XLN Audio - XO - Improvement, Pros, Cons

[SLiC]

Been playing with Atlas 2 demo again this afternoon. Some positive notes:

- Bigger sequencer is a great addition.
- The GUI looks much better than before.
- Export options are nice.
- Undo/redo adds great convenience.

That said, I still like XO more for the most part. But I am tempted to get Atlas 2 since it is on sale. I also need Groove Agent 5.

Yeh, going full screen with the sequencer was a cool addition, especially as its actually a pretty good drum sequencer.

Still the killer feature for me (the main reason I boot ATLAS over XO) is the Drum Pad layout as I mainly use 4x4 and 8x8

[LoveEnigma18]

Been playing with Atlas 2 demo again this afternoon. Some positive notes:

- Bigger sequencer is a great addition.
- The GUI looks much better than before.
- Export options are nice.
- Undo/redo adds great convenience.

That said, I still like XO more for the most part. But I am tempted to get Atlas 2 since it is on sale. I also need Groove Agent 5.

Yeh, going full screen with the sequencer was a cool addition, especially as its actually a pretty good drum sequencer.

Still the killer feature for me (the main reason I boot ATLAS over XO) is the Drum Pad layout as I mainly use 4x4 and 8x8

Yeah, I can understand why. That same layout style is one of the things that impressed me in Groove Agent 5. The sequencer is great for sure, however, XO one although limited in some ways is actually satisfactory for me (as EnGee also pointed out somewhere). But since Atlas 2 has MIDI Out, it does have that extra edge. The only question now is do I need Atlas 2 between XO and Groove Agent 5 (among a couple drum plugins I have/use).

Can Atlas 2 be resold? I guess only once and then it becomes NFR, right?

[burkek]

Atlas doesn't seem stable. Just muted a few tracks in one of their presets, changed out some drum sounds, saved as a full loop. Success. Muted the kick. Saved as a new 'no kick' loop. Crash. Macbook Pro (2017). Monterey.

[EnGee]

I went through all the presets in XO and marked about 35% as my favorites, which is a high ratio

The only strange limitation is only 2 patterns per preset! It's not a big problem really, as I will use my sequencer in the end to edit and add more patterns in the end. Still, 2 patterns is too little

Anyway, I'm very satisfied with the overall with the contents and the many parameters to tweak the very good patterns provided (some are garbage of course! But I might not need any starters after some time anyway).

So, GA5 is like my SUV, Maschine like my sport car and XO my daily motorbike

[Biome_Digital]

I went through all the presets in XO and marked about 35% as my favorites, which is a high ratio

The only strange limitation is only 2 patterns per preset! It's not a big problem really, as I will use my sequencer in the end to edit and add more patterns in the end. Still, 2 patterns is too little

Anyway, I'm very satisfied with the overall with the contents and the many parameters to tweak the very good patterns provided (some are garbage of course! But I might not need any starters after some time anyway).

So, GA5 is like my SUV, Maschine like my sport car and XO my daily motorbike

The secret is the randomisation

[EnGee]

I'm not fan of randomisation! Maybe a happy accident or a nice mistake while working, but not really into the "unknown" or click the "surprise me" button

[Biome_Digital]

I'm not fan of randomisation! Maybe a happy accident or a nice mistake while working, but not really into the "unknown" or click the "surprise me" button

Its a bit more than that though, more like variations. It's really good. You should look at it.

[briefcasemanx]

Atlas 2 looks better to me but XO comes with like 8000 samples. I'm assuming the XO samples are really good since they make addictive drums? I might buy both. If the XO samples weren't in a proprietary format I'd buy XO for sure.

[telecharge]

I thought the same thing, but it appears the samples come from Samplephonics/Noiiz. See: viewtopic.php?p=7616126#p7616126

Nothing against them, but that dampened my enthusiasm for XO.

[cryophonik]

To me, the power of Atlas 2 (and XO, although I like Atlas better) is how it lets me best utilize the gazillion samples I already had.

[telecharge]

I totally agree. I bought Atlas 2 as soon as I learned of this current sale and posted it in the Bargain Center.

I'm just looking for a good reason to get XO, too. I haven't seen any comparisons of their AI/algorithms for collating samples, but I haven't really searched for that either.

[TheHelioSequence]

The thing I really appreciated about Atlas 2 was the randomize kit feature, but ultimately I felt it was missing tools to process and produce sounds within the plugin (compression, harmonics/distortion/bitrate, synth like filters, reverb/delay). While I would say that any individual plugins would be better in a final production, there is something about the intention of making a kit with these kind of FX that works better for me workflow wise when writing with XO (or Battery).

The thing that annoys me the most about XO is the lack of ability to randomize the entire kit and each sample. The work around for me is to pull up a preset and then limit the library to a specific sample folder... then I'll get something more unexpected. But overall I'm still really wishing for this feature and feel somewhat disappointed that it was never implemented.

Another miss is that it really seems like XO could include drums samples from any AD2 packs that you own. It would even be nice if any of the midi packs would also import into XO (even if in a somewhat simplified and quantized manner). Why not have some more integration between their product lines?

Great price on either XO or Atlas 2 right now if you've been holding out for a sale.

[chroma]

can you drag samples out of xo? One thing I really like about atlas (especially now in version 2) is the ability to drag all the samples out into a drum rack... easy.

But if you wanted to randomize samples in a precanned config - atlas supports multi-output natively, not too hard to build a drum rack with some prebuilt fx per pad to do your explorations in... but i don't really expect atlas to be a full-blown drum sampler or even sequencer, i'm mostly using it for the randomization.

[DJDJ]

I’m an XO owner, and love it, but after reading this thread I got curious about Atlas and started demoing it today. I’m always open to something being done better.

There’s definitely a couple things about it that are very cool, in particular I really like the ability to save sample maps. But overall, I didn’t really like it and am not impressed at all yet.

The kit generation feels much more random than XO, which may be a plus to some, but I found the kits it spit out (from my sample library) were only so so. The algorithms are clearly different.

There’s other issues I have with it. Exporting one shots should be automatic, and it’s not, but exporting stems is. And that makes no sense. It doesn’t print the changes made to the samples inside the plug-in (like pitch changes, envelope changes, effects) to one shots upon exporting. It’s swing and groove is less intuitive and less musical sounding.

And I’m not that fond of its aesthetic or GUI either. I would say it’s too flat for my tastes, but XO is flat too and I have no issues with the way it looks.

I will say that it’s done a better job of accurately analyzing my samples, and generally organizes similar sounds very well.

But honestly, I don’t get all the praise (or hate for XO). I think that even with its limitations and XLNs lack of upgrades and apparent difficulty, XO is still the better plugin for me. I do have things I’d love to see improved about it, but overall it’s one of the coolest plugins I own. It’s still absolutely amazing

[LoveEnigma18]

can you drag samples out of xo?

Yes. Use CTRL + mouse drag to drag samples anywhere from XO's Space.