Third Take

I found a great article on parallel compression at a blog called Hometracked. It looks like a great blog and I plan on keeping up with it.

Parallel compression is the process of mixing an uncompressed signal with a compressed copy of it. The article at Hometracked shows how to do this in Sonar and includes audio examples.

I’m still experimenting with this technique, but getting good results.

Toontrack has released EZplayer Free and you can download it, for free, if you make an account at their website.

What is it? It looks like the MIDI clip organizer from EZ Drummer in a standalone plugin, allowing you to organize MIDI clips and play them back through a variety of samplers - EZ Drummer, Drumkit from Hell, BFD, and more. You still need to have a sampler and a host program, but now I guess you can easily map MIDI clips from one sampler to another.

My guess is that this is Toontrack’s next step in their plan to take over the world. They already have a couple samplers - EZ Drummer and dfh - and are building a formidable sample library with the EZXs they continue to release. With EZplayer, now they can start selling MIDI libraries, not only to EZ Drummer customers, but other sampler users as well. It also makes it easy to sell samples to someone who already has MIDI patterns.