Steinberg

Groove Agent has high quality samples and a huge variety of patterns. It's powerful and easy to navigate. I also often use with other drum machines because of the external routing possibilities.

What's new in 15.0.30.

This Cubase 15 Update is Actually Huge! (v15.0.20 New Features)
https://youtu.be/tdHgq5vlGAM

Steinberg Absolute 7 bundle includes impressive number of virtual instruments, top pianos, synths. The best part is Halion and Groove Agent (both the full version). You also get presets for Retroloug and Padshop. Around 35 different instruments.

https://youtu.be/yNmsfb9fpKU

It is a great product for traditional sheet music composers. You can directly write music after connecting your virtual instruments and export the audio. Tricky part is that there are some limitations to get full real orchestral vibe. So, you need to create your own template for some specific setup and compose for it. For example, one of my setups there is piano(1)+strings(5)+percussion ensemble(1 - using piano staff). Elements version has limitation on instrument numbers. Thus, it is A+++ for me.

I'm generally very pleased with this product. I had the free version for a while, which contains directories of the entire for-pay version but blocks you from actually using almost all of it (which serves as a good enticement for springing for the full deal). Inevitably there are swathes of sounds that aren't applicable to the type of music I do, but the instruments I do use sound great, and there's lots of variations to choose from. The ethnic instruments alone would be worth the (discounted) price I paid. I could nit pick over the scarcity of interesting guitar loops and so on, but let's just say that as a comprehensive general-use plugin this one pretty much fills the bill.

Extensive downloading process reveals product comes with zero free content. Huge waste of time unless you have a paid product in mind too.

I have nothing negative to say about this synth. It is an old moog emulation, and it is free. Functionally it is simple and limited, however it is more then usable despite this.

Presently trialling the Demo. Quite similar here - apart from thre common complaints abur plugin compatibility, UI redesign etc - stability is a very mixed bag in my experience & also hard to track down. Is not consistent & same project may load or crash and FWIW, in trying to change the sample rate. On macos Sonoma 14.2 or Monterey 12.7.2.

One thing that helped me a little - installing and auto-importing C12 prefs is a dog's breakfast. I got closer to better behaviour in ditching those prefs and building C13 prefs from scratch (if a little lengthy & boring). Still, the sudden hang can be still there - variously: opening a previously saved C13 project, or importing a C12 project.or importing a Nuendo 12 project. I guess one of the upsides is that there is a two month window on the 13.0.02 demo, however time-wasing. Perhpas it migth settle down but so far, no. Another update I suspect.

MacPro 7,1, 16 core, 192GB, MacOS 14.2, Vega II Duo. Apollo x8, UAD-2, Antelope Pure 2, Antelope Orion 32+. RAID-4 Thunderbay 6, RAID-0 Sonnet M.2 4x4.