LennarDigital Sylenth1

[Dominus]

if you call 'randomzing' presets helping, especially someone as arrogant as lennardigital is thus far... ?

btw, the # of presets mean jack shit if they are all crap. it's quality over quantity that should be the mindset of a preset desiginer.

With half of the controls blocked off in the demo I didn't really like working with it, not to mention the annoying voice. If it would have had a 30 minute timeout, or just audio dropout and had full controls available I would have spent some more time with it.

[grymmjack]

I got me a PT Cruiser from Chrysler and yep the price is a bit higher than a cheap Korean but the PT matches my hair and shoes so I had to have it

On the other hand Dwight Yoakham is doing an open air show and tickets for sitting on the grass are $87 + booking fee which is crazy as I have paid $47 for the same venue for a bigger name act

If it fills a need ppl will get it if they have the $$

some buy only the most expen$ive stuff just to say they did, do, whatever. i call these people foolish myself.

more money than brains. this isnt about the sylenth1 synth though. i can empathize with the dev for using a solid ui toolkit. i dont fault him for it, i think it's pretty smart. however charging that price, it better be as CPU friendly as FM7 and sound as good as the synths he compares it to (which is quite a bit of boasting and a bold enough statement to pique my interest to try the demo even if i will never buy it).

dont hate him for pricing it high, if you dont wanna buy it, dont. if you want him to fall on his face and risk the loss of another decent developer of vst stuff, continue with your current behavior...

how much would you pay for synth1? honestly. if synth1 had (and this is just hypothetical banter now) a similar graphical interface (to the haters of current).. how much? it makes some insanely great sounds with like 1% on my CPU. to be fair i'd say $150 because FM7, the only other synth that compares CPU/sound quality-wise that I own - maybe pro53 too, cost that much before the NIversary and the announcement of FM8. $150 seems justified for synth1 therefore since it's quality as defined by the attributes of CPU use, sound, and capability are about the same as FM7.

[grymmjack]

if you call 'randomzing' presets helping, especially someone as arrogant as lennardigital is thus far... ?

btw, the # of presets mean jack shit if they are all crap. it's quality over quantity that should be the mindset of a preset desiginer.

With half of the controls blocked off in the demo I didn't really like working with it, not to mention the annoying voice. If it would have had a 30 minute timeout, or just audio dropout and had full controls available I would have spent some more time with it.

understand ya. sort of ranting about shitty presets - they are liabilities imo. when was the last time you sat down at pentagon and tried to get through and demo every factory pre? not enough time, and when it starts on bt's bank i get pissy - i wish it would remember the last bank, i dont give a f**k about bt or his music.

[grymmjack]

then add a few hundred presets to Sylenth1

I'm working hard on that part. But I want to add only high quality presets. Sure I could use a random generator and create 500 crappy presets, but that would be ripping people off IMO.

The thing is, you seem be searching for an average synth at a cheap price. Then search along, there are lots of these available already!

I want to deliver top-quality only, and I believe that's worth a lot more.

hire t3 then. they do great work.

[djwglpuppy]

I agree with other posters that even though the sounds are pretty solid... For a VST like that, it should cost about half of that. I mean, look at Toxic III... absolutely amazing synth at half the cost... all of Audiodamage's amazing effect units are around $40. There are so many Analog emulators on the Market that it needs to be a much lower rate.

Note to developers: We VST junkies wanna spend our hard earned money on your synths, so put realistic price tags on your software.... Make it so we feel guilty not buying your synths (When Komplete 3 was selling for $599. I HAD TO GET IT... And is well worth that amount!)

[4damind]

Mmh, its not easy to place a new synth this days. Sylenth sounds nice but its not the cheapest VST. Would be a good idea to have an introductory offer and to make it easier for many people to give your synth a try.

[pinbot]

OMG! I love the GUI!

[needle]

Looks and sounds great but I can't stand the wonky SynthEdit knob movement. I downloaded the demo and started playing with it before I'd even made it to the second post of this thread, so I hadn't read any of the SE-related drama, but my first thought when I tried to tweak a knob on this thing was... "Eh, SynthEdit".

Really, it's a great sounding synth and the presets are top-notch, but the annoying and sloppy way SE knobs respond to mouse movement drives me nuts.

