Tool Much Fun 24
I’ve been looking at software for many decades. It’s fascinating to me all the different things it lets you make. Plus, sampled sounds — I remember playing with them on a Mac with a floppy disk when they were mono 8-bit. You thought 128kbps mp3s sounded bad! So I’ve got much better quality ones for you in this and previous editions. Let’s get started, there are a lot of genres to cover.
This edition offers:
Work, Writing, Music, Samples, Kontakt, Fonts, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Video, Development, AI, Promotion, Training, File sharing and Media Consumption.
I’ll switch it up a bit and change the order this edition, just to keep you on your toes. There is no end of new stuff to check out. Let’s begin!
“All-In-One Knowledge Management Platform” This crew aims to improve the knowledge management in your organization, and if you aren’t familiar with the term it boils down to how to disseminate procedural information. That’s right: documentation. Making it both well and internally consistent is the first challenge. Connects to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, GitHub, Teams, Slack, Confluence, Okta and more. Includes approval and revision tracking as you would expect.
Forms
More than just forms. Some of you may have heard of or filled out a form on Typeflow or Google Forms by now. This offering is a step up and integrates with your calendar and can do PDF approval workflow, and more.
Forms: people don’t like filling them out, and making them either if the tools are lousy. This one offers modern, clean form building tools for the form makers which means less friction for the people who have to fill them out.
Here’s a few PDF tools for people who need more than Apple Preview and don’t like Adobe:
For Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, this one offers the standard suite of tools such as editing, flattening, adding and reordering pages plus conversion to Word or image formats. There are also some AI-based PDF querying tools.
These folks offer a range of versions, a free version with basic functions hoping to tempt you into their commercial version with features such as forms and comments. The middle version is Windows only, but the top of the line PDFsam Visual is available on the rest of the platforms. It is subscription based, priced at AU$61.90/year.
Soda offers the usual editing features, but has the AI summary features similar to Pdfgear, as well as an e-signing workflow like DocuSign.
Free, web based way to do 30 common functions on PDFs, such as editing, compressing, redacting and rearranging pages.
Hustle is a productivity service aimed at people who want more than what is offered by Trello, Monday, TickTick and the like. Organize your projects and tasks. US$70/year to get the good tier.
Memtime Time Tracking for Accountants
The thing about time tracking is that the money folks in your organization need it done, but don’t want you to spend a lot of time doing it. This one plugs in to a number of services like Zero, TeamWork, Toggl, and Asana. Mac, Windows and Linux apps are supported — no mobile apps yet as they are currently not able to capture work done on those platforms.
Rosters, Time Tracking & Attendance Software from New Zealand. This one looks clean and modern, which I think is important when doing relatively unpleasant tasks such as roster creation. Connects to Xero, Square, Clover and Lightspeed.
I hope the name is from the episode of For All Mankind where the astronauts stuck on the Moon only have one tape to watch, but I doubt it. This one is a service for HR tasks “from hire to retire” (catchy) such as salary/workforce planning, onboarding workflow, org charts, realtime dashboards of your staff and eSigning of contracts and other documents. Integrates with over 100 other services.
Currently in waitlist mode, this one aims to connect live performers with venues for facilitation of the dreary booking and payments arrangements. Not to be confused with the should-have-been-more-famous word processor.
An open-source note taking app for many platforms, this one seems more like a full-featured text editor. It does syntax highlighting so I’m wondering if it’s more suited for the Development section.
A simple website for creating polls with ranked choice voting. Your polls can include images, and voters don’t need to login, but you do to create the poll.
An app for serious document creation, this one allows you to create links from inside the document text and graphics to both text and graphic comments. Supports realtime collaboration now. Should be good for both authors and editors.
A system for verifying if your subscribers’ email addresses are genuine, removing duplicates and so on.
A newcomer to the browser category, this one aims to return the web to it’s original intention of openness, to take back the control that Google, Microsoft and to a lesser extent Apple have on it these days.
Writing
“Create Beautiful Books” — by this they mean ebooks for Apple, Kindle, Kobo and others. This makes validated EPUB3 files, compresses your images and makes ACE-approved accessible output, which is ace. If you were in Australia several decades ago you’ll get that last bit.
A minimalist writing tool for Mac, costed at AU$30. There is a Basic version for free here.
