Old 04-05-2010, 03:07 PM   #201
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I think this thread is doing what basically KvR IS ALL ABOUT.
Yes, but here we have KVR compressed into one discussion with just a few pages

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Old 04-05-2010, 03:27 PM   #202
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I think this thread is doing what basically KvR IS ALL ABOUT.
Your right there. I just have a couple more I found & then I'm going back to what I initially started the thread for "Inexpensive SoftSynth All-Rounder"

Intro
[IMG]http://img682.**************/img682/1161/introi.png[/IMG]

Not only does it look really good, it also has the sound to match.

VS-1 / oscilloscope

[IMG]http://img63.**************/img63/3907/vs1oscilloscope.png[/IMG]

http://www.sitesled.com/members/bksl/

Haven't had much of a play with this one. But if it sounds as good as it looks that cant be a bad thing. I have heard good things about most of SynthLabs stuff.

WARNING SYNTHEDIT
Yes unfortunately these are made with synthedit. Which can be a turn off for some.

Back to the matter at hand though. My favourites inexpensive Softsynths list hasn't changed much

Sub £200
Alchemy
Zebra

Sub £1oo
Ace (which I now own...yeahhh )
Rhino
KarmaFX

Maybe Wuskstation which I might get because I can get for the upgrade price.
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Old 04-05-2010, 04:15 PM   #203
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Originally Posted by Peevy View Post
Your right there. I just have a couple more I found & then I'm going back to what I initially started the thread for "Inexpensive SoftSynth All-Rounder"

Intro
[IMG]http://img682.**************/img682/1161/introi.png[/IMG]

Not only does it look really good, it also has the sound to match.

VS-1 / oscilloscope

[IMG]http://img63.**************/img63/3907/vs1oscilloscope.png[/IMG]

http://www.sitesled.com/members/bksl/

Haven't had much of a play with this one. But if it sounds as good as it looks that cant be a bad thing. I have heard good things about most of SynthLabs stuff.

WARNING SYNTHEDIT
Yes unfortunately these are made with synthedit. Which can be a turn off for some.

Back to the matter at hand though. My favourites inexpensive Softsynths list hasn't changed much

Sub £200
Alchemy
Zebra

Sub £1oo
Ace (which I now own...yeahhh )
Rhino
KarmaFX

Maybe Wuskstation which I might get because I can get for the upgrade price.
I've had the oscilloscope for a while and I like it alot. I had it crash on me about a month ago, but I don't know why. I think I was changing presets while I was looping midi.
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Old 04-05-2010, 04:57 PM   #204
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I'm picky too so I know what you mean Funny, it's most of the ARP-emulations that aren't doing it for me so there is the difference in our preferences then

This goes a lot to why we both like Oatmeal I think; it can do both big fat sounds AND cold, digital sounding patches (it sometimes reminds me a lot of the PPG Wave with it's digital wavetables combined with analog filters).
well, i'm also picky about oatmeal...! i still haven't managed to program any pad/strings sounds that i am 100% happy with. there's just something that niggles me slightly about it's sound - it has this kind of slightly metallic quality (especially at the low end) that i just can't seem to get rid of with it's filters or it's eq. of course, this kind of quality is great for some patches - particularly for those jordan rudess style sync'ed lead sounds (a sound which i'm really not into btw!!) but not particularly good for me as i primarily wanted to use it for ambient soundscape type evolving pads. i will persevere though... if i am still unhappy with it after a week or two i think i am going to plump up the cash for rhino.
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Old 04-05-2010, 05:22 PM   #205
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do you try different kinds of chorus effects for pads? Thats what I've been doing lately. Comparing different Chorus versions and related effects.

I wonder where metallic sounds come from, from a reverb maybe, or FM ing or Sync ing, or from another delay based effect. If its from FM/AM, sync etc, playing with the keytracking amount might help.

