Xenobioz

it has a really good factory presets. The GUI is nice too, has a good readability! And it's super low on CPU. Glad I found this. Old but gold.

Just found out about this elsewhere and tried. There are some good presets and if the workflow is your kind of thing you might like, but overall I found it below average at best. I wouldn't say it sounds "new" at all, in fact kind of retro, both in the presets, the look and feel of it etc. Speaking of presets, they take too long to load and many of them don't even work, they keep reverting to this annoying arp. It does have one feature that could have been great if implemented better...where it shows you the waveform, you can click on it directly to add to it or click on the same spot to take away. But it's in really tiny pixels, you can't zoom in, or grab a line etc, so it's pretty much worthless. But again this is free and what I may not like you might.

Very cool. Kinda "new" sounding, but in a good way.

Finally getting around to reviewing things I've used forever but just grabbed and run.

Thank you folks who make nifty free stuff.

This is my workhorse synth. There's a very large 'sweet zone' for patch creation, and this is what I like the most.

The oscillator section is fantastically flexible. Contrary to most synths, where you only have a mixer to combine the oscillators, here you have morph and meld. What they do is to attach two waves, similar to what phase distortion in Casio's CZ series did. When the morph slider is in the middle, the resulting waveform contains half a cycle of both oscillators. Moving the slider cuts off the cycle of one waveform replacing it with the cycle of the other.

The oscillators have the typical saw, square (pulse), ramp, triangle, sine, pink and white noise. But they all respond to PWM (!). If that wasn't enough, you can draw the waveform. Forget about other implementations: this is the best waveform drawing interface I know.

Osc C can FM A, B or both. The LFOs run at audio rate, so you could use them as FM modulators. That is, you may not recreate all algos from a DX7, but you could get pretty close. 3 LFOs, 3 oscs. No self modulation though.

The envs are very snappy and flexible. You can invert them, have delay, initial volume level... and each stage can be modulated (!). I've not seen this before. Huge flexibility.

The filter is sweet, and has less obvious modes such as, DLP - Distorted Low-
pass, PLP - Parallel detuned Low pass, FORM - Formant filter and MOOG - Moog LP filter.

The range of sounds Kruudster can produce put other free, and paid, VSTs to shame. I have no idea why this plugin is not more popular. The dev deserves all respect in the world.

The manual is only 3 pages, but the >300 presets show what this monster can do. Growl basses, chiptunes, huge pads... it's all there. It doesn't need unison to sound fat. The modulation options are outstanding, and pretty easy to visualize (it's a one-page synth). I have other paid synths, but spend most of my time on Kruudster.

A truly unique synth.

An otherwise simple 2 oscillator synth, but with lots of assignable modulation sources. Lots of hover help messages.

Great choice for dubstep or electro house genres. You can add plenty of grit with the phase distortion and waveshaper, and then modulate those with an LFO or ADSR. It's one of the few synths that can approximate the sounds of Massive without using wavetable synthesis. Lots of filter models.

It's free so do yourself a favor and play around with this synth, or at least check out the presets to see what this bad boy is capable of. It's not capable of everything, but it certainly has a unique sound a personality to it.

This synth fills a void where a part chiptune, part semi-modular synth is needed. You can create complex tones by adjusting the ADSR envelopes which operate independently of each other. Overall pretty cool synth and fun to play with.