Tool Much Fun 25
It’s about time. Where has he been with all the new stuff (or things I hadn’t heard of)? Better late than never, even though this publication can’t actually be late because there is absolutely no strict schedule. In fact there were so many releases in the Music category that they will be carrying over to the next one in large quantity. A few categories had nothing come my way since the last issue, such as File Sharing and Development, but there will be more eventually. Anyway time to jump in! This edition offers:
Music, Samples, Kontakt, Podcasts, Fonts, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Work, Video, AI, Training, and Media Consumption.
music
Music
These folks have Metric Halo make a range of utility and sound sculpting plugins such as Meld, Mizhead, MES-432D9D Dual Three Band Parametric Mastering Equalizer, CGII, DB Verb ( a reverb for drums), MBSI channel strip and MBEQ which competes with FabFilter’s and Three-Body Tech’s.
“a free plugin from Big Fish Audio that lets you slice and transform your samples with ease.”
Sorry to take a while to get around to Aqeel Aadam as Wailing Wall, then Waymaker and Ridgewalk came out a while ago. The new one is Outgrowth which offers five engines and five effects to mangle your sound.
Lots of plugins for Abelton Live full version.
A tool for adding harmonics. So essentially it's a distortion plugin, this provides unprecedented control over those harmonics including a widening function that can send different harmonics to left and right.
This is a delay that claims to go beyond stepped repeats of 1/4,1/8 etc but you can see those steps on one of the sliders. But I guess the other controls —which are not notched — allow for more unusual “Latin-style” rhythms. Also includes a chorus.
Don’t get hysterical, get Hysteresis
Not sure how long this one’s been out. Looks like I have already installed it but I don’t seem to have posted about it before. It’s a “glitch delay geared toward creating robotic artifacts and musical malfunctions” and it’s free.
Nembrini continues to expland their range of amp sims. I’ll admit that Hughes & Kettner doesn’t seem popular where I’m from, but that doesn’t mean much. This has the usual set of features you expect from them such as cabinet and mic emulation, IR loading, EQ and compression.
Iconic Instruments Levine’s Machines
A drum machine modelled on Steve Levine’s LM-1 Drum Computer. Includes a sequencer and 20 “era-specific Pattern and Mixing presets”, the latter being for the onboard effects units of drive, compressor/limiter and EQ.
Compressors. I might not need another one but this might be your first. They also make:
There is no shortage of saturators, and Platone Studio offers this low-cost plugin with only four controls to deal with: Push, Crank, Wet, and Output.
This aims to improve your mix. How? When mixing with headphones they all color the sound, which leads to poor choices… that is, your mix will only sound good on headphones much like yours instead of a general mix that works everywhere. This uses modelling of real spaces to adjust that, so you can have virtual listens in various environments.
Is it really cheating?
A multi-fx unit on steroids. It has 16 effects engines and flexible routing options to totally mangle your sound. Also includes macros.
How I wish I had heard of this years ago. When I write guitar parts I often choose chords by both feel and sound exploratively, but I don't know what they're called so I'd have to show the guitarists and sketch up a diagram. This app for both Mac and Windows lets you make nice clean charts for them.
Eva instruments Virtual Stage FX
An affordable plugin that helps position various instruments in a space to help give them separation. Three room sizes are offered.
This group has a large range of instruments and samples in eight categories and they’re available in Kontakt, Logic Sampler, and WAV/REX/AIFF formats.
My Musical Voice The Monster Menace Vocal Bundle
A set of five plugins aimed at vocals —but I guess the plugin can’t tell what it is processing— consisting of Drive, Shape (EQ),Heat, Wash (reverb) and Call (delay)
Direct App Store link. When you want to modify sounds, you can turn knobs or push sliders… but what happens when both hands are occupied? This is another one of those apps for turning motion into MIDI data which you send to your synth to make it turn its knobs, so to speak.
Rast has joined the list of vendors that make resonance cleanup plugins, but this one’s claim to fame is that it works in Mid/Side mode to ensure you get the best width without losing bass.
Make retro sounds the retro way
“Easily generate, organize, and access retro sound effects for your games” A web-based sound generation site for retro/8-bit sounds. Several features for free, more if you go Pro, which starts at US$3/month.
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.
Yes, you are reverb
Yes Another Reverb but this one differentiates itself by including a six band EQ, as well as the standard predelay, decay and size parameters. An intiutive set of three controls: close, mid and far let you place your sound source in the mix more easily.
samples
Much realism is offered with 5 different velocities, 7 round robins and 4 different articulations.