This thread has me experimenting with oatmeal again, the extra skins are helpful, I couldn't get into it because of the GUI, too difficult to see.
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Old 04-05-2010, 06:00 PM   #206
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i will persevere though... if i am still unhappy with it after a week or two i think i am going to plump up the cash for rhino.
I've been playing Rhino a bit more myself lately. I no I've gone on about not really digg'n the UI but man does it sound brilliant. I was scanning through most of the patches last night, it has a very varied & rich sound. If I start getting addicted to SoftSynths (I think I am) I think I'll eventually have to purchase Rhino too.


Has anyone seen these new skins for Ace

Black Hell
[IMG]http://img202.**************/img202/6433/aceblack.png[/IMG]

White Magic
[IMG]http://img199.**************/img199/3050/acesilver.png[/IMG]

http://www.u-he.com/PatchLib/skins.html

I think they look pretty cool
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Old 04-06-2010, 07:54 AM   #207
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I'm sulking...

no-one reacted on my recommendation of Kinisis...
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Old 04-06-2010, 08:11 AM   #208
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do you try different kinds of chorus effects for pads? Thats what I've been doing lately. Comparing different Chorus versions and related effects.

I wonder where metallic sounds come from, from a reverb maybe, or FM ing or Sync ing, or from another delay based effect. If its from FM/AM, sync etc, playing with the keytracking amount might help.

This thread has me experimenting with oatmeal again, the extra skins are helpful, I couldn't get into it because of the GUI, too difficult to see.
it's something about the oscillators themselves - just a slightly harsh, metallic sort of quality that bugs me now and again. it's nothing to do with reverb or delay etc. as it is still very evident(to my ears) with all of that stuff switched off. i find it very difficult to get smooth sounding strings out of it (the sort of strings that are very easy to make with discovery for example). just when i have the top end sounding good i play a few notes low down and there is this raspy kind of tone that i can't seem to fix even by adjusting the keyboard tracking of the filter. oh well, i will keep on keeping on...

i'm not all that fond of the chorus in oatmeal - just a personal thing. there are nicer sounding choruses out there. i'm very fond of the blue cat freeware ones.
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Old 04-06-2010, 11:51 AM   #209
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I'm sulking...

no-one reacted on my recommendation of Kinisis...

Ahhh..Don't fret, I'm watching the video on they're site now. It looks very interesting so far. I'll get a wee go at the demo later, I'm gettin busy making some patches in Ace today...lovin it!
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Old 04-06-2010, 01:43 PM   #210
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i find it very difficult to get smooth sounding strings out of it
Why not use Oatmeal for what it's good at and use something else for pads and string sounds. I just use SuperwaveP8 for that I still have to find a freeware synth that can do silky smooth pads like Albino but I get by with what I have selected so far. Also, that LoganA synth can do very round sounds, especially when you put it's own effects-unit on it (that 'supersize' patch does exactly what it says).

I think I have to revisit RGC-audio's Square as well
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Old 04-06-2010, 02:00 PM   #211
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well i kept on keeping on today... and i'm now getting some lovely smooth pads out of oatmeal!!! i always tend to start with a saw wave if i want to create pads or ambient soundscape type stuff but today i decided to stick to the pulse wave, applying very subtle PWM - the result is some very nice sounding stuff when routed through the delay.

i am seriously thinking about going all freeware myself technogremlin! these last few synth related threads have really inspired me to dig deep into my freeware plugs and to be honest i can pretty much achieve anything i want with them. despite a few niggles oatmeal is still one of the only softsynths that really inspires me to design sounds. i'm thinking of restricting myself to just oatmeal and nothing else - it's sound shaping possibilities are infinite imo.
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Old 04-06-2010, 02:09 PM   #212
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Oatmeal is really really great. PWM is a godsend for pads

I really only hate it that velocity and aftertouch are tied together and unseparable.


You guys should also check out TAL Elek7ro, if it already hasn't been mentioned. Great sounding, low-CPU synth!
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Old 04-06-2010, 02:19 PM   #213
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Oatmeal is really really great. PWM is a godsend for pads

I really only hate it that velocity and aftertouch are tied together and unseparable.


