However proud you think I am of this video's title, I'm prouder. Now I just need someone to release a buggy plugin called Fate so I can make a video called "The vicissitudes of Fate by (whoever)."
XLN Audio makes some cool stuff. I have XO, RC-20, and DS-10. XO is the only one I use regularly, but the others are solid. Their new Life plugin, on the other hand, made for a disappointing reveal.
I didn't even know that importing files offline in the VSTi wasn't possible when I started to hate it; the sheer amount of overlap with XO and the fact that it's basically a less useful version that inexplicably has a higher base price was more than enough to push me in that direction.
But man, adding an online-only component that hangs over the head of everyone who purchases it like a sword of Damocles? That's the kind of thing I feel morally responsible to come out swinging against.
Products that are a one-time fee and have a mandatory connection to a server used to be pretty common in gaming, and you know the common thread that runs between them? Those games don't exist anymore. Servers got turned off. They can't be used. I still use plugins I downloaded 10 years ago, though. Normalizing plugins that self-destruct after a certain amount of time is some BS.
I rushed this video out in a day, so the intro music got thrown together in one sitting and I didn't have the chance to look back at it and fix it up with fresh ears before I threw it in. Strings and stuff aren't my forte, and there are a few things I wish I could go back and polish up (that part where it stops and then starts up again ~definitely~ isn't working without connective tissue), but getting this video up feels like a race against time before too many unlucky consumers pick this up, not realizing what it is and how little effort it's actually saving them.
Incidentally, that's why I didn't edit the video to speed things up and keep a nice breezy pace. It's only fair to show exactly how little time Life is saving them.
Oh, and there's some sketchy-looking stuff in XLN's Terms of Service. Legalese is always scary-looking, though, so I didn't mention anything about that. Seems like you're giving them a lot of rights to the things you make, though. Might be worth a glance.
The first time I show Life off sounds better than the second time. The reason for that is that my project tempo is 120, but those patterns were playing at their default tempos. XO can also do this, obviously, but all of the XO audio is locked to 120 BPM, and the second Life audio demonstration is also locked to 120 BPM for a better comparison.
I didn't notice it until just now, but I think Life is doing some extra normalization stuff. And it has a noise-reducing feature you can use. Normalizing stuff is super easy in Reaper and would have been a couple extra clicks at most, so it doesn't change anything, but it would have made the comparison even closer (despite the fact that it's already mostly identical).
My hope is that Life eventually gets a 50% cut to its base price and an offline mode that lets you manually import samples without the trip to the cloud. Maybe then it'll be worth picking up on sale. Until then, the very existence of this thing makes me think less of the company.
Last thing: the audio you hear at the very beginning is technically from the Tascam DR-05 recorder that's on the pop filter in front of the light. So that's what ~that~ is. I wanted the sound of the recording starting and stopping. Probably not worth the effort since it's basically inaudible. I was also considering making a point that it'd be a better way to spend a hundred-something dollars, but that's a rabbit hole that'd require a much longer video that's barely on topic, and again, race against time.
#xlnaudio
#musicproduction
00:00 - 01:10: A gratuitous intro
01:10 - 02:53: Recording and uploading video/audio
02:53 - 04:33: Exporting the manually-uploaded audio in two different ways
04:33 - 05:57: Giving Life a chance and its online-only problem
05:57 - 08:30: Using the cut-up samples in XO to do the same thing Life does
08:30 - 08:51: Showing off Life one more time to reinforce how identical it sounds to XO
08:51 - 10:12: Big Fish Audio's Momentum is a great free alternative that I use all the time
4 авг 2024