Collaborative writing software from Germany. Currently in beta. It aims to reduce all the copying and pasting between multiple text sharing and communications services. Works on multiple devices and includes chat with co-authors, version history, merging, attribution which includes percentage of text written and time spent, and of course commenting on existing text.
Open source distraction-free writing app.
Music
A kind of combination music community and maybe a kind of music label, as they have both a membership option and links to a curated selection of music. Plus there is an online shop with 5 items, one of which incudes - 31 Drum Oneshots (Kick, Snare, Top),16 Drum Loops, 13 Bass Loops, 7 Experimental Design Sessions, (are these for Ableton Live?) Samples: 13 Effect, 8 Melodic and,13 “Raw” Bass.
This is a rompler which provides the bass sounds of classic 4-operator FM hardware synths, e.g. Yamaha DX100, TX81Z, FB-01 & Reface DX. 100 presets are included.
Apotheca is all about modulation. Setup LFOs to modulate Delay, Flanger, Saturation, Bitcrush, Reverb and Filter parameters. You can change the shape of the modulation curve and also connect lots of parameters in the style of modular synthesis. A bit of a learning curve but quite powerful.
If kick drums are a crucial part of your music, you want full control over them. This lets up import drum samples and uses AI to edit them. No mention of what models, ethics, etc. They also make a companion plugin “Sub Ninja” for assisting the mix of your bass and the kick.
LAAL is not only the name of Data’s only daughter, it’s a look-ahead limiter with many fancy features such as transient protection and mid/side controls.
This is a tool for bouncing tracks or stems from ProTools which seems to be a bit of a pain. I should probably get one for Logic.
Around a quarter of a century ago, musicians could choose from more than Mac, Windows or Linux. There was also Atari and Amiga. On the latter two platforms, a type of compositional software called a Tracker was one way to write music. This plugin is modelled after the samplers that were around back then.
A MIDI Tool for Ableton Live 12 Full (the one that supports Max for Live) that allows you to generate chord progressions of any length and complexity, by just typing chord symbols.
An instrument plugin for making cinematically drifting/evolving ambient soundbeds and droney washes. Blend two sampled analog and digital parts with a third of noise textures. Built-in reverb and bitcrusher effects.
A free multi-fx effects plugin from a new-to-me developer.
A new kind of synth and sound design tool that although has the traditional knobs and sliders, also lets you get into coding, There is free 2-channel version lacking MIDI support you can try.
A “no-nonsense FM synth”. Good to see someone trying to make one because FM synths use maths that seems to be hard for programmers to turn into comprehensible controls.
Transient Shaper. It claims to have “precise control” over the attack and sustain parts of a sound. At $129 it better be good.
“Soft, Dark, Intimate 48″ Felt Upright Piano”
These folks specialise in heavy metal amp tones that I assure you you can’t get by using the drab old amp sims that come with your DAW.
Some kind of web based musical instrument for non-standard-tuning audio. I got it to make sound once then couldn’t after changing some settings.
An analog-style delay plugin.
Makemake musicmusic withwith ChordChord
Slick-designed web based music arranger with MIDI support. Export WAV, mp3 or PDF of your chosen chords. AI assistance of chord choice is offered, and you can choose to use it on just subsections of your song.
Impact Soundworks Shreddage Amp Venom
“The ultimate metal core amp” Includes screamer, distortion+, opt compressor, chorus, EQ and echo effects.
A compressor from newcomers Daybreak Audio, this one includes “an unbelivably strong” multiband compressor and multiband distortion as well.
This is a free app to process audio files and apply effects to them. It’s a graphical UI for the open source CDP software.
There are a huge number of effects, and you change attributes by dragging sliders. Then you process the file, and play it to see how it sounds. By default the app saves a copy of each version so you never lose anything but you have to manually delete the duds that didn’t turn out how you wanted.
An Abelton Live instrument built from samples of a bass pedal. Includes straight and vibrato plus mechanical noises.
Need some cinematic whooshes, collisions or other sci-fi sounds? Check out SoundMorph.
Presets
This time the presets category has some descriptions omitted due to time constraints.
An expansion pack for OneShot made from sounds of the forest.
Gonza 3 Packs Essentials For Psy Trance
Reverb Machine’s Chroma Campfire Boards Of Canada Synths
Arps for Bleass Omega
Hurton Audio BA-1 Synth & Cyber Vol.1
Futuristic styles for Baby Audio BA-1
Psytrance Presets for Vital.