You guys should also check out TAL Elek7ro, if it already hasn't been mentioned. Great sounding, low-CPU synth!
I can't believe that he gives that away for free.
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Old 04-06-2010, 02:24 PM   #214
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Me neither. Patrick is a great guy! He's gonna fix the GUI on TAL Elek7ro so now the dropdown boxes will be brighter! Like this:

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Old 04-06-2010, 03:08 PM   #215
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I thought Synth 1 had some high frequencies, almost metallic sounding stuff , too, that was difficult to filter out, depending on which waveforms.


I think Phase modulation is great for pads, too, even if its subtle sometimes, it sounds nice, and I think the only freeware that has that is Voyager 1.1, which really has its own sound, I think, great patches by various patch people.

So, thats why I like Voyager as well as Oatmeal.
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Old 04-06-2010, 08:20 PM   #216
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I'm sulking...

no-one reacted on my recommendation of Kinisis...

It is a nice one ... you can avoid lots of host automation task and just program it from within the synth... plus good old vector tricks !!. It just needs better factory patches to take off I suppose ... lot's of great synths never get noticed !!
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Old 04-06-2010, 11:08 PM   #217
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I keep hearing about how CPU hungry Ace is so I thought I'd test it out on my system. I started a project with 10 instances of Ace running all with different patches but all at the highest quality setting, plus SSD-EX with 11 output tracks. And just for good measure I put IIEQ Pro on every track & Reacomp on most tracks (23 Tracks in total). The CPU use was averaging around 32%, which I thought was very acceptable considering the fact that Ace is supposed to be so taxing on the CPU. I'd say this would probably shoot up to about 45% with a few more Vox tracks added. Most of my projects actually average around 45% CPU so no big deal then.

Maybe its because I'm using a quad core CPU, plus I do have it overclocked from 2.4ghz to 3.05ghz. I think for the quality of sound Ace produces, its worth that extra hit on the CPU.

You're lucky then...
I used just one instance of ACE.
I tested a patch called "HS Floyd The Poodle", playing "Jump" (just for reference ).

CPU - quad, 2.4GHz
Buffer size - 128
Voices - many
Quality - standard
CPU - 25%

Quality - good
CPU - 33%, one core maxing at 100%, crackling, unusable
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Old 04-07-2010, 12:37 AM   #218
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i am seriously thinking about going all freeware myself technogremlin!
Somehow I have seen you moving that way already

Oh, and I'm completely with you about how Oatmeal inspires to do sound patching.

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You guys should also check out TAL Elek7ro, if it already hasn't been mentioned. Great sounding, low-CPU synth!
Elek7ro didn't inspire me, Hahaha CS33 is more my thing. But I'm going to give Elek7ro another go per your recommendation (maybe I should do some patching with it to see what it can do).
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Old 04-07-2010, 01:39 AM   #219
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I really only hate it that velocity and aftertouch are tied together and unseparable.
Yes. I'm loving Oatmeal, but struggling a bit with this. The manual tends to make me think I should be able to separate them out - mono vs poly aftertouch? - but I cant do it!

Is there actually a way to have patches velocity sensitive with aftertouch? - e.g. VCA controlled by velocity and VCF by aftertouch?

