Is Waves trying to end XLN Audio?
Dang nabbit, Waves. You’ve done it again!
EDITOR NOTE: A few months after Cosmos was released, Waves decided to slap a $15 price tag on it but it can still be a powerful tool if you have a large, unmanageable sample library. I never even touched my growing library until I got Cosmos because I have 30k+ samples I’ve accumulated and navigating them was a huge pain in the but. $15 to save loads of time is well worth it, to me.
Today I’m excited to announce (even though I have nothing to do with it) a new plugin that you can’t afford to not have… mostly cause it’s free [$15]!
The fine folks over at Waves just dropped this killer new sample finder app called Cosmos which is not only free [$15] but also comes with 2500 samples.
I am super hyped on this because I have this huge folder full of samples I’ve downloaded from various bundles over the last few years, but I literally never dive into it because it looks like an unorganized archive of folders… at least it’s alphabetized.
Now I don’t have to do a bunch of uninspiring digging to find a sweet sound, I can instead just use Cosmos!
Cosmo’s “cosmo” view where everything looks star clusters.
Cosmos is a sample analyzer where you select all folders that contain your samples and it scans the sounds and applies any applicable tags or instrument categories to that sample making it easy to find what you’re looking for.
It then allows you to search for samples in 3 different views, my favorite being the Cosmos view where it organizes sounds into these clusters of similar sounds and you can quickly drag around to find the sound you’re looking for.
By the way, if you need samples click here to check out my sample pack store.
This concept and user interface is not anything new.
For those in the scene, you have probably already seen plenty of videos and ads about a similar plugin from XLN called XO. As far as I know, they’re the ones who created this idea of creating this visualization where all samples or clustered together next to samples that sound the same.
I’ve been sideying XO like crazy and just waiting for a deal to drop but Waves just basically ripped off XO’s sample browser and released it for free [$15].
XO’s user interface which was the first to create this “cosmos” aesthetic.
So…. I guess I don’t need to buy XO, right?
Well not exactly.
Now if you just bought XO right before Waves released their free [$15] version Cosmos, don’t worry! You didn’t completely waste your money because XO has a bunch of really cool sequencers built into it and ways to play with your samples where as Cosmos is JUST a sample browser.
So in terms of features, Cosmos is the bare minimum where as XO can be used not only as a sample browser but a sequencer and sampler as well.
Waves also dropped the CR8 Creative Sampler.
The new sample plugin from Waves audio, CR8
Currently at an intro offer of just $10 with a full price of $35, CR8 comes in much cheaper than XO’s $130 price tag but again, still lacks all of the Sequencer features of XO.
The CR8 is actually a crazy cool sampler and I think is well worth having in the arsenal.
One of the cool things is it integrates directly with Cosmos so you can quickly select your sample and load it into an empty sampler on CR8, of which you can have 8 total samples loaded.
This sampler is wildy powerful and has a lot of really fun features which I think give it an edge over most other samplers on the market.
This comes at a time where I’ve been diving more into Abletons Sampler and Simpler, but honestly in a lot of ways I like the user interfaces of CR8 much more than Ableton’s stock samplers and it also has a ton of really easily built in modulation settings.
The robust modulation section that can be found on the bottom of most Wave’s audio plugins.
Adding in samples is easy enough, you can drag them in from anywhere or click on the sample you want in Cosmos to load it in. Cosmos auto-detect keys and tempos so when you drag in samples they’re already tuned and ready to play!
The looper section has some crazy powerful stuff in it. When loop is turned on you can set the loop start and end points independently of the sample start point. What’s nifty is this little speed knob which is super fun to modulate and changes the speed at which the sample is played back.
You can also freeze the sample by pressing this hand which locks the playhead in the sampler to whatever you set in the offset. This is also super fun to modulate to make some unique sounds.
If you don’t already know about Waves modulation sections, these are built into the bottom of most Waves plugins.
In the case of CR8 you have 5 MIDI parameters, 4 modulation types, and 4 envelopes which when you click and drag on one can be assigned to any parameter that has these little boxes.
You can then modify these modulation sources to your liking and adjust how much they positively or negatively impact the parameter.
Waves has killed it with this modulation section and I think more plugin developers should considering a modulation section like this. Its visual representation is just so accurate and makes it way easier to see what you’re modulating.
Mixer section allows you to quickly edit the maximum 8 lanes of samplers you can load in one session.
As mentioned before, you can load 8 samples into one instance of CR8 at one time.
Each sample has its own parameters but you can create filter groups so that when you edit a group’s filters that filter changes for every sample in that group.
There’s also a mixer view to quickly adjust some settings for all your samples.
One of my favorite features is the keyboard zones section.
The keyboard zone mapper in CR8.
This is where things get really wild and you can split your samples up to only play across certain keyboard ranges.
This means you can have bass samples only playing on lower keys and leads or pads playing on higher keys.
You can also construct drum racks this way by assigning a drum sound to a specific key so you can use CR8 as a drum rack.
You can also save presets so if you go crazy designing a setup, you can save it with or without the loaded samples.
You can also split samples up by velocities. This can be useful if you’re working with some sort of acoustic based samples like a guitar or piano where the qualities of a low velocity note are much more unique than a high velocity note so you can have your sample change to a high velocity recorded sample as you play harder.
So that’s CR8 and Cosmos in a nutshell.
While this combo might not have as many powerful features as XLN’s XO, they sure are at a much more reasonable price point.
It seems like Waves has really been gunning after XLN as of late.
A few months ago they also dropped Retro Fi which is a LoFi plugin clearly targeted at the same market that would use XLN’s RC-20 which is probably one of XLN’s most time-tested and coveted plugins.
This is what competition is all about though and I love to see these companies going head to head and improving on each other’s products.
Cosmos is free [$15], go at least pick that up if you’re like me and have a nuclear waste dump of samples.