The Sample Stop Silk Road: Eastern Melodies
A set of Eastern-inspired melodic loops made with traditional flutes, plucked strings, and textured pads. Stems are separated for your convenience.
Mondo Loops Lofi Hip Hop Sample Packs
11 packs including Jazzhop, Chillhop, Ambient and strings. They also make Dust Verb, a lo-fi reverb.
Bass, Drums, Effects, Loops, Synths and Vocals. They also do preset packs for Diva, Dune Massive, Spire, Silent, V-Station and Zebra2.
Sam makes sample packs, Serum presets, courses for sound design, mixing and mastering.
They claim to be the world’s largest royalty-free sound library with over 11,000,000 items including sound effects, samples, loops, and music tracks. Subs start at US $5 a month.
kontakt
Kontakt Instruments
Drums galore this edition!
Drums for rock, metal or other heavy music, comprising 300 samples.
A fully-featured kit including compressor, limiter, EQ, Crush and widener. Plus midi mapping for Addictive Drums, BFD, SSD and others.
Another one, this one seems to have 7 channels and includes an EQ, bus compressor and tape saturator.
Seek and ye shall find (new sounds)
Pendle (and Percy) continue to delight makers of unusual sounds with their take on a sampler. The “seekquencer” function moves the playhead to different parts of your sample to make unthought-of noises.
Handcrafted Audio Handcrafted Piano
A >59GB library that is not only a masterfully-sampled piano but a synth as well.
For your next introspective, Japanese-themed audio piece
Looks like Sonica is aiming to take the top spot for instruments from Asia, and they offer Taiko drums, Koto, Sanshin, Kabuki, Sho, Shakuhachi and tsugaru shamisen.
Make all the movie noises
These folks are aiming at the moviemakers, as you can tell from the company name. But this bundle includes drums and guitar for completing your soundtrack as well as for making effects and ambient sounds.
An instrument that makes a drill-like sound from a Virus T1 synth. And it’s free, but the cost is that you have to follow an account on Spotify, which I am not convinced is the best way to get people to like you.
Is that what hats look like in The Abyss?
Another sampler, this one claims to be able to take your sample to new heights. Includes modulation, looping, morphing and onboard effects. No samples are included with this instrument, but I hope you at least have some that came with your DAW.
podcasts
Podcasts
For the consumption rather than the creation. Do you listen to nonfiction podcasts and need to take notes or extract quotes? This AI-powered player lets you make transcripts of your podcasts and then summarise them too. Delivered via email. Exports to Obsidian, Bear and others.
Now this one is for making them: at scale though, as it’s aimed at the enterprise. Includes hosting, editing, publishing notices of new episodes to social media, ad insertion and analytics.
fonts
Pardon the awkward cropping
An indie foundry from New York with 10 clean typefaces on offer.
Remember when fonts were fun? A little corny, but fun. A subset is available here.
Any Futura you like
A revision and updating of a classic font.
mac
Mac
Stop the macOS Dock from jumping screens.
A “smart” clipboard search tool. That is, saves a history of clipped items and uses local-only AI to allow you to describe what you want to find in your history.
A remote control or monitoring app, such as TeamViewer, Acronis CyberProtect or NoMachines. As usual a client must be installed on the target computers. An iPad app for controlling is available.
For an unknown reason Apple was never fond of having an item in the contextual menu of the Finder to allow creating new empty files. But because Windows had this feature, switchers are often disappointed that it’s not built in to macOS. This utility is one of several that gives you that feature.
Check how much power your Apple Silicon processor is using with this performance monitoring CLI tool. Shows wattage and temperature.
Bit of a Swiss Army knife for audio: automatically pause your music, set individual apps’ volumes (an often-requested feature) and record system audio.
It was a toss up for putting this in the AI category. It’s a Mac-only client for accessing an online service (ChatGPT), so this is the right category.
The interesting part is that there is a version for 68020 CPUs running System 7, which is 35 years old at press time.
Perhaps aimed more at Mac admins, and then the unfortunately large subset of those who work somewhere that has chosen Microsoft as a platform, this allows you to set Outlook as the default mail app without having to open Apple Mail first.