Thanks, Keys.
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Old 04-07-2010, 02:21 AM   #220
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Is there actually a way to have patches velocity sensitive with aftertouch? - e.g. VCA controlled by velocity and VCF by aftertouch?
Unfortunately, NO. That's my gripe with Oatmeal. Everything else is SUPERB, but this little niggle gets in my way. AT is simply added to the current velocity played No way to separate them. Unless someone reverse-engineers Oatmeal, because I don't think we'll ever see updates for it, for a long time.
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Old 04-07-2010, 03:15 AM   #221
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If you are Looking for old skool sound then check out arturia array they sound nice
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Old 04-07-2010, 03:22 AM   #222
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Personally Arturia doesn't do it for me. Minimoog V is a lame excuse - GForce Minimonsta is the way to go. CS-80 is a joke compared to the real thing, really. They're not worth the money.
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Old 04-07-2010, 03:35 AM   #223
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If you are Looking for old skool sound then check out arturia array they sound nice
$250 and above is not inexpensive. You're in the wrong thread.
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Old 04-07-2010, 03:47 AM   #224
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when i first came across this synth i discarded it because of its UI, but i revisited it recently while tidying my vsts. OMG! this is one hell of a synth!!!!! the sounds and tweakabilty are just incredible! it is now my main synth to turn to.. followed by albino and then maybe synth1 / oatmeal

the synth? z3ta

and at £75 an absolute bargain
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Old 04-07-2010, 03:55 AM   #225
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Unfortunately, NO...
Thanks for that ED. Thats a real shame.

@CEO - for 70's prog I use MinimogueVA and Arppe2600va and Nanotron
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Old 04-07-2010, 04:01 AM   #226
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when i first came across this synth i discarded it because of its UI, but i revisited it recently while tidying my vsts. OMG! this is one hell of a synth!!!!! the sounds and tweakabilty are just incredible! it is now my main synth to turn to.. followed by albino and then maybe synth1 / oatmeal

the synth? z3ta

and at £75 an absolute bargain
i was very impressed with z3ta's sound when i demoed it a year or 2 back but then it spat a burst of white noise through my speakers and scared the crap out of me! a quick google revealed that there is some kind of distortion bug in it that some users have experienced. shame because it does sound great
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Old 04-07-2010, 04:06 AM   #227
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Personally Arturia doesn't do it for me. Minimoog V is a lame excuse - GForce Minimonsta is the way to go. CS-80 is a joke compared to the real thing, really. They're not worth the money.
arturia is a strange company. they market their synths as emulations but they don't sound much like the hardware they are trying to emulate at all imo. and they charge an awful lot for them.
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Old 04-07-2010, 04:51 AM   #228
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It is a nice one ... you can avoid lots of host automation task and just program it from within the synth... plus good old vector tricks !!. It just needs better factory patches to take off I suppose ... lot's of great synths never get noticed !!
ouch - now I'm hurt!




In all seriousness: you couldn't do it with host-automation, since it retriggers (polyphonically) at note start...
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Old 04-07-2010, 04:55 AM   #229
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Personally Arturia doesn't do it for me. Minimoog V is a lame excuse - GForce Minimonsta is the way to go. CS-80 is a joke compared to the real thing, really. They're not worth the money.
I also prefer Minimonsta. I had them both at one time, and Minimonsta just seems to shine.

I can't comment on the CS-80. I have no experience with the hardware or software.

Anyone besides me remember the big stink at KVR a few years back when Xavier Oudin of Arturia posted under an alias and started bashing the Minimonsta. When his cover was blown, the outrage got so high that some higher-up from Arturia ended up getting involved. The GForce / Ohm Force guys were totally cool; stating that eveyone is entitled to their opinion, but some people over there couldn't let it go.

Arturia supports their stuff really well, but it is dongle based. I still use Storm 3 as a ReWire client. Some of the modules in Storm have a really good, unique sound.
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Old 04-07-2010, 05:23 AM   #230
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i am seriously thinking about going all freeware myself technogremlin! these last few synth related threads have really inspired me to dig deep into my freeware plugs and to be honest i can pretty much achieve anything i want with them. despite a few niggles oatmeal is still one of the only softsynths that really inspires me to design sounds. i'm thinking of restricting myself to just oatmeal and nothing else - it's sound shaping possibilities are infinite imo.
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Somehow I have seen you moving that way already
I did consider going all freeware myself. I had previously been using (I'm ashamed to admit )some cracked plugins. But I've gone away from all that now & really tried to go down the freeware only root. There are a few real freeware gems out there, fx & instrument alike. But apart from those few I just wasn't getting the quality I needed & realised I'm gonna have to start coughing up some cash If I really want that quality sound I was looking for. That's the reason I started this thread.

