived and breathed SQL and Data Science, so he knows what kind of interview questions you’ll get. This site has practice questions so you can land that job for Python coding, Statistics, Machine Learning, or at Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
A wide range of courses for music production and art, covering topics like mixing, orchestration or composition for film, cinematic sound effects, music licensing, then in the visual category there are things like concept art workshops, matte painting and even one for 3D working in Blender.
While I was there I saw they have a free commercial use sample pack and Kontakt instrument, which requires only handing over your email address.
Learn all the movie and game things
File Sharing
Recently I saw some people posting they were abandoning WeTransfer because they misinterpreted the admittedly partially unclear Terms and Conditions which stated they were intending to deploy AI based software to scan the content of transferred files for pirated and other illegal materials such as CSAM. People thought they sneakily wanted the rights to use your files, but that’s not really what their business model is. In any case a couple of alternatives were suggested:
Send large files securely and free of charge.
This one lets you send files up to 250GB in size each for AU $8.16 a month. A free taster lets you send 2GB files.
Media Consumption
Clear the cruft (Windows screenshot shown)
An app I have needed for a while but didn’t know existed. I still have a collection of mp3 versions of songs (all ripped from purchased or donated CDs of course) with varying bitrates and thus quality levels. Moving between computers and different playback software led to many duplicates. This app scans for those and ranks the best quality ones highest allowing you to clear out the crummy quality ones.
Move from Spotify or 40 other streaming services to a new one you’ve decided to subscribe to by also subscribing at a cost of €3.25 (about AU$5.80 at this time). This gives you more music management features and the ability to move your playlists “at one time”, as well as syncing between multiple services. A freemium option lets you test the waters.
Now our journey has concluded and it’s time for you to go back and start investigating, downloading, subscribing or whatever is appropriate. Don’t forget to save your receipts for the next tax time.
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Music, Samples, Kontakt, Writing, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Animation, Video, Development, AI, Promotion, Training, File sharing and Media Consumption.
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