FYI and FWIW, FM8 is on sale for $10 over at pluginboutique. It’s an oldie but goodie, and won’t clobber your CPU. About the best $10 I’ve spent on a VST, possibly ever.
-kb
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Thanks, Kirk.
Does FM8 just work on its own, as a VSTi within Cantabile, or would I have to install some other Native Instruments product to be able to use it? I don’t use anything by them but I get the impression that’s how their software has to be used. I can’t find anything that spells it out though.
Nope, all the ni stuff runs as a vst (and a standalone) without any extra stuff… You can download the native access app to keep it all updated (and may have to these days, I have it anyway as I have loads of their stuff…)
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Thanks, Toaster.
Separate question - does anyone know how to get the forum to automatically subscribe me to topics I post in, so I know there was a reply without having to come back and check? I thought that was the default, or how I had it set, but it seems not.
I only see this option, which doesn’t cover it if someone replies to the thread but not directly to my post using the Reply button:
“Send me an email when someone quotes me, replies to my post, mentions my @username, or invites me to a topic”
Nice thing about FM8 imo is that its so deep in functionality it can do some very non-FM sounding sounds. Of course it can also sound like a prototypical 1980’s cheese-pop factory too, if that’s what you want.
For anyone else wanting to install FM8 in Windows 7 (not supported, but still possible), you need Native Access 1.14.1, from here:
You also appear to need a monitor the size of a barn door to register anything. After switching mine to 1080p (which it doesn’t quite do properly), I still couldn’t see the submit button on the Add Serial Number page, or reach it by blindly pressing Tab. It turns out you have to click the maximise button, which wasn’t obvious, near top right - it looks like a panel with no window buttons, but they’re there, just kind of detached.
None of the advice on installing NA 2 works - I went through all of it before I found that link.
Pluginboutique offered two choices of free gift. After minimal research on YouTube, and going by the fact that they showed both Mac Os and Windows icons next to it, I chose Excite Audio Lifeline Console Lite, which turned out to be useless to me because it’s Mac only. The first inkling I had was after I’d already chosen and downloaded it.
I can’t remember what the other one was called, so I don’t know if that had a windows version.
Izotope Neutron Elements 4. Its completely worthless imo. I have several licenses for it from purchases of other stuff I wanted that came with this, and I deleted it from my drives after seeing it.
Oddly, Neutron 3 Elements is a nice little product and still use it. But they really dumbed down v4 and on top of that added in advertisements to uprade to their full version.
All to say, you missed out on nothing with the freebie.
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That’s good to know. Thanks, sekim.
Thanks for the tip! I got both of those freebies but have yet to install them so I guess I’ll skip.
It seems I was wrong - they do offer a PC as well as a Mac version of Excite Audio Lifeline Console. I was just baffled by the pluginboutique website user interface.
It’s v1.1.2. It takes a very long time to load up in Cantabile though, and quite a long time for Cantabile to exit, after it has. That’s on a Windows 7 machine, so I guess that could conceivably be a factor, but probably not. Maybe it’s authenticating the license every time, via a slow server?
I haven’t really tried it yet, but I can see me not bothering to actually use it much, because of the long wait to start up. Too many plugins like that would make the whole thing impractical. FM8 doesn’t have that problem.