Sell me on Meta Synth

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Hi guys

For a long time I've been intrigued by metasynth but I've always been on the PC. Now that I'm on the MAC I can get this.

I'm going to try the demo. But I'd appreciate some thoughts and opinions. Things about it that I wouldn't know right off the bat maybe or why you think it's unique.

Thanks!
Aiynzahev-sounds
Sound Designer - Soundsets for Pigments, Repro, Diva, Virus TI, Nord Lead 4, Serum, DUNE2, Spire, and others

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I've owned it, and I found it pretty interesting. It's probably best if you try the demo out to get an idea of what it is capable of and what it can't do.

You can pick it up for $200 when they have sales which is what I did, and i definitely had fun with it when I owned it. I however felt it just wasn't for me and decided to sell it.

I think maybe my two favorite aspects of it were the filter room and the re-synthesis room. It actually can re-synthesize stuff pretty accurately which is definitely one of it's strengths.
Last edited by V0RT3X on Tue Nov 04, 2014 4:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
:borg:

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MetaSynth is truly a unique and amazing beast for sculpting sounds. I see it as a mad scientist laboratory where you have a bunch of tools and beakers at your disposition and you mix all kind of stuff (sounds here!) to create and make new ones.

It definitely has a unique workflow that may even seems erratic & uninviting for some, and it takes time and patience to really get comfortable with it but I've always thought people were over exaggerating about it like if it takes a master degree to be able to do something with it. When I finally got it and started experimenting with it, I really didn't find it THAT hard. Again, yes it has a particular workflow and you need dedicated time to really explore the possibilities and control it, but it's not chemical engineering neither. I think the real question here is : do you have TIME to give to MetaSynth. It's not a preset synth where you get sounds in 5 clicks, it's a tool for creating from scratch, just like painting. And guess what, you can paint sounds in MetaSynth.

Definitely try the demo, it's not for everyone. It's one hell of a software imo.

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Yeah I am trying this out. Wow it's pretty cool. So much you can do. I was disappointed with Iris, this looks like it's the ticket.
Aiynzahev-sounds
Sound Designer - Soundsets for Pigments, Repro, Diva, Virus TI, Nord Lead 4, Serum, DUNE2, Spire, and others

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I still use it occasionally for certain things and it definitely has a unique workflow; but while it's definitely a very powerful sample mangler and modifier, the workflow is showing its age and seems designed for slower computers, not the powerhouses we have available today.

Just to comment on the negative side, one big annoyance for me is that it doesn't have an undo tree, so you're limited to one undo level and the only way to get around that is to manually save every step or every side-step you think you'd like to go back to. I discussed this on the list with the dev and it comes down to Meta Synth being built on an old code base where it's hard if not impossible to implement this and other features we've come to expect. It's easy today but they can't just port the code, they'd have to re-write it from scratch and they haven't been motivated to do that in many years. :shrug:

They maintain a UILIST/Group on Google which you can browse, although it's for all their software so you have to dig a little for MS-specific posts.

I bought it on a promotion and I definitely suggest that or second-hand from another user (they do allow license transfer); the full price is rather high by today's standards and you'll never get anything close to it on resale. But it's definitely a very unique and fascinating piece of software.

My 2... OK, 3 cents... ;)

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It's resynthesizing algos are very unique, so are the custom tuning feature and all the other things you can do with the resynthesized data. E.g. playing back a resynthesized cello arpeggio with a multisampled cello sampler which you can build yourself inside Metasynth, retuning the notes, expanding them, stretching them to infinity, that's audio incest at it's best :) - I know of no other app which does this in this quality and once you know your way around, it works very fast. Resynthesizing pictures is also great, but here the synth is definitely showing it's age, the graphics look very dated once imported, but the sonic results can be stunning.
The FM synth module is also very capable, the Spectral stretch algo can sound smooth as butter, and you can totally rearrange the spectral content, stretch it without introducing artifacts and so much more. So after all those years I'm still in love with Metasynth.

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Sounds awesome. Kind of how no idea what I am doing on this so far but I did managed to do some mangling.

The re-synthesis is really smooth and I got it to stretch out a phrase. Really exciting.
Aiynzahev-sounds
Sound Designer - Soundsets for Pigments, Repro, Diva, Virus TI, Nord Lead 4, Serum, DUNE2, Spire, and others

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There is a free alternative for PC :

http://www.integralive.org/

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I do agree that on the cosmetic side, Metasynth might need a little upgrade & rework. Workflow could also benefit from that.

On the most important side though, the audio part, it’s still very powerful, flexible and pretty nuts. It still can render unique & creative sounds you could not do with any plugins or other synths / software, except with something more advanced like Kyma.

@UltraJv: never heard of Integrate, will check it out. Thanks for the input.

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*Integra, I meant.

The limited Undo thing is one of its weakest point too yeah, still can't believe we can't have more than one level deep or Undo's :(

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Well as soon as I fired up the demo it sold itself. Thanks for the advice on buying though guys. Also I'm checking out Integra, looks good.
Aiynzahev-sounds
Sound Designer - Soundsets for Pigments, Repro, Diva, Virus TI, Nord Lead 4, Serum, DUNE2, Spire, and others

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Aiynzahev wrote:Well as soon as I fired up the demo it sold itself. Thanks for the advice on buying though guys. Also I'm checking out Integra, looks good.
Have fun! And get ready to get lost within the Metasynth bowels for hours :D

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Neon Breath wrote:
Aiynzahev wrote:Well as soon as I fired up the demo it sold itself. Thanks for the advice on buying though guys. Also I'm checking out Integra, looks good.
Have fun! And get ready to get lost within the Metasynth bowels for hours :D
Hours? Weeks!

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So did you inherit money or sumthin....

New Mac, and then MetaSynth, maybe the most expensive plug of them all 8)

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Numanoid wrote:So did you inherit money or sumthin....

New Mac, and then MetaSynth, maybe the most expensive plug of them all 8)
Maybe he's just a good sound designer and earns his money?
Sampleconstruct wrote:It's resynthesizing algos are very unique, so are the custom tuning feature and all the other things you can do with the resynthesized data. E.g. playing back a resynthesized cello arpeggio with a multisampled cello sampler which you can build yourself inside Metasynth, retuning the notes, expanding them, stretching them to infinity, that's audio incest at it's best :) - I know of no other app which does this in this quality and once you know your way around, it works very fast. Resynthesizing pictures is also great, but here the synth is definitely showing it's age, the graphics look very dated once imported, but the sonic results can be stunning.
The FM synth module is also very capable, the Spectral stretch algo can sound smooth as butter, and you can totally rearrange the spectral content, stretch it without introducing artifacts and so much more. So after all those years I'm still in love with Metasynth.
Yah I agree the Resynthesis is definitely some of the best i've heard. Actually the first time I used metasynth i had no idea what the resynthesis room was about and thought it actually just copied the loop i used into another loop :dog:

It was that good!


The image filter is also pretty unique! I like running stereo sounds into it and then using the filter to do all kinds of insane panning and filtering effects. All this Metasynth talk is making me think I should buy it back, because i do miss making sounds in it..
:borg:

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