The fact that I don't have to deal with copyright strikes anymore and the very generous commercial license alone is worth the tier 2 price of Filmstro!

I have paid thousands of dollars for music from their competitor SmartSound and still have to deal with YouTube copyright strikes every single time. Annoying... but with Filmstro this seems to be a thing of the past. Hooray!

Filmstro's music library is smaller compared to the big players and the quality ranges from "quite good but a bit monotonous even with animated sliders" to some amazing gems - but there are a couple great tracks for almost every occasion. Epic soundtracks, trippy electro, quirky hip business music, you name it.

Animating the sliders helps to follow the mood and tension of the film and melt sound and visuals to one coherent experience. Even if it's just a business presentation this can make a huge difference. And hearing how music gets more epic when you pull on a slider is pure magic.

Unfortunately, I had a bit of a bumpy experience with their software. I can absolutely not have Chrome and Filmstro open at the same time as they seem to suck away resources from each other (this is mentioned in their FAQ).

While the basic concept is straightforward and easy to understand, positioning and blending multiple tracks and controlling music endings was a bit tricky. It took me a while to understand that Filmstro wouldn't "recalculate" the track as I was used to from SmartSound Sonicfire and that I could actually cut into the beginning, but not the toggled endings. Once you get used to the way how Filmstro tracks try to keep the beat and the things you can and can't do with the animation curves (e.g. you can't set keyframes with the sliders while Filmstro is paused) it gets a lot easier.
It's not a bad software, but it's still a bit away from a "no issue" perfect user experience.

What rescued this whole situation to me: Sebastian from Filmstro actually responded in detail to every single one of my issues and offerd workarounds and explanations. They seem to take input very seriously. 5 tacco support experience, which is very important to me.

In conclusion, if you do video stuff and don't have a music library yet, getting Filmstro should be a no-brainer.