Oatmeal, Synth1 & a few others found through the help of this thread are amazing plugins especially considering the fact they are free. But in order to get that sheer quality in sound, performance, tweak-ability & easy to use UI, I found that I just had to start spending a bit of money. One example of this is, say you wanted some orchestration in a track. You could maybe use shortcircuit load a bunch of string & whatever other instrument samples & teak it until you've got something close to the desired sound. Or spend £100 on GPO, which isn't a lot of money for this kind of Vsti.

This is just my personal opinion & I find nothing wrong with others preferring to go down the freeware route. I'm just saying I've tried it & its not working for me.

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You're lucky then...
I used just one instance of ACE.
I tested a patch called "HS Floyd The Poodle", playing "Jump" (just for reference ).

CPU - quad, 2.4GHz
Buffer size - 128
Voices - many
Quality - standard
CPU - 25%

Quality - good
CPU - 33%, one core maxing at 100%, crackling, unusable
Funny you say that, now that I've started to get into the nitty gritty of making my own patches for Ace, I find that some of them are bumping up the load on the CPU quite a bit. One of which can go up to about 15%. Well If I have to start rendering tracks thats fine. I still think its well worth the £62 I payed for it. I think I'll try out one of those new skins later.
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Old 04-07-2010, 06:20 AM   #231
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You're lucky then...
I used just one instance of ACE.
I tested a patch called "HS Floyd The Poodle", playing "Jump" (just for reference ).

CPU - quad, 2.4GHz
Buffer size - 128
Voices - many
Quality - standard
CPU - 25%

Quality - good
CPU - 33%, one core maxing at 100%, crackling, unusable
Strange...The patches that were bumping the CPU up 15% last night are now averaging around 5%. I must have had something else running in the background.

"HS Floyd The Poodle" is averaging about 11% standard quality & 21% good quality. Its probably got something to do with my CPU being overcloced from 2.4GHZ to 3.05GHZ. Plus my buffer size is usually 256, I find it an acceptable compromise between latency & stability.
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Old 04-07-2010, 06:49 AM   #232
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Strange...The patches that were bumping the CPU up 15% last night are now averaging around 5%. I must have had something else running in the background.

"HS Floyd The Poodle" is averaging about 11% standard quality & 21% good quality. Its probably got something to do with my CPU being overcloced from 2.4GHZ to 3.05GHZ. Plus my buffer size is usually 256, I find it an acceptable compromise between latency & stability.
Well, it's strange that it pushes one of the cores to 100% here.
This produces crackling at no matter what buffer size I use.

But some of the sounds are great at a low quality too, so maybe not a complete deal breaker.
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Old 04-07-2010, 07:13 AM   #233
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Well, it's strange that it pushes one of the cores to 100% here.
This produces crackling at no matter what buffer size I use.

But some of the sounds are great at a low quality too, so maybe not a complete deal breaker.
That is strange. Are you using a Q6600? These sort of problems can be caused by any number of things. I had a lot of problems with my last motherboard crackle & pop everywhere, then I changed to a Asus P5K with a p35 chipset & all was fine. I gained even more stability upgrading from XP Pro to Windows 7 64bit.

It does still sound good in low quality but you can always go back to good or accurate quality when rendering. Sorry maybe not... If your getting the Crackle Pops.
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Old 04-07-2010, 09:07 AM   #234
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I did consider going all freeware myself. I had previously been using (I'm ashamed to admit )some cracked plugins. But I've gone away from all that now & really tried to go down the freeware only root. There are a few real freeware gems out there, fx & instrument alike. But apart from those few I just wasn't getting the quality I needed & realised I'm gonna have to start coughing up some cash If I really want that quality sound I was looking for. That's the reason I started this thread.
To each it's own of course but for me freeware is going a long way. Just to let you know where I'm coming from, these are the synths I actually have legit licenses for but have shelved so far: Albino, Z3ta, Virsyn Tera, PPG Wave, Pro53, Battery, Kontakt, RMIII, VAZ 2010, CronoX, some other Muon and Linplug synths and probably a few I forget to mention here In addition to this a whole host of pro FX stuff from PSP, Ohmforce, Dave Brown, etc.