A range of samples and presets for Pigments, Sandman, Biome, Absynth, TAL Sampler, Thorn, Razor and Tantra.
Samples
Dream Music Temple 128 Multi Genre Vocal Samples
For Koala Sampler
Here’s a couple of sounds probably more aimed at game designers than musicians that I stumbled upon. Anyone remember Stumbleupon?
Left Field Drum Breaks Shot caller Vol. 2
30 drum breaks made on “real vintage” drums and mastered through analog tape (unspecified, but could you really tell the difference?)
Low Heat’s The Heat Sample Pack
Drum and percussion hits and synth and bass one shots for making Synth-Hop, Lo-Fi, Boom Bap, G-Funk and so on. I hadn’t heard of G-Funk, I must be getting old. Also 40 melodic loops.
Kontakt Instruments
The next two let you use the flavor of the Middle East in your compositions.
Deviant Drums is their flagship library, allowing you to switch kit parts between brands such as Tama, Gretsch, Yamahan and Mapex than all the usual drum machine controls like saturation, tuning and size. A free taster version is available.
The Sound Stone Kontakt Instrument
A vintage acoustic and electric guitar recorded through a 3m m79 tape machine.
This uses strings, cellos, flutes, vocals through effects to generate tension and other ominous sounds.
“sweeping, atmospheric pads” for ambient or dreamy music. This one is for Audiomodern Soundbox, not Kontakt.
While you’re there check out the Audio Solos range for creating ambient evolving soundscapes.
Bunker Samples Intimate Violin Iremia
A vision played quietly and intimately, recorded with 10 microphones one of which was inside the instrument.
Somerville Sounds Genesis Pipe Organ
Somerville increases their range with this pipe organ, age and model unspecified, but played bu a pro organist.
Insanity Samples Dixieland Collection
Want to make trad jazz? You might need this collection of Cornet, Clarinet, Trombone, Banjo, Piano, Upright Bass and a Jazz Drum Kit (including iconic percussive elements).
Vintage Schulmerich handbells with a full three-octave range, plus almost two octaves of handchimes. Recorded with a Neumann U87 in two positions.
This new venture has launched a library called Guitar Affair:The Dreamer. For making dreamy guitars I guess?
These folks make a number of libraries including acoustic guitar, ukulele, wind instruments and Scape for cinematic textures. There are also some freebies to try.
A dombra is a long-necked nylon stringed instrument, and this library allows you to bring the sounds of central Asia to your pieces.
Deviant Drums is their flagship library, allotting you switch kit parts between brands such as Tama, Gretsch, Yamahan and Mapex than all the usual drum machine controls like saturation, tuning and size. A free taster version is available.
Need some more top quality Kontakt libraries? Have a listen to the demos over at 8DIO.
I discovered this just before Halloween, as you might expect. Inspired by 50s style horror movie posters and comic book covers.
Mac
Keystroke viewers were this edition’s mini-obsession, for when you are making a screen recording and want your viewers to see what keys you’re typing more sensibly than taking a video of you pressing them on your physical and possibly grubby keyboard.
This lets you setup Picture-in-Picture for things you aren’t usually allowed to use it for.
Back in the days of floppy disks, it was up to you to manually keep track of what files were on what disk. We started by writing the filenames on a sticker attached to the disk. Then someone invented dry erase stickers. Then databases started appearing. For a while this category subsided, but now it’s back: search all your externals for files without having to connect each one.
iOS
Today’s focus is on wish list apps: save-for-later apps that are specialised for online shopping, with features such as categories, price comparison, dates and gift recipients.
Now back to other topics.
Group and Team management app. It is marketed primarily at sports teams but can also be used for other group activities.
Aimed at real estate agents, this app can scan a four bedroom house under five minutes, then you upload the scan to their service and it builds you pretty floor plans in 12-24 hours. Pay a higher fee for an express 8-hour service.
A utility which offers over 100 text transformations such as stripping out unwanted characters or formatting and converting characters.
Also for Macs, this utility allows adding a reminder or note to any webpage, for example you might have a favorite affiliate you want to give your purchases to, or perhaps you always forget that a certain restaurants’ vegetable curry is pretty bland.
iOS AR
Extract LiDAR data from devices that have that hardware.
A rarely-mentioned development tool by Apple. Create models using a device that supports LiDAR, then add animations and/or Spatial Audio. Exports in .usdz format.
