The Air Advance Music Production Suite Is a Hard Drive Crammed Full of Recording Software, for $600

My favorite part of the Air “Advance Music Production Suite” is that it’s literally mailed to you on a hard drive. There’s no digital download option. I don’t know, maybe the logistics of hard drive costs and shipping are cheaper than the bandwidth required to send you 500 gigs of data, but I like to think that the marketing department set it up this way. It just sounds impressive. “This is so much software that your ISP can’t even handle it.” I don’t know, maybe they’re right. Maybe you live in Canada and use Rogers.

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So what gifts await you in Air’s hard drive of mystery? It’s broken down into three categories: virtual instruments (from Air, Akai, SoniVox, Camel, etc), mixing and mastering effects (from Waves, PSP, Izotope, FXpansion, and more), and loops/samples (from Camel and Prime Loops). Now if you think this complete list of studio equipment seems pretty well rounded already you will be happy to know that there’s access to tutorials from Sonic Academy and Gobbler thrown in aswell. So it could be a good deal if these particular pieces of software are exactly what you need, but take a look at the specific items offered because there’s only one from Waves for example (the Renaissance channel strip, which I’m a fan of), so if you saw the Waves logo and were like “nice, I was just about to buy the license for an L2 Limiter,” you’ll be disappointed.

Take a look at the full list of included software, and order the Suite if it suits your fancy, here.

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Chris Alfano has written about music and toured in bands since print magazines and mp3.com were popular. Once in high-school he hacked a friend's QBasic stick figure fighting game to add a chiptune metal soundtrack. Random attractive people still give him high-fives about that.

Latest comment
  • Cool idea, but a bit limiting. Waves Mercury gets you the vast majority of things you need for mix/master, and I find it’s just easier to pick and choose for VSTis anyways. No Native Instruments stuff here is also a bummer, I love their stuff.

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