[novaflash]

... but the annoying and sloppy way SE knobs respond to mouse movement drives me nuts.

the "steps" effect ?

[Sascha Franck]

This is indeed one of the most annoying things about a lot of SE creations. Knob and fader movements almost never feel halfway smooth, and they certainly never feel "great" at all.
This (and a few other issues, such as the pulldowns you may usually find) are one of the reasons I will never understand the "SE only for the GUI part of it" points.

[Teksonik]

This is indeed one of the most annoying things about a lot of SE creations. Knob and fader movements almost never feel halfway smooth, and they certainly never feel "great" at all.
This (and a few other issues, such as the pulldowns you may usually find) are one of the reasons I will never understand the "SE only for the GUI part of it" points.

Thank you Sascha, this is a point I've been trying to get across in several threads. If you can program high quality synths/effects in C++ why bother using Synth Edit at all. Makes me very suspicious of developers who make such claims.

[Sascha Franck]

Makes me very suspicious of developers who make such claims.

I'm not exactly saying things are suspicious, but *if* I was coding all the source things "by hand", I certainly would try to find a GUI designer, allowing my creation to be presented properly - something SE seriously lacks of, IMO.
Let alone that (at least afaik) SE still doesn't allow for some nifty (yet rather common) things such as synced multibreakpoint envelopes.

In the end, just programming a few great sounding "core" modules doesn't make it all that much anymore these days, in case there's nothing else. There's also accessability and useability. And I'm not even talking about the looks of whatever GUI, just about how you can interact with it. Which seems to be sort of limited on most SE creations I've tried.

And finally, SE creations are very unlikely to ever be ported to other platforms.
Ok, having switched to OSX just recently I may be a tad biased (actually I'm not, at least not much, I'm still running my PC DAW laptop parallely, synced up and all...), but for a professional developer, multiple platform support might be an issue to think about.

Don't get me wrong folks, I love SE - and if it only was for the sheer existance of it, which defenitely caused a revolution in plugin development land, yet I'm not blind regarding the (sometimes obvious) shortcomings of it. The more or less flaky graphical handling being one of them.

[4damind]

May be that some of the missing features have to do with the pure SE UI? Sylenth lacks some improvements found on most newer VSTs.
I played the last hours with "Surge" from Vember Audio. This VST gives some ideas for a nice (one page) interface _and_ a great soundengine.

Make a better userinterface, implement some missing features, put more presets to the synth and give the users an indroductory offer and may be... This could be a great synth

[Z3R0T0N1N]

for those who think that SE "makes" crappy guis, check out BK synthlab's Intro, Meddle/2, Spheres, and that other one that i can't remember right now.

Here are some points for those who "don't know anything about SE but i know what i don't like"

the GUI elements are defined by the developer; many developers have little or no expertise in graphic design or GUI development; you will find crappy GUIs in all sorts of places, and Se is not the least bit unique in this;

If you make a knob/slider animation that has 10 frames, it's gonna look crappy regardless of where you use it. If you use 101 frames, or use a different animation type like the sliders, it's going to look as smooth as can be. Many people are using not enough frames; that is the developers fault, not SE's fault.

If you leave the definition files alone, you get the combination circular/linear control, which I like, but many people are confused by and therefore don't like.
All a developer has to do is use "vertical" as the animation definition, and it will not respond to any circular mouse motion.

There are many examples of wonderful GUIs in synthedit: Drumatic3, Mainliner2, and way to f**king many others, that do not have noticeable stepping, or dual motion controls, or sloppy design;

and finally, for a program which has put the power of instrument and effect design in the hands of artists, and thus brought us some of the very most creative, useful, and irreplaceable (not to mention FREE) music making tools on the scene, it is perpetually astounding to me how much f**king crap gets slung at it.

If i thought for one second that anyone would listen, i would say "lighten up".

anyway, Sylenth is wicked. It is a bit pricey, but if the dev feels his work is worth that, then i guess it is. I won't be buying it because i can't afford it, and also because my next synth will be AQ's PolyAnna.
But good luck with it anyway

[Sascha Franck]

for those who think that SE "makes" crappy guis, check out BK synthlab's Intro, Meddle/2, Spheres, and that other one that i can't remember right now.

Point taken - but, does any SE creation have something like, say, the aforementioned syncable multibreakpoint envelopes?