Luxonix Purity reduced to $49.00!

[BBFG#]

Dimension Pro has 4-5 flutes, none of them very usable. Purity has 1 good flute. Purity's flute has this harsh breath noise to it, but it seems like the harshness can be removed with a LP filter, which is built into the preset.
I don't think Purity sounds as good as SampleTank, but I do have to say that SampleTank has some excellently edited samples.
Of all of them, SampleTank seems the most usable, but Purity is more "synth" than SampleTank is.

I've ended up keeping certain hardware just for specific sounds, right now, nothing beats a Motif for its solo flute to me. (It is also my preferred source for guitars). I'm also finding most VIs do really decent oboes, but many are lacking a decent english horn (really? was it that much harder than the oboe?)
Dimension samples tend to be compressed and truncated to give them punch and so aren't as good to me for solo stuff. And layering in it has been tedious for me.
Generally, when I want a 'Roland' type sound from the computer, I usually open up Rapture instead.

So if Purity is the easiest to work, I can see that. (The GUI does remind me of Aria) BTW, the Aria player is free and downloading the latest version is well worth the updates. But check with Garrittan, because some of their software require a specific order of installing them.

I think my main thing is cost per developement with Purity though.
If it intends on remaining 32 bit, I can't see it being worth more than $20-30.00 (And that is because of sample size content).

[HaganeSteel]

Dimension Pro has 4-5 flutes, none of them very usable. Purity has 1 good flute. Purity's flute has this harsh breath noise to it, but it seems like the harshness can be removed with a LP filter, which is built into the preset.
I don't think Purity sounds as good as SampleTank, but I do have to say that SampleTank has some excellently edited samples.
Of all of them, SampleTank seems the most usable, but Purity is more "synth" than SampleTank is.

I've ended up keeping certain hardware just for specific sounds, right now, nothing beats a Motif for its solo flute to me. (It is also my preferred source for guitars). I'm also finding most VIs do really decent oboes, but many are lacking a decent english horn (really? was it that much harder than the oboe?)
Dimension samples tend to be compressed and truncated to give them punch and so aren't as good to me for solo stuff. And layering in it has been tedious for me.
Generally, when I want a 'Roland' type sound from the computer, I usually open up Rapture instead.

So if Purity is the easiest to work, I can see that. (The GUI does remind me of Aria) BTW, the Aria player is free and downloading the latest version is well worth the updates. But check with Garrittan, because some of their software require a specific order of installing them.

I think my main thing is cost per developement with Purity though.
If it intends on remaining 32 bit, I can't see it being worth more than $20-30.00 (And that is because of sample size content).

Yeah, I can definitely see that.

The funny thing is, keeping romplers for one or two specific sounds is exactly what I think they do best, and it's sort of the "test" I use to see if a rompler is any good or not, and Purity has passed that test for me.

I keep the M1 around because of its "Chorus 1" waveform, which I think is beautiful.

I keep the Hyper Canvas around for its basses, ethnic sounds, and synth wave (Saw/Square/Sine) sounds.

And I keep Purity around because of Breath Bell, which really sells the synth to me.

Purity is also very easy to work with. The fact it responds so well to MIDI messages and has a GM bank really helps secure it into the niche market it's aiming for.

But the other thing is Purity's synth engine is just so fantastic. Things like its LFO and filter might not seem like such a big deal, but it nails it. The LFO and level of control it gives you is so spot on.

Purity doesn't try to be anything more than what it is, though, which is why I find it hard to recommend to people.

My goal here isn't to help Purity, it's to help the people who are interested in Purity decide if it's right for them.

It really does make a good bell synth, though.

And I didn't know the Aria player was free. Whoa. I need to look that up.

[tapper mike]

This is what I'll say (again) about Purity.

The 64 Bit Question
It really doesn't need 64bit in and of itself because with regular use it will never break the 4gig ram barrier. If you freeze tracks in your 32 bit daw you should have no problems using it. That's something that people seem to find very hard to do because they want to pile on indecision upon indecision. For me even though I have 64 bit daws I rarely need then as I'm not trying to stack 100's of tracks on top of each other. If I can't write/arrange a song with a nominal amount of tracks then it isn't much of a song and piling more crap on to it won't make it more of a song.

64bit doesn't make sounds sound better it's only useful for when ram passes the 4 gig mark

The UI
Hands down this is the best multi-timbral synth UI I have ever used. And that is saying a lot. The layout, workflow, general appearance and visibility is quite amazing. Other companies could learn alot from it including IKM, NI and Wusik and Korg.

I picked up a ztar so I could lay down multiple parts at once. Left hand bass, right hand melody, or rhythm or any combination on either. The linking/unlinking of instruments is a godsend to me. Prior to aquiring Purity I'd always have to open up two instances of Wavestation then dig thru to find the preset on each and remove certain sounds to get the proper separation. PITA! Purity shines here wavestation doesn't.

The rhythms, motif's and phrases are a nice starting ground however honestly they need more.

While some of the osc's in Purity are quite nice many really fail in comparission to Wavestation. Sorry I know that will offend many. Wavestations oscillators are far superior in quality and quantity. They are punchier and fuller even at lower levels. It's not that the file size is bigger it's just that they were recorded at higher levels and possibly compressed a bit more.

There are a few instances where Purity's osc's outshime (in certain circumstances) Wavestation. As for example the clarinet. For a soft classical interlude or the intro to "16 Tons" by Ernie Ford. But for big band or other arrangements it falls apart.

