Product Reviews by KVR Members
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WNAdditive
Reviewed By -SPYRO- [all]
January 23rd, 2004
Version reviewed: 1.0 on Windows
White Noise Additive (WNA) is very interesting, it's approach is straight and you can get really good moving, evolving pads sounds with it, from all the range of additive synths today I found this one the best and easier to use, and you get lots of fun making the presets. It features formant morphing so you can use the same principles of vocoding to make your pads.
CPU usage is high, just as any other FFT synth, My CPU goes real high when playing 4 notes on my 1.6Ghz and that depends if I use Formant or not. But, still a great synth in my opinion.Read Review
CPU usage is high, just as any other FFT synth, My CPU goes real high when playing 4 notes on my 1.6Ghz and that depends if I use Formant or not. But, still a great synth in my opinion.Read Review
FL Studio All Plugins Edition
Reviewed By -SPYRO- [all]
January 22nd, 2004
Version reviewed: 4.5.1 on Windows
FL Studio Producer Edition 4.5.1
User interface: While FL Studio has a good looking and clean interface, I think it needs some work in certain areas such as the waveform view on the playlist, for example audio clips could have draggable envelopes so you'll not forced to use the upper part of the playlist to make fade/in/out. Also it needs a better zooming function, no big deal FL Studio is 99% perfect for me. Didier Dambrin has made a tremendous effort to offer one of the best interfaces I ever seen.
Sound: This is pretty subjective, people tends to think that X or Y software sounds better than the other. I think FL Studio has a clean sound, when playing your songs or when you render them, the levels when you mix is exactly the same level when you export. Finally you can set awesome levels of rendering resolution, for exmaple rendering at sinc depth-256.
Features: FL Studio has plenty, I think you have all you need to make your musical dreams true, add the slicer and the soundfont player. It even has two types of scratchers, one is non realtime (Wavetraveller) and the other is an awesome piece of software called Fruity Scratcher, you can do really accurate professional movements with it. FL Studio also comes with a complete set of effects, the piano roll is plenty of useful functions like the "slice notes" "arpeggiator" "chords" "chop" "stum tool" "randomize" "quantize" and all offer not only the mere standard function, for example you can load groove templates for quantization, or entire sequences for the chop function.
Documentation: It is really well made, and the website has some very useful Tutorials. Also FL Studio has tons of tutorial songs. Is hard not to learn FL.
Presets: FL Studio is full of presets, for 3xosc, for TS404, for mixer states, piano roll quantization...
Customer Support: When you adquire FL Studio, you get acces to a internet community where you can get help from a great staff, you can even talk with the programmers directly.
Value for Money: Really doubt you can get such a big monster for the prices they ask.
Stability: Superb, The only way you can crash FL is by using faulty (betas) plugins. My only complain is that the screen tends to freeze when the CPU is really strained, FL should reserve a little more resources for that.Read Review
User interface: While FL Studio has a good looking and clean interface, I think it needs some work in certain areas such as the waveform view on the playlist, for example audio clips could have draggable envelopes so you'll not forced to use the upper part of the playlist to make fade/in/out. Also it needs a better zooming function, no big deal FL Studio is 99% perfect for me. Didier Dambrin has made a tremendous effort to offer one of the best interfaces I ever seen.
Sound: This is pretty subjective, people tends to think that X or Y software sounds better than the other. I think FL Studio has a clean sound, when playing your songs or when you render them, the levels when you mix is exactly the same level when you export. Finally you can set awesome levels of rendering resolution, for exmaple rendering at sinc depth-256.
Features: FL Studio has plenty, I think you have all you need to make your musical dreams true, add the slicer and the soundfont player. It even has two types of scratchers, one is non realtime (Wavetraveller) and the other is an awesome piece of software called Fruity Scratcher, you can do really accurate professional movements with it. FL Studio also comes with a complete set of effects, the piano roll is plenty of useful functions like the "slice notes" "arpeggiator" "chords" "chop" "stum tool" "randomize" "quantize" and all offer not only the mere standard function, for example you can load groove templates for quantization, or entire sequences for the chop function.
Documentation: It is really well made, and the website has some very useful Tutorials. Also FL Studio has tons of tutorial songs. Is hard not to learn FL.
Presets: FL Studio is full of presets, for 3xosc, for TS404, for mixer states, piano roll quantization...
Customer Support: When you adquire FL Studio, you get acces to a internet community where you can get help from a great staff, you can even talk with the programmers directly.
Value for Money: Really doubt you can get such a big monster for the prices they ask.
Stability: Superb, The only way you can crash FL is by using faulty (betas) plugins. My only complain is that the screen tends to freeze when the CPU is really strained, FL should reserve a little more resources for that.Read Review
Sfz+ is simply the best soundfont player ever invented, I use soundfonts all the time so I know how hard was to find a good virtual player.
The interface is good looking and really easy to understand.
Features? well it has lots! too much to mention here, but this is what I consider important. Sfz+ has the best quality of all, is stable as a rock and the CPU usage is better compared to other "big league" samplers. Sf2, wav and giga support, DFD (direct from disk) everything works flawlessly.
Sfz+ gives you the freedom to choose a single file (sf2,wav,gig) per instance which is useful if you don't want to fiddle with multi outs, or when you load a complete bank (eg: GMs) and you can load one file per channel which is the best approach when you are loading one patch banks or separate wav files.
It's price is a steal, for the monster you get.
Customer support is awesome, you talk directly with the developer on their forums, and he does listen to his customers.
I've set the presets meter to "1" because Sfz+ doesn't need any by default.
I know Sfz and Sfz+ since early beta versions, even at that time I was completely stunned, even more with every new update. For me Sfz+ is a real winner.Read Review
The interface is good looking and really easy to understand.
Features? well it has lots! too much to mention here, but this is what I consider important. Sfz+ has the best quality of all, is stable as a rock and the CPU usage is better compared to other "big league" samplers. Sf2, wav and giga support, DFD (direct from disk) everything works flawlessly.
Sfz+ gives you the freedom to choose a single file (sf2,wav,gig) per instance which is useful if you don't want to fiddle with multi outs, or when you load a complete bank (eg: GMs) and you can load one file per channel which is the best approach when you are loading one patch banks or separate wav files.
It's price is a steal, for the monster you get.
Customer support is awesome, you talk directly with the developer on their forums, and he does listen to his customers.
I've set the presets meter to "1" because Sfz+ doesn't need any by default.
I know Sfz and Sfz+ since early beta versions, even at that time I was completely stunned, even more with every new update. For me Sfz+ is a real winner.Read Review
