Oeksound Bloom

Tried it a bit today. It did a really nice job on some guitars and vocals that weren’t recorded very well(too high mid heavy). I use soothe and spiff a lot and I can see this one fitting in well. Very cool & useful tools as more & more tracks coming in for mixing these days are of the self-engineered at home type. I don’t think Oeksound has had a miss yet 👍🏻

What does it do? Soothe is meant for crappy condensers, Spiff for crappy multiband and 1176 non-linear pumping, what problem is this meant to solve?

Maybe there's a more civil way of discussing it, but I feel like the whining about price and lack of loyalty discounts has gotten a bit out of hand. You bought the software when it came out. It was a fair exchange - why should you be entitled to something down the line? The initial "support" for the developer was the exchange. It is what it is - if you can't afford it now, that sucks, man, but there are mountains and mountains of other plugins out there. This isn't 15 years ago. And this is a relatively esoteric tool as well.

These guys get a lot right, they're contending with copycats and piracy. They can price it how they like. If it's not "right," then they'll lower the price clearly. And I say that as someone who doesn't have much use for something like this.

people will buy hardware and bs that’s way less useful. I paid 270 or so for Oxford Dynamics, an algorithm from 1996 and a plugin from 2004, and still use it all the time. There’s no way anything dbx is better than it but people will pay over 400-2000 bucks for something from the 70s that isn’t as useful and just makes everything sound worse 90% of the time.

I just got the rest of the Goodhertz bundle. People complain a ton about their and U-he prices all the time and the limited sales and probably already have filters and a tremolo but good luck automating them without them blowing up or zipper noise.

You cannot even explain why something very basic like a cleaner filter structure, ramped parameters, and more (or less) controls is a better tool anymore. They will fight you on it and know nothing. They cannot do math or their time is not valuable in a service industry.

Still liking Bloom quite a lot. In terms of comparing to its direct competitors, here's my take

Gullfoss - has a weird fetish with 15khz. It always ends up pushing up waaaay too much of that stuff, and I mix pretty bright 🤣 The 'master' version is my favorite, by far, but even that one is just not controllable enough, and tends to do too much. I also find the interface and controls simply unintuitive. 

Izotope Stabilizer - big controllability improvement over Gullfoss, and I like the range of target shapes it offers. Generally think pretty highly of this tool, though the UI isn't super pretty compared to Bloom (oeksound always just nail the UI). 

Bloom - easily the best UI and controllability. Sonically, it's as good as Stabilizer, but the extra controllability usually means a better end result. I also quite like the 'compress' function. The only thing that I dislike is that there's no clear indication of how much boost or cut are taking place; the graph doesn't have any kind of dB scale the way Stabilizer does, which I definitely miss.

I demo'd Wavesfactory Equalizer and thought it was great, but I didn't love it on mix buss. It was super useful on individual tracks. I can't remember exactly why I felt that way, though; it's been a minute!