Tassman

Here are my initial impressions after installing and playing around with Tassman 3.0. The first thing that pops out is that the interface now houses both player and builder. There is a prominent "explorer" tree-style navigation pane to the left. The explorer contains all of the instruments, presets, modules, sub-patches, and everything. All you have to do is double-click to launch an instrument, or drag and drop to select a module, and Tassman switches to the correct mode. It's 10 times better than the old version, in which I was never sure exactly what I was doing.

CPU-wise, Applied-Acoustics has really done a great job. On my AMD 2400+ with 512mb of 266, the DXi hovered between 10-15% for nearly all of the pre-made instruments and settings. I haven't put it to the hard core test yet, but 3.0 appears to be very greatly improved over the previous version in this regard. At this point I realize that I'll probably be using it far more than I did the last version because it's more intuitive.

Now for the part where Tassman really shines: the sound quality is simply amazing. It's expressive, and feels truly musical. The analog synth instruments sound thick and real, but the physical modeling is where the rubber meets the road. The organ and e-piano instruments are the highlight, they're totally convincing. The tube and mallet style instruments are also fantastic. The step and cv sequencers are tons of fun, and seem to suggest some very strange solutions.

Now for the parts I didn't like. First, sub-patches are not very well identified. When you encounter one in an instrument, it's like "what's this thing and where did it come from?" Also, I couldn't figure out how to close unwanted instances of things, so each time I ended my session I got like 5 dialog boxes asking if I want to save changes to whatever stuff was open. Not very intuitive, but hopefully the solution is there.

I can't accurately rate the stability.Read Review