Software and hardware for creatives is expensive. With these Black Friday deals, you can afford them, even as student or freelancer just starting out. All software mentioned are tools I use on a regular basis, I’m not sponsored or in an affiliate program for any of them.

Affinity Suite

Great Suite for Digital & Print Design, like social media graphics or stickers. Cheaper than one year of canva, can do much more.

Best of all: its a one time purchase, no subscription! Right now its off 40%, which means all three programs for windows, macOS and ipadOS will cost you 108€.

-> Explore the Affinity Suite

iZotope RX Advanced

No matter how fucked up your audio track is, RX will get you a usable file. Not always great, you cant turn shit into gold, but good enough. Got a great recording, but there’s a tiny issue, like ground humming? RX can fix that and will get you a pristine audio track.

If you already have the Adobe Creative Cloud, you’ve got Audition, which does everything RX Essential can do. The really good stuff is in Standard and Advanced, which even at black friday is behond fucking expensive. Luckily you can get second hand license transfers on ebay and KVR Audio, be sure to check them out!

-> Explore iZotope RX

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of old programs prone to crashing if you don’t use them exactly as intended, they are tough to learn and basic features are out of date. They are by far the most powerful on the market, as soon as you use more than one.

Dynamic linking is absolutely sick, as well as perfectly compatible file formats. Making a video in Premiere, creating an infographic and a title in Illustrator, animating them in after effects, linking the composition in premiere where it automatically updates. My point is, do not get Adobe software, unless you want to work in an agency or are a working interdisciplinary.

Now if you want it, get it on black friday (november) and cancel it next year in october to get the black friday price (34€/month) again. If you forget to do that, you are locked in paying 67€/month for a year! If you are a student, you can get the full suite at 16€/month, but same shit: it renews at 30€/month if you forget to cancel in october (and resub on black friday).

-> Explore Adobe CC Plans

Bitwig

God I love Bitwig, its my favourite pice of software. Logically structured, modular, powerful, stable. There are two relevant editions, Essentials and Studio (which has a EDU price, 200€)

If you do podcasts, the Essenials edition gives you a great multi-track editor and all the audio tools (Gate, EQ, Compressor, Limiter; Audio side-chain) to record and edit a great podcast. If your audio hardware is noisy, you may get RX essentials too, which provides great de-noise.
For music production and live installations, the Studio edition is by far the best. Killer features are spectral separation containers and a fully modular environment, the grid. With TDBitwig you can control Bitwig from Touchdesigner.

-> Explore Bitwig Studio