when is the cycles Sale over?
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I read May 19th on VI Control
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Do it. Then tell us about it. 
I’ve decided to wait. It’s not the last sale they will have. 🫣
Yeah, I’m down with more opinions. Been scoping it for a while now on lines. A proper Elektronaut point of view would be nice.
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I’m gonna demo it for sure… the 19th is enough time, but that Novum looks really interesting too. I’m more interested in stem remixing than granular so both of them might just be too expensive for my use case
I just spent 2 hours with Cycles. I really like it, it is super powerful. the learning curve is high though. I am following some videos and that is helpful. The new S+A site has tutorials as well.
I already added a melodic layer to the song I am working on. That was after around an hour or so of learning the plugin and messing with a preset.
Second hour I loaded in a vocal sample and it can do some really cool stuff to vocals. I basically am grabbing something, cutting 4 bars from it and then tuning it to C and dragging it onto C3. I am not sure you have to tune to C, you can just drag to the. note in the key of the track. But I am still leanring this thing The point is that it seems to be very strong at pitching samples and making them sound like something else. The pitch algorithim is excellent. So this mean you can really change up a vocal into something very different, which is what I always look to do with different plugins,
This is rather deep plugin and is probably worth the money if you are really into composing very unique sounds out of samples and it does appear to work for dance music, not just ambient.
Tomorrow I will try layering different samples and blending them all together. I have read that can be an incredible way to get cool sounds.
I should also say that ideally you should be into tweaking with this thing because if you just rely on sequencer presets and such you won’t really get your moneys worth, imo.
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What about Portal, y’all?
Oh, that’s sounds interesting. Do elaborate, if you care to. 
Portal is amazing. I use it on every song I do. It’s got a totally playful vibe to it that I mentioned before, where you can get results out of it without knowing truly what’s going on behind the scenes. It makes you want to throw it on a track and see what happens. Although Output do several other plugs, this one to me stands above the others in terms of what it brings to the table. You can dive in and tweak away or build your own stuff once you know what’s happening, but for quickly manipulating a sound it’s great.
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is it drag and drop like Cycles?
No, so Portal is an effect rather than an instrument. In fact, we could probably split this category into effects (eg: Shaperbox, Portal etc) and audio manglers (eg: Novum) where you load something into the device and then work on it directly in the plugin and that get you your new sound. I guess with more processing power these days the gap between the two is kinda small, if you look at something like Infiltrator, it sounds like someone doing old school mangling at times. One thing that’s fun is to use a mangling effect to mess up audio, resample that and chop that up for a bit of the best of both.
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Nice write up… How’s the CPU? I hear it’s famously hungry for power!
Useful Cycles demo
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Another one. He makes a simple piano loop then processes it.
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Yeah this is a very good vid. but honestly he is just touching on the very basics of the plugs. You can layer samples, and modulate about every parameter, plus the loop patterns are very deep since youcan generate your own.
When that video came out I thought this was just an ambient or soundtrack machine, and truthfuly it can do much much more.
This second video you linked is really good.
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It is CPU hungry but nothing seems to faze my M1. I’m using it now in a track that is pretty much done. So lots of plugins, and it still doesn’t hit the CPU past 55%.
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Yes. They are making me reconsider my decision to wait for the next sale.
Well not to be a sales guy but they RARELY have sales. That is why I jumped on it.
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forgive me for asking again, but what are your M1 specs?
Does Cycles detect sample root notes and keys?