Apple has decided to abandon the idea of getting iPad users comfy with macOS with the LaunchPad app, and get everyone to go back to either Spotlight or the Applications folder. This is one of several apps that replace LaunchPad. Too bad the DragThing guy gave up, he could have made a few sales now.
ios
iOS
A pretty-looking reminder and appointment manager that includes features like time-to-leave alarms that turn into countdown timers, which may be useful for people with time blindness.
A customizable keyboard that is on the border of useful and garish.
A personal database designed to track all the live concerts you've ever been to.
A journal app with AI software which prompts you instead of the other way around. This shows you quotes and images to inspire you, and then lets you brain dump for sorting later.
If you need to get “dodgy” with your iOS device, perhaps as a last resort in troubleshooting it, this Windows-based utility may have more low-level features than iMazing. Please note that jailbreaking your device is a security risk so I can’t endorse it save for educational purposes, that is, don’t sign in to anything important once you jailbreak.
iOS Graphics
It seems making art for art’s sake isn’t popular, so developers have made some art apps that say they are for making wallpapers. Which is just really art that you want to look at on your Lock or Home Screen. This one has a few ways to play with your image, blur, glass and mirror, and two parameters in each— not quite enough for me to get this one as I have other art apps that can do a lot more.
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
The first Augmented Reality MIDI controller. You map 3 motions in space to 3 MIDI parameters, and then you can change the values by moving your phone in space.
Old skool beat makin’
A full featured dum machine that is also an AUv3 plugin for use in a DAW. It has a large number of preset rhythms and some onboard effects.
A standalone music and beat creator (no plugin). It offer six layers, has static MIDI file export, but not live playing.
It’s an EQ, and it’s simple, hence the name
A no-nonsense 6 band EQ for quickly sculpting the tone of your tracks. He also makes a number of other music apps and plugins such as:
A Dual Stereo Phaser. If you’re uninspired by your current phaser effect, check this one out.
By the maker of Samplist, this is a basic sampler that lets you load samples onto pads and trigger them by tapping.
This is a utility for looking at raw MIDI data that is being sent over the WiFi network. Not sure if this is aimed at developers or not.
A multitrack audio editor. This one includes onboard effects but does not seem to support AUv3 plugins, so you can't load any of your other plugins into it. Exports in a number of formats.
A universal app that lets you break free of the constraints of your DAW and fetch items from the internet, such as online video services, cloud storage, social media platforms, or your NAS.
Tap to play
graphics
Graphics
Make funky shapes… when it works
This is supposed to be for generating rounded edge shapes and saving as SVG or PNG but it wasn't working in Firefox.
A tool for syncing frames… but how? What for? I have let you down a little dear reader, because I saw this somewhere and when I have visited it, it doesn't explain what it's for.
Someone like me likes infinite canvas note taking/drawing apps and has compiled a huge list of them to check out. Some you will have doubtlessly heard of such as Apple’s Freeform and Miro, but others are new. Although I can’t promise I won’t revisit one of these in a future edition of Tool Much Fun, in the spirit of sharing I am posting this so you can explore further.
Choose colors like the cool kids
A cool-looking web-based color tool that supports 8 different color spaces to explore, dark mode, export in PNG or CSS or copy the values to the clipboard.
Custom brushes for Photoshop, Procreate and Clipstudio Paint.
work
Keep your groupies grouped with Usermesh
Sick of organizing using emails, Slack and Whatsapp chats? Use this to quickly build a private website for your group. Free account gives you one board with 5 members.
Themes for ecommerce sites. Not the game.
Surveys and feedback to the speaker or admin person live, during a presentation. I first heard of this from Slido https://www.slido.com/ so it seems similar to that. Customisable templates are offered, as is AI-assisted presentation creation.
In a few years we will say “it looks very mid-to-late 2020s”
“A new kind of CRM” - A modern, easy-on-the-eyes CRM that tracks tasks, meetings (with recording, transcription, and follow-ups), accounts and it features AI to help sort it all out if you want it to.
Dex plugs into Linkedin, Facebook and Gmail to go beyond the standard CRM. They offer a Chrome extension and mobile apps for both iOS and Android to enhance their service.
Be the envy of your workmates while you blitz your todo list.
A modern and pretty-looking task manager with time tracking, todo lists, reminder alerts, and an AU assistant named “Blitzy” is offered to help you.
