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Give your home studio a €14,000 makeover for just €349 with IK Multimedia Total Studio 4 Max deal. From vintage synths to mastering processors, IK Multimedia has you covered with all of its big-name titles in one suite.

We can never really have enough plugins, can we? Well, IK Multimedia is testing that theory to its absolute limit. It’s going in hard with a Black Friday sale price on its Total Studio 4 Max bundle, which gets you a giant haul of effects and instruments with a combined value of over €14,000 (if bought individually) for just €349. This could well be one of the best Black Friday plugin deals we’ve come across.

Let’s reflect back a bit though, what software could possibly constitute a life-savings level of cash? Launched at the start of 2023, IK Multimedia Total Studio 4 Max comprises a whopping 170 products, and it’s designed to pretty much be an ‘everything-we-make’ software bundle which covers every stage of music production, from initial ideas to mastering.

Get all the plugins you need to take your music from a spark of inspiration, all the way to a finished, mastered release with IK Multimedia Total Studio 4 Max. With 170 instruments, more than 500 FX and over 640 gigabytes of sample data, it’s a complete solution for composition, mixing and mastering your music with a combined total value of over €14,000. At this price, why are you still reading this article?

Now, it might well be worth that much if you bought every product piecemeal, but IK Multimedia Total Studio 4 Max has a regular retail price of €799 – already a fraction of the price. But here we see it slashed again by nearly 60% to an absolute bargain price of just €349.

There’s over 640 GB of instruments/samples, and over 500 FX included. There are seven main virtual instruments included, covering everything from general-purpose sounds with Sampletank 4 MAX (and all 34 expansion packs); a plethora of classic synths from Syntronik 2 MAX; pristine orchestral instruments with Miroslav Philharmonik 2; vintage keys in the form of SampleTron 2 and Hammond B-3 X; and smart, modelled bass and drum sounds thanks to MODO BASS 2 and MODO DRUM 1.5.

Mixing and mastering tools are taken care of by T-RackS 5 Max v2, the incredible ARC 3 room calibration software, MixBox 500-series-style presentation of EQ, dynamics and more, and a faithfully modelled emulation of Lurssen Mastering’s mastering chain.

But IK’s not done yet, because also included is the awesome AmpliTube 5 MAX v2 guitar software $/€99.99– guitar amps, effects, cabinets and more. With over 400 recreations of classic and contemporary heads, combos, pedals and speakers, AmpliTube 5 puts radio-ready guitar tone at your fingertips.

If you’re still not satisfied, check out Black Friday Deal: TONEX MAX & AmpliTube 5 MAX v2 – $/€79.99 each or $/€129.99 for both ,which also comes in the bundle, allowing you to create your own models from any hardware you can get your hands on.

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If Cubase 13 not enough for you, Steinberg’s more grown-up DAW gets an update.

If you’re working in post-production, game audio or with dialogue, Nuendo 13 might be a better fit.

A few weeks on from the launch of Cubase 13, Steinberg has released Nuendo 13, the latest version of Cubase’s more serious, post-production-focused sibling.

Nuendo 13 includes a lot of the new features here, may not really mean much to bedroom musicians, but pros who work in not only post-production but also game audio and dialogue editing are likely to lap them up.

Immersive sound mixing has been improved thanks to comprehensive support for the MPEG-F format, and there are further improvements for those who work with Dolby Atmos. There is an update to Headphones Match and, as in Cubase 13, the MixConsole has been redesigned to offer faster access to your most-used functions. Cubase 13’s Steinberg Vocoder is here, too, as are the EQ-P1A and EQ-M5 equalizers and Black Valve and VoxComp compressors.

Dialogue editors and ADR engineers, will be able to explore TonalMatch, a new offline process that analyses the sound characteristics of an audio recording and enables you to transfer these to other clips so that they match. VoiceSeparator is an AI-based plugin that can detect and isolate speech from background noises (including other voices) and Cubase 13’s VocalChain plugin is included, as well, complete with a collection of presets that are designed specifically for post-production.

ADR Script Reader is another handy addition – this enables ‘voice talent’ to see a digital script via any web browser on a laptop/tablet that’s on the same LAN network as the Nuendo user, who can make edits to this script as they need to.

Throw in some productivity and workflow enhancements – again, a lot of those mirror those in Cubase 13 – and that’s Nuendo 13 in a nutshell.

Nuendo 13 is available now via the Steinberg website priced at €999. Updates from Nuendo 12 cost €199.

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Torso Electronics has introduced the S-4 ‘sculpting sampler ‘, described as “a futuristic platform for crafting unique soundscapes and compositions, using samples and real-time audio processing.”

The S-4 has four parallel stereo tracks, each with an audio engine featuring a chain of audio devices including samplers, live granular processing, morphing resonators, and a range of audio effects. You can capture sounds on the fly with the onboard microphone and stereo line input, or load samples from the four gigabyte internal flash storage.

Features:

• Audio engine:
  • 4 parallel stereo audio tracks
  • Tape player with live looping capabilities
  • Polyphonic sample player
  • Live granular processing with time-warping and pitch-shifting algorithms
  • Morphing resonator (48-band filter bank)
  • Bit crushing, drive, and compression
  • Combined reverb and delay with pitch-shifting and shimmer
• Modulation features
  • 4 modulators per track
  • Modulate any parameter of the audio engine
  • Modulator types:
  • Complex LFOs
  • Generative sequencing tools
  • Envelopes
• Hardware
  • Quad-core 1.5 GHz processor
  • 4 GB flash memory (sample pool)
  • 24-bit / 48 kHz stereo audio in and out
• I/O
  • 2 line-inputs
  • 2 line-outputs
  • Built-in microphone
  • Stereo headphone output
  • MIDI in/out
  • Analog sync in/out
  • USB-C
• Miscellaneous
  • WiFi – Ableton Link
  • Class-compliant USB audio interface
  • Expandable number of inputs/outputs with class-compliant USB interfaces
• User Interface
  • High-resolution LCD color display, 3.5 inch
  • 21 tactile RGB buttons
  • 9 high-quality endless encoders

The Torso Electronics S-4 is available to pre-order for $899, with shipping planned for March 2024.

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