The world doesn't need more tools for the loudness war. True, but... who can say no to a good, greasy sausage (sorry vegetarians!)?
Welcome to Dada Life and their Sausage Fattener, a plug-in that, well, compresses, saturates and can get a nice sausage out of your bounced tracks.
The video below is one of my fav of the year so far...



The plug-in was actually developed by Tailored Noise, in collaboration with Dada Life (a team of Dj/producers), and it looks like more will follow. I hope they'll keep on making funny videos like this one!
Dance and Electronic music producers may be the main target here, but even other users could find Sausage Fattener good for their tracks, why not? Just be careful when trying it on songs where you want to preserve the original dynamics.
Unfortunately no demo version (yet?). The plug-in is 29$, more or less like a very good homemade sausage.

Price
29$

Product page

Tronsonic is a new sample libraries' developer, based in UK. If you're into vintage and "dirty sounding" synths, this may be worth reading. Two products available at the moment, Waveform72 and Logandy.
We've taken a look at the first one, Waveform72, that samples a famous monosynth from 1972 - all 7 waveforms plus pink and white noise, recorded to worn tape on a 1965 valve tape recorder.
They call them "mellotronized" libraries, but this term may be a bit misleading. These libraries have nothing to do with the original Mellotrons and no Mellotrons have been used to create them. It's just that the recording/sampling process is inspired by the Mellotron and similar devices (Birotron). So basically here we have a hybrid "tron/synth" product, with vintage sound qualities.



With Waveform72 you get both the basic oscilators (plus pink and white noise) and a good collection of presets (bass, leads, pads, sfx, motion), for EXS24, Kontakt.
Kontakt users get also some multi-patches, while Logic users can create them layering several EXS24 tracks (examples are provided). Structure and NNXT are compatible too, but no presets are included in the package.
The library sounds good, I've enjoyed the almost unpredictable qualities of some presets. Just be careful with the volume in your DAW. In some cases you may get a clicky sound, reduce the Attack if that happens.

Waveform72 is on sale for 10.99£. No big risk here, if you like the demo above (you can listen to a few presets on the website too) you know what to expect!
Since I'm a big fan of the Logan, I hope to have a look at the Logandy library in the next weeks too. Let's keep an eye on Tronsonic...

Price
10.99£

Product page