You may have heard of MEGA for filesharing, but did you know they now have group collaboration? Chat, calls, meetings, screen sharing,
ICYMI
I think this was originally a generic task manager but now they may have decided to focus on developers because there simply a new feature called Taskade Genesis which is geared towards making apps and websites.
video
Video
Danny Stuart’s Materials Edition 1
160 Abstract Textures and 160 video loops, totalling over 3GB.
ai
AI
This is a graphic oriented AI site which claims to handle video, audio and 3D graphics. It’s powered by Nano Banana. Starts at US$16/month for 2000 credits.
This is a text-to-speech service. I don’t really like overuse of this, especially when it’s combined with text also generated by AI because the whole thing becomes trite. Use sparingly.
A text-to-image generator that uses unspecified diffusion models to create your desired image. Credits based system to pay for the compute time.
Stem splitter, kind of. It claims to be able to remove vocals from any song. I prefer Lalal.ai! Try it out at this link.
Nothing to do with those spheres from that old game or fancy countertops, this is an AI suite of specialised agents for managing your emails plus “socials, SEO, lead generation, calls, and support”. It seems to be aimed at startups who have a lot to do but can’t afford real human staff yet, and will of course be the subject of discussion about whether or not AI systems are ”taking our jobs”. The worry is whether or not we had created jobs that were automatable to begin with, just like factory workers.
A web service for changing your voice into different sounding people or even making a pitch-shifted choir. US$4/month for the minimum, after a free trial.
An agent for building websites such as landing pages, dashboards, portfolios and more.
“A Self-Writing Internet Technology” and what they mean by this is that it's an AI tweaker for writing apps and websites, using Motoko, “the first programming language for AI”, and runs your apps on the revolutionary Internet Computer network (ICP). I don’t yet know what either of those are so I need to investigate further.
This “is an AI assistant for everyone, powered by the Qwen series models. It's free to use” and there are apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows.
Do you have to make a lot of presentations as part of your job? This offering helps build attractive slides not just by designing the layouts but also creating images within the slides to make them more stimulating. Plus it supports analytics so you can see who saw what.
Corel has made an installable app for creating images, and includes an interesting feature called negative prompts where you can instruct it to exclude certain items or elements from your picture to further refine it.
AI Writing
A collaborative text editor which uses integration with several LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and so on. So yes, you can write, use AI summarization and other features, and still see little avatars of your collaborators like you may have seen in Microsoft apps with collaboration features.
An AI-powered text editor app for Mac that tries to be an assistant with the power of autocomplete, rather than you asking it to generate larger chunks of text which you should then edit. They claim “All processing happens locally. Your words and data never leave your device.”
AI Music
A plugin that helps you pick samples — real ones, not generated — for your track. This would also go in the music category but it’s likely that it uses AI algorithms to work its magic.
A synth that can be customized using AI.
“Agentic AI Browser for Deep Search & Automation” We’re now seeing the next generation of browsers: with integrated AI. The first I heard of was Perplexity’s browser Comet. Now Firefox is getting in on the act.
AI Video
A frontend for Veo 3 and Sora 2 which can be accessed via an iOS app.
Video creation. In these early days of AI-made videos, several complaints were posted about consistency errors of characters and objects. This offering allows you to upload up to 7 images of characters, scenes and objects to ensure consistency in the generated video. Plus it allows control of the first and last frame to further assist you to make the video of your imagination.
training
Training
A site for creating body poses for you to copy when you draw or paint characters.
A web tool that lets you find reference photos of faces for you to draw. The photos themselves are not intended to be used.
Sebastian Inwood (Krakota)’s Drum & Bass Production Community
There is a free tier to test the waters, but the real deal is in the course here which is £49/month. Abelton focused, includes 8 videos and a monthly live chat.
Learn how to take advantage of “GPT, Midjourney, Flux, Stable Diffusion, Llama, DALL·E and many others.” I wonder why they haven’t updated the page, and/or the course content. Seems to be based in Poland.
media
Media Consumption
Keep track of all your current favorite shows and past rewatches across all channels, platforms, and streaming services. Show data is from imdb. Works on web, iOS and Android.
A remedy for playlist boredom
A music discovery site that lets you see related bands in a 2D graphical map. Very cool! Now we need it in 3D, especially when VR goggles become more commonplace.
So that’s a wrap. Now I can get back into the massive list of Music stuff that came out while in the last couple of months. Until then have fun creating… no matter what you make.
Saw something you wanna go back to? Here’s that table of contents but at the bottom. Weird, but handy!
Music, Samples, Kontakt, Podcasts, Fonts, Mac, iOS, Graphics, Work, Video, AI, Training, and Media Consumption.