Please note this review is based on the following plug-in:

Release 1.1 10-21-2006 (First release Virus A,B,C support.)

This is the only version currently available from Rekon Audio in August 2011 (time of writing).

If they have since updated the software, the below review may be useless.

If you are thinking of buying this software and it is still selling as the above version, please read on as the following may affect you.

I give this review out of a sense of civic duty to help others avoid the experience I had with it. I don't like to bash people's hard work and I think the piece of software is a great idea that has unfortunately been poorly implemented and then under-supported/developed.

User Interface

Looks alright but is generally too small for comfortable reading at a comfortable distance from the screen (with 20:20 vision BTW)
One thing that makes it confusing is that although it is designed to suit Viruses in the range from A to C, its GUI is based on C and if you have a different version (with no EQ for example) some of the knobs will do nothing. This issue is compounded by the fact that some of the controls are misaligned as detailed below.


Sound
This is not applicable as it is a Midi only plug-in. Although I will say it cannot reliably save the sounds of any Virus because it does not store the information in great enough accuracy and has not been updated in some time.


Features
It is designed for one basic job which it doesn’t do correctly:

8 Filter Saturation Modes are missing and therefore cannot be saved (anything above shaper is just saved as shaper) resulting in completely different sounds when loading a saved patch. The missing saturation types are: rectifier, bit reducer, rate reducer, rate + flw, low pass, low + flw, high pass and high + flw.

Osc 3 Wave shape selection doesn’t work at all and is missing almost all the necessary options.
LFO 3 Wave shapes are also missing.

Phaser controls are all messed up: Rate moves depth; depth moves frequency; frequency moves feedback; feedback moves spread and spread moves EQ mid gain.

Osc 1+2 shape settings which come from a knob with 128 options along a stepped continuum from wave to saw to square are stored in the vst with a drop-down that has 3 options only. That means any mix of a saw, square or wave with another shape is lost when saving patches.

Documentation
The manual was alright but you would need to read it quite carefully if new to this type of software.

Presets
Yes, about 128 and they were quite usable IIRC.

Customer Support
Not great I am afraid. They have a no refunds policy. I did get a refund after an initial fob-off when I quoted some trading standards regulations to them.

Value For Money
None at all. If it worked correctly it would be great but it doesn’t.

Stability
It has the potential to do weird things of you create a feedback loop by accident, but not if you know what you are doing and read the manual. The sound is unpredictable for reasons stated above.