{"id":77809,"date":"2020-03-21T16:04:50","date_gmt":"2020-03-21T21:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/?p=77809"},"modified":"2023-07-16T17:48:03","modified_gmt":"2023-07-16T22:48:03","slug":"cheap-stuff-free-stuff-silly-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/cheap-stuff-free-stuff-silly-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheap stuff, free stuff, silly stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adobe has transitioned from innovation to rent-seeking<\/a>. Fortunately, there are practical alternatives to Photoshop<\/em> and InDesign<\/em>: Affinity’s Photo<\/em> and Publisher<\/em>. You can buy them, and actually own<\/strong><\/em> them, and for excellent prices, too. Currently they are $25 each. There’s also Affinity Designer<\/em>, a counterpart to Illustrator<\/em>, for the same price. I haven’t had time to give them thorough workouts, but I have verified that most of the Topaz plugins I use work in Affinity Photo<\/em>. The Affinity site is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Cherry Audio has made their Voltage Modular Nucleus<\/a> free for the downloading for a while. I already have VCV Rack<\/a> and Reaktor Blocks, so I’ll probably give it a pass, but if you have a yen to experiment with modular sound synthesis, it might be worth checking out.<\/p>\n

If you have a digital audio workstation such as Logic or Cubase, here are some freebies you might find useful.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Native Instruments’ Analog Dreams<\/a> is an “instrument” emulating old-fashioned subtractive synthesizers. It’s in my armory, and it sounds convincing. I haven’t used it much, but that’s because I have more virtual noisemakers than I will ever use.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Standard Guitar<\/a> is an extended-range electric guitar that works well with pedal and amp emulations. (The site is in Japanese, but it’s not hard to figure out where to click.)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Shiny Guitar<\/a> is an arch-top guitar, suitable for jazz, of course, and quite a bit else.<\/p>\n

Both the above guitars run in Plogue’s sampler Sforzando<\/a>, which is also free.<\/p>\n

If you have NI’s Kontakt, there are several other free guitars to consider here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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I wonder sometimes just how authoritative AllMusic is. The above is from the entry on Canned Heat’s second album<\/a>. Strange \u2014 I don’t recall hearing the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus on “Amphetamine Annie<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

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I recently received the above invitation. Um, yeah. Right. Just wondering: how many of these “women of excellence” need to shave?<\/p>\n

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This seems oddly appropriate just now:<\/p>\n