Sometimes you've got your drums right, the bass is perfect and maybe one or two instrument tracks are already playing nicely along. Still, your track sounds a little empty. Depending on the genre you're working on, you can add a background pad to fill up the frequency gaps and increase the overall atmosphere of your track. Over here, Francois explains how to do this with NI Massive, Sylenth1, Arturia Minimoog and Tal-U-No-Lx. Download the Background Pad Preset for Massive, Sylenth1 and Tal for free here.         Listen to previews of our Massive preset packs:   Keywords: free massive...

Variety of Sound offers free vst plugins on their page. Among them you can find eqs, reverbs, limiters etc. Apart from that, they also have quite an interesting blog. http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/downloads In case you're wondering why all this is being offered for free, here's a statement by "vos": As a computer scientist and musician, I’m enjoying designing DSP algorithms and plug-in concepts. It’s a pleasure for me to share my efforts with other people without having to worry about commercial interests. In each of my effects there is a special technical design, workflow or concept combination I haven’t found in existing...

The guys of zeitgeistmastering.com mentioned some helpful tips on how to prepare your tracks for mastering in a youtube video. We are quickly summing them up: Here are 8 essential tips: 1. Make sure that there are no effects on your master channel when you bounce (export) In case you have essential effects on your master, send 2 versions: fx mix, giving your engineer an idea of the effect no fx mix, giving him the opportunity to apply his effects however: don't leave any limiter in place 2. Make sure the level of your track peaks somewhere between -6 and -3dB  3. If the...

This might be particularly helpful when cleaning up your old music projects. Recently i had to deal with the problem of eliminating duplicate files within a fairly large set of mainly ms office files (under windows).    For me, a program called "alldup" perfectly did the job     Other solutions i tried: winmerge: should be great for comparing code files, as it offers an in-file comparism doublekiller: basicly does the same job like alldup, but offers less options dupeguru: they offer a music edition. should be very interesting for people who want to tidy up their mp3s