Great Stuff!

[Bonteburg]

I bought CM issue 54 yesterday and it's the first time I've spent money on my music since I got Muzys last year. The ComputerMuzys is a great piece of kit, certainly NOT watered down, too restricted or anything. Take it from someone who bought the sequencer back when it didn't even support VSTIs. The CM101, SR202 and DS404 truly inspired me. Except from the really high cpu consumption of the 404 (which kind of put me off it, to be honest), I'm experiencing pure lush there.
Don't laugh at me now:
Yes, the CM is a very basic synth, or "teaching tool", qoute/unquote Dave, but it's radical simplicity makes it all the more powerfull imo: If you know your substractive basics, you'll get just about ANY analog sound that comes to your mind out of it....in no time. This is the first time a synth's resonance parameter is too , ermm...phat(shudder) for my speakers to take.
SR202: Again a first time for me: My first "proper" drum sampler. Mute groups: How I struggled to match open and closed hihats before! Kit building: Switching drumsets on the fly (provided they be properly mapped). Kit banks: I longed for that day...go to a site, pick a user kit you like and play it.
DS404: Mixed emotions there. Still a bit crashprone as it seems, and cpu is way too high for me.
But the user banks (again, that magic word) are plenty (i only downloaded Scot Soldia's great clicks'n'cuts-ish Gardentools 1 so far).
Hehe, I know how naive this must sound to all the Battery/Sampletank/Pro52 etc owners. But it's a great progress for me.
Pheeew.
All in all, the best 18Euros and 40 Cents I payed in a long time.
Dave etc.:
Keep up the good work, and please, try and make an effort to port them to OSX sometime. You said in another thread that this was unlikely to happen, but maybe I can get a little support group together by way of this topic?

I could have written three reviews instead, but I wanted to give a general roundup on ComputerMuzys et Muon.

Cheerio, Marco

[e-modic]

Hi, rate mal was ich mir gekauft habe: electron. You see it was not for nothing that I posted (and you shouted )

DER ist fett !

Did you download the demo Marco ? Try it !

Now its time that Muon gets up drinks coffee and sends me the electron, I am up for 4 hours now...machines are waiting...

bryllyant

[Bonteburg]

Yeah, have fun with the electron!
However, I actually turned it down in favour of the Tau Pro when presented with a chance to get one of them free earlier this year. I daresay all the knobs confused me. But I liked the sounds of the Tau better, too. But from the demo i'd say the Electron is a great machine, and barely registers on my cpu!
Enjoy it and don't drink too much coffee!

...ermm .edit:
I misread it, thought YOU'd be drinking coffee. Right then:

Go have a cup of coffee then

Cheerio, Marco

[Muon Software Ltd]

Got my coffee right here and I'm downloading the orders from the server now. Once I've checked all the addresses etc. I'll get the stuff sent out. On a Saturday morning too

Thanks for the kind words on CM101, SR202 and DS404 as well, Bonteburg. What CPU are you trying to run DS404 on, by the way? are you using stereo samples?

Dave

[Bonteburg]

Hey Dave how are you.

Mac G4, 450 Mhz. Not exactly light speed, but no Ford Model T either.

Stereo samples, yes. ....interesting. I use the Bread and Butter stuff from the CD.
I'll give mono a try. Like it better anyway, tighter to produce with in my experience.
Do you think it will take some load off? That'd be great!

[Muon Software Ltd]

The recommended specs on our site actually show a 450 as the minimum CPU capable of running DS404...without conducting further tests I would have thought that you'd be able to get 16-20 mono voices out of it before croaking though. I would recommend using the voice limiter to make sure you don't overload.

Each voice in DS404 contains a mono sample playback oscillator. So, to play stereo samples, DS404 splits it into two files and uses two seperate voices to play back the whole sample. Thus when playing stereo samples your polyphony is halved and your CPU consumption is doubled. None of the BB patches use stereo samples for this reason.

Regards
Dave

[Scot Solida]

Hi Bonte!
The same sorts of sounds that are in the "Garden Tools" are also in the SR202 kits that Whyte Rabbyt made from some of my sounds. They aren't IDENTICAL, and there are fewer of them, but you might give those a try if the Garden Tools kits are too big (they are almost 2 megs each). You can find them at www.theelectronicgarden.com.
As for the DS404 being "crash prone", I have no problem with it. In fact, I have spent the last month buried in the DS404 (you won't believe the amount of goodies that we are working on for the DS404!) and I haven't had a single crash. But that's on a PC. If it seems CPU-heavy, that'll be down to the size of the samples onboard and your memory, I think. I've actually grown very fond of the DS404. It's a great sampler, and I find myself calling it up more than expensive samplers like HALion. It's hardware-like approach makes it a more familiar working environment for and old EMU/Ensoniq owner, while offering the benefits of software editing. It's also one of the easiest samplers to build kits or multisamples in, I think. The fact that it reads embedded pitch and loop-point data is a real plus.

Bryllyant: You are going to LOVE Electron. It's one of my favorite synths, and seems to end up on almost every track I do. For that matter, so does Tau Pro...