A basic app for drawing in Augmented Reality. I’m not sure why it’s in the Developer Tools category in the App Store. It would probably get more views in the graphics section.
iOS Graphics
If you are a developer, one way to get more attention is by posting attractive screenshots of your apps. This one gives you a lot of control for the background.
A simple and free iPad app for importing photos, creating collages and adding text overlays.
Another addition to the niche category of slit cam apps for making those unique effects.
Competes with VN, Capcut and so on with effects, filters, AR overlays, time shifting and creating videos from a slideshow of still images.
iOS Media
Go back to the old days of CDs with this app. It allows you to play your songs as if you had to select a disc and put in a player, rather than our more modern menu-based systems. For nostalgics who have given away or lost their CD players only. I still have mine.
iOS music
A sample based audio sequencer and live performance app. They say it's a groove box and drum machine with onboard effects (not listed). Multiple effects per channel or group. You are expected to record your jam in the app and export it like the olden days: no support for AUv3 is mentioned or is Abelton Link for syncing it to other apps.
A multi-fx AUv3 plugin that includes delay, reverb, phaser, compressor, autopan and glitch.
Toy Sound Apps
I found yet another bunch of apps that are standalone only so can't be used in your preferred DAW for using their sound more conveniently.
Write chord progressions, add lyrics and then drag and drop the MIDI into your DAW — no live MIDI output I'm afraid.
Graphics
A large asset store that includes very cool (yes I know it’s not cool to say cool anymore. Fire?) video transitions, motion assets, textures, LUTs, Titles, templates and also training courses. However, some of the items need AfterEffects, and others like the titles are built with the fonts that come with an Adobe subscription so I’m not sure how well they’ll work if you substitute them with your own fonts.
A web based gradient maker where you can choose from 14 noise types, seven colors and three attributes to create a downloadable gradient file. Unfortunately I had trouble changing the height value using Firefox, maybe they only tested it in Chrome (sigh).
A WebGL based site for creating psychedelic kaleidoscopic animations. There are a number of attributes you can change with the mouse or keys, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to export a recording so you have to use your own screen recorder. Supports audio input and MIDI too. Nice.
A old-school — maybe 90s or early 00s?— glitch style audio visualizer for the iPad.
Create 3D versions of basic logo shapes or upload your own SVG file. Create looping videos of them rotating. Free, and commercial use is permitted.
Need more graphics? There’s a huge range at Creative Market.
Video
A full-featured Gui. Interface for ffmpeg, which allows lossless cuts to video files (hence the name) as well as other features like audio track replacement.
A live streaming app that can stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and more. Free to try then US$80/year for the PRISM Plus upgrade with more features and no watermarks.
Automatic captioning for Premiere Pro. Caption styles are customizable and you can highlight words.
Not really sure what this is. It’s not software. The first item is >100 “Personalized B-Roll Prompts” but I don’t think they mean AI prompts. You also get a filming strategy workbook and some other organisational materials. I think this is more for social media video producers rather than moviemakers.
Over 240 keyframeless preset animations in 23 categories which you can use as either adjustment layers or drag-and-drop effects.
Development
This is a system you can license to incorporate into your products to give them end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Contact them to find out pricing etc.
An organisational tool. “Boards, docs, chat, and Git automation in one workspace” save having to move between different websites and use APIs for sharing data between services.
AI
This is tool to prevent known AI system from modelling your material once it’s been published. There are invisible watermarking features, plus they offer an AI detection tool.
A video editing platform which offers over 6000 templates as well as video generation, text-to-speech, scripts, background removal, subtitles and translation.
Image editing and generation (for US and Canada only for now). Free to try.
A music generation site. Add your own lyrics, choose a style and gender.
Not for creation, this is an inspection tool for checking things like dents in metal, scratches in leather, holes in fabric, box detection on conveyor belts, that kind of thing. Runs on a dedicate device that can be installed in a factory for example.
Formerly AgentSea, this seems to be a portal which accesses only open source LLMs, and includes ones I hadn’t heard of such as Z.ai and Qwen. Their claim to fame is that it’s private and your chats don’t go back into the training data.
They call this a “deep agent” and it’s another one in the category of “we can do everything”. It can hook in to Slack, Teams, Confluence, Good Drive, Salesforce and so on, then when you build your agent it professes to do all kinds of fancy things with them. Available in a small-teams tier called ChatLLM and then an enterprise version for the heavyweights.
