hope you guys & girls? can help me out at deciding.....

i listened to a few songs on youtube using padshop and they sound VEEEEEEEEEEERY nice, those lush, slow moving ambient type sounds, very nice what i wanna create. i have some fears though:

1. we know no sample import which sucks and we know why i guess, expansion packs etc.

2. if i would own Alchemy, would padshop still be worth, enhancing or a waste then and i should invest the money in alchemy and get the same results?

3. with limited samples wont be the results also limited? i know granular synthesis is like endless possibilities but with a sample and its timbres it will be somehow limited and same sounding wont it?

4. any user video demos about creating pads, soundscapes etc. to have a good overview of its possibilites?

thanks

VST3? ...meh
its all about VST3.5 now

If Alchemy is expensive for your budget or you think it's overkill and you don't need that power, have you ever consider Granite? Quite different than Padshop from what I've heard and seen but Granite is a pad & drone gem, very efficient and good at this. One of the coolest little granular synth I've bought for drones so far, cheap & very easy to use as well (and allows sample import)

i tested it in the past not much so i cannot judge now but i think it wasnt so interesting and i like to control in a VST my sounds and so on much more than in a seperated audioplugin.
it's not that cheap too 80 bucks, double it and a bit more and you got alchemy ;D!

edit:
just testing, didnt remember it so nice like now, but it's really too expensive in my opinion now i think the xmas price would fit around 40 bucks.

I'm really liking Padshop here. This is something I did in my spare time with it.

http://soundcloud.com/cruciform/continuum

I love it!

Beautiful demo cruciform. Is it completely made with padshop or are some other insturments used as well?

Thank you I was PMed about it earlier, so I'll paste my reply here.


*******


The opening pad is a preset, "Aurora". It's only had some EQ and compression added and then a touch of reverb. It's there to just give some extra depth through the first minute.

At around 5 secs the next pad starts, a preset called "Analog Emotion". I used a lot of automation on it, mostly the envelope amount, resonance, filter cutoff and volume to really produce the swells and pullbacks. Those are all parameters on the preset. I added a little eq and a touch of stereo widening to it but it's mostly just the sound itself, a really inspiring lush pad. It creates and carries the depth of the whole song with the chord progression.

At about 5secs the bass saw also starts but it's a Reaktor sound.

Coming to 10secs, the bells playing the melody are a Padshop preset - "Airy Bells". I used a touch of delay to them plus a Camelspace effect that adds some slight movement in the resonance but it's so subtle it wouldn't be overly missed if I removed it. Also a little eq to shape it into the overall track.

Also around 12-13secs you'll hear a high gated saw come in. That's a Padshop preset, and it runs through the whole song. For the first section it duplicates what "Airy Bells" are playing. Then from 1:14 onwards it's duplicating the Reaktor saw.

The vocals and drums are from sample libraries.

yes thanks a lot, the song is great , i just got a mail that you can tryout cubase 6.5 30 days with elicenser, i will test it out just for padshop as i wanna see if you can mangle the presets to totally new sounds!

Thanks and yes, you can. You can start with a blank sheet, load a sample and program it from there, or play with the presets of course.

Hi.
I just upgraded to Cubase 6.5 and everything works fine except Padshop. It loads presets fine, but does NOT load the samples into its oscillators, so ... no sound! Knobs are turned with every preset load, and the "correct" sample is selected in the oscillator section, but its waveform is NOT displayed in its window and when MIDI commands arrive it "pretends" to play its ... empty waveform!
Can someone help?
I installed/reinstalled it many times, into various locations, no result!
Thanks!

Check here:

http://www.steinberg.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=168&t=19922

Thank you, but this doesn't help much.
I cannot start the main Setup.exe, it produces an error.
So i cannot get the ""Install for anyone who uses this computer (all users)" option, even after i istalled MS Framework ...
Thanks, anyway.

From that thread:

"I had to update MS Framework.
After that i was able to start the Padshop Setup.exe.
Now the waveforms are fine in Padshop."

All Steinberg products seem to need the latest version of .NET Framework to install properly. You can uninstall it afterwards if you want. Which version did you install?

Mmmmm...you need .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 or .NET Framework 4. Version 2 won't do.