In the interest of expanding on other topics that enable people to exchange information about what they found to have value in the freebie world and in new instruments of 2020, what was your best “bang for the buck” purchase of 2020 (for live or otherwise) regardless of when the software published?
For me, I’ll begin with Cantabile since I purchased a license in 2020. A truly remarkable software that opens up an entire new world. Of course everyone here already knows that, but it still needs to be said!
Other than Cantabile, my hands down, best bang for the buck was the Holiday Bundle from iZotope for $49. I was only vaguely familiar with a few of their offerings and don’t even recall what attracted me to demo the bundle, but Neutron and its AI assisted EQ was worth the price of admission. Trash 2 turns out to be the best sounding IR loader for cab sims (just turn the “trash” off) out of 4 I have. In fact after A/Bing my IR loaders running the same IR I was a bit surprised there was as much difference as I heard… But an even larger value in the bundle imo, is the Phoenix reverb and its successor R2 from Exponential Audio (now part of iZotope). They’re older plugs, but wow they sound fantastic in even critical environments like orchestral. Did some digging and found they are made by the fellow responsible for a lot of Lexicon’s reverbs. Literally sounds like the orchestra was recorded in the chosen reverb environment where everything else I’ve tried sounds like added FX albeit good added FX in some cases…