A sales and CRM oriented offering, this one talks about leads, outreach, replies, prep & notes. Begins at US$16/month for features such as auto-sorting of your Office365 or Google inbox and calendar and drafting replies, then moves up to get workflow automation and full campaign management.
A one-stop shop and portal for all things AI. Maybe once you get into this site you won’t need to browse the AI section of my blog as much as it seems to be a specialised marketplace site for finding AI services. But we’ll see— there are always new ones popping up.
Free AI Video Generator
Whoa, there are a lot of search results for ”Manus AI” but this one seems to be the one I heard about. It leans on Claude Sonnet to do all kinds of tasks like research and analysis, data processing, web automation, content creation, code development and file management.
This reminds me of Perplexity, because it looks like it hooks into a number of LLMs such as Gemini, Claude, Deepseek, Grok, Kimi (which I hadn’t heard of before) and OpenAI. The results of your prompt/query are returned in a more graphical way, with balloons (called nodes) you can click on, move choose colors and also direct your follow up queries to. Apparently this is called an “AI Canvas tool”. Features are as you’d expect: Automated Meeting Notes, Workflow Automation, Integrations with other services, Task & Project Management, Summaries and Insights, basically what each LLM that it accesses can do. Looks cool.
You may have heard of these folks if you have seen the name Hailuo with regards to video generation. They also do an agent, speech and music too.
For iPhones— but I have no separate category at this stage. It’s getting tricky. Anyway this one lets you run Gemma 3, Meta Llama 3.2, Qwen 2, 2.5 and 3, and DeepSeek R1 all on your iPhone privately. It needs iOS 18 as a minimum.
Transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze your meetings. They claim 95% accuracy and over 100 languages are supported.
Although I thought this was short for “drift” at first, it’s probably “draft”. This is for making attractive carousels for social media posts.
A portal for accessing the graphics features from multiple services such as Gemini, Wan, Black Forest, Runway, Stability, Pika and more, all using a graphical workflow to blend different elements together. Impressive.
This is an app-building service, using eight agents that have been tailored for specialising in different tasks such as data analysis, CRM, finances, operations, appointments/time management and so on. The apps you custom build are hosted within their site but you can then invite more team members to use them with you. Many other services are offered to connect via APIs.
Promotion
These folks are serious about marketing! Probably aimed more at medium-to-large business, this has a full suite of tools to make links that take your customers exactly where you want them to go, including from QR codes.
A link-in-bio tool with extra features such as analytics. Aimed at “indie musicians, authors, and small teams” to help them keep in pitch with their fans or customers.
More like a music distributor than a promotional tool, this platform offers a way to publish your music with the main attraction. Being “Set your own prices, get paid directly, and retain full ownership of your non-exclusive catalog.” Sounds good. I hope this is a successful venture.
Training
Rapidflow Infinity Masterclass Bundle
Teaches how to use software and hardware to make Techno & House. 6 hour course, includes mixing and mastering.
File Sharing
They say they’ve been around since 2010 and it appears the website hasn’t had many updates since then. They kind of remind me of MediaFire but without 100 ads on the page. There’s a free 500MB tier to test it out. Other dodginess includes grammatical errors such as “How much Premium-account cost?” on their FAQ page.
This is more aimed at the business side I think, as they don’t seem to have a consumer plan or even a consumer page. Plus there’s lots of mention of APIs, which the consumer offerings don’t usually have. Either way they claim US$7 per TB per month.
Media Consumption
For reading. This one is aiming to be an alternative to Goodreads and it allows you to import your reading list from there.
RSS is back! But it never really left. This is a newsreader and it's available on iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, Web and more. Bookmark extensions let you grab content to read later from most websites.
Sadly this issue has come to an end, and it is now your responsibility to go back and check out at least one of the things you saw above that took your fancy. Fear not, there are boatloads of things that didn’t make it into this one and they shall be waiting for you in Tool Much Fun 25. As usual, if you are a maker of something and want a longer entry, get in touch with me via your preferred method and we can work out the next steps.
Saw something you liked? Use this handy table of contents at the bottom (whaat?) to pop back up to any section:
Work, Writing, Music, Samples, Kontakt, Fonts, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Video, Development, AI, Promotion, Training, File sharing and Media Consumption.