I really think you can do very pro-sounding productions with only freeware
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Old 04-07-2010, 09:23 AM   #235
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To each it's own of course but for me freeware is going a long way. Just to let you know where I'm coming from, these are the synths I actually have legit licenses for but have shelved so far: Albino, Z3ta, Virsyn Tera, PPG Wave, Pro53, Battery, Kontakt, RMIII, VAZ 2010, CronoX, some other Muon and Linplug synths and probably a few I forget to mention here In addition to this a whole host of pro FX stuff from PSP, Ohmforce, Dave Brown, etc.

I really think you can do very pro-sounding productions with only freeware
Why are you ditching most of your payed for plugins for freeware? Is it because your rebelling against how over priced some of these plugins are, which believe me I understand? You list some very fine plugins there some of which I cant imagine would be easy to replace with freeware. Just Curious.
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Old 04-07-2010, 10:01 AM   #236
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First of all I came to realize that there are several that I almost never use and some I actually don't like the sound of. Then there is the fact that to many choices has really killed my inspiration, I really want to go back to a smaller set of instruments (see my topic on going freeware).

But mainly I'm ditching all the commercial stuff because I HATE copy protection schemes. I have been able to keep the real evil stuff like pace away from my system but several of the plugins have key-disks that are needed to reinstall. Also keeping track of serial numbers over the years has proven to be very hard (I'm now in the process of documenting stuff in a wiki, it helps a bit).

So far I don't really miss any of the commercial synths except Albino. And I still have a hard time saying goodbye to PSP's Lexicon-42, 84 and VintageWarmer.
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Old 04-07-2010, 10:05 AM   #237
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Made me think about another top freebee that hasn't been mentioned yet: Abakos.

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Old 04-07-2010, 10:10 AM   #238
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First of all I came to realize that there are several that I almost never use and some I actually don't like the sound of. Then there is the fact that to many choices has really killed my inspiration, I really want to go back to a smaller set of instruments (see my topic on going freeware).
the part about killing inspiration is right on the money for me. i work far better under restrictions. sometimes i just used to sit there and stare at the list of vsti's wondering which one to fire up and play around with and more often than not i would end up doing nothing. i want to create a situation where i can skip that part and just have 1 synth for everything. sounds crazy?! perhaps... right now it is looking like that one synth will be oatmeal. in a way it is many synths in one as it has the ability to let you create any waveform you can think of, it has lots of different filters and the ability to run 2 filters at the same time in different configurations. it actually makes my head spin thinking about it's sonic possibilities. plus i have been able to 'near enough' match other synths sounds by analysing the waveform and recreating it in oatmeals wave editor. in fact, oatmeal itself is injecting a lot of fun back into synth programming for me.
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Old 04-07-2010, 10:13 AM   #239
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Made me think about another top freebee that hasn't been mentioned yet: Abakos.

abakos is a very nice, polite synth - i think that's the best way to describe it(!). it has one of the most tame filters i have ever heard but still a nice sounding filter. good for soft boards of canada style pads.
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Old 04-07-2010, 10:40 AM   #240
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i want to create a situation where i can skip that part and just have 1 synth for everything.
That is exactly what I'm gunning for as well.

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abakos is a very nice, polite synth - i think that's the best way to describe it(!). it has one of the most tame filters i have ever heard but still a nice sounding filter. good for soft boards of canada style pads.
I completely agree with your view here... but still a nice one for Peevy to play around with
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