[BBFG#]

64 bit does make VIs more stable.
And freezing tracks are not something I like to do until I need to.
The GUI is nice and simple, very clean.
But things left in 32bit are losing their value.
I believe it's a good deal @19.95, an okay deal @29.95, a marginal deal @39.95. While the library size is good and GUI is good enough, the lack of further development puts it in the bargain bin more than anything else.

[musikmachine]

My goal here isn't to help Purity, it's to help the people who are interested in Purity decide if it's right for them.

Definitely gave me a few things to think about!

[tapper mike]

I took the deal @$49 and I thought (as I still think) it was worth it for the price. It's a niche market and Purity does fill that niche rather well.

I've encountered no stability issues with Purity in 32 bit versions of Abelton Live or Sonar or Samplitute or Real Band. Although I will say the GM makes no difference in my version of Real Band as Real Band uses Coyote Forte DXI and the sounds are identical. I've run it on both Win7 64 and Vista64 it's incredibly stable mostly due to the small footprint.

I find it very suitable for jpop, fusion, 80's synth pop, 90's house and more. The rhythms are very intoxicating and I find myself riffing over them quite often. I haven't delved too deep into editing. And while I find there is plenty of room for improvement as I do many products. Overall I think the foundation is strong. It's not a throw-away vsti for me. I open it usually every other day for something and spent over 4 hours with it prior to my last posting, which was time well spent.

I think it's a wonderful rompler and while I've made plenty of comparissions to Wavestation and where it falls short. It's not wavestation. It's much easier to work in.

[BBFG#]

TBH, the only products I've had stability issues with have been the HG Fortune SE 32bit. (Oh, and of course my Proteus X2 that I just can't seem to give up on). The 32b FireBird & Eve work great. MY IKM is all currently 32 bit, although Sampletank will be 64b by the end of the year. But I've heard from others that these can be a crap shoot as they work for some and not others, even with the identical OS/DAW specs.
I look for certain ranges in sound as most of us do. And this is where it gets subjective. We do a mix of World/Ambience - NewAge(wife's influences) and jazz fusion (my influences). All seeming to be struck with underlinings of experimental and trip-hop. Purity struck no chord with me in any of those venues. At best, for jazz, I would give it an okay to do re-bop or steakhouse contemporary standards. As a GM module, I can see this as a good set to use. It's not worth the price they're asking for it to me though.
Stock sounds for the most part in 32bit. They would be smart to 'backlist' this product at a greater discount and use the money for R&D. But they already said they don't plan on doing this. Wait a couple more months. It should get cheaper.

[Numanoid]

Think I manage to fight of the Purity GAS. Getting heavy into Kontakt at the mo'

[HaganeSteel]

I've been playing with SampleTank Free to see if XL is what I want.

I've also been using Purity more and more, playing around with it, stress testing it, etc.

I'm really impressed with SampleTank, but at the same time, I'm not.

I've been doing short little demos with the Miroslav sounds especially, and I've noticed that they don't seem to mix too well together.

So many instruments are stereo sampled and huge so that they fill up way too much space in a mix.

My first impressions of Naoshi Mizuta's Final Fantasy XI soundtrack back in the day, which uses SampleTank and Miroslav extensively, were "It sounds realistic, but messy."

Example:


The accordion and guitars sound as good as what's in Dimension Pro and my Hyper Canvas (Hyper Canvas has a *startlingly* good velocity switched nylon guitar that completely dominates the ones that are in my XP-30).

But this "realistic, but messy" sound seems to be the way the sounds are, at least judging by SampleTank Free and Naoshi Mizuta's use of them.

SampleTank seems to have very tight samples, and I really like that, but they're not very clean samples, and I don't like that. I never really liked the way Mizuta's instruments sounded, but I liked how functional they seemed.

I'm saying this because I'm surprised that Purity seems to have a more production-ready sound than SampleTank does.

It doesn't sound anywhere near as realistic or good, but it still sounds reasonable, and I find the samples to be overall cleaner, and combining it with my Hyper Canvas makes for a pretty outstanding combination.

But I'm really questioning whether or not I want Miroslav now because they sound good, but how usable are they? Naoshi Mizuta's mixes sound like they're stitched together with duct tape.

And Chains of Promathia is a complete trainwreck because he EQed everything wrong.

[Arglebargle]

The acoustic guitars are really boomy in that song. As someone who still uses ST2 a bit, I find a lot of the sounds need mad EQ work.

[HaganeSteel]

The acoustic guitars are really boomy in that song. As someone who still uses ST2 a bit, I find a lot of the sounds need mad EQ work.

I was afraid of that.

You can hear it in Mizuta's later soundtracks:


He needs to EQ and compress the hell out of his stuff, and that sort of thing virtually doubles my workload, especially considering I don't need to EQ the Hyper Canvas, or even Dimension Pro as much.

The problem with that is, as you can hear, too much EQ is a dangerous thing.

Now I've heard Miroslav used in Radiant Historia and Xenoblade Chronicles, and it sounds great, but I realize it must have taken a lot of work to get it to sound that way.

I'm not good enough with EQs and compressors to be able to consistently fix errors or problems in sounds I'm going to spend all my money on, and that's what I'm worried about.

It might be worth upgrading to GPO 4 instead, or abandoning orchestra altogether because I find all of these orchestral sample libraries to have major problems.

But as a rompler, I think Purity is a reasonable alternative to SampleTank now, just based on the fact it sounds so clean. I'm actually really liking Purity's drums now too, especially its hihats, which lend themselves really well to the kinds of funky rhythms I like to use.

[Arglebargle]

To be honest that song sounds fine to me, mix wise. I don't notice anything amiss, be it EQ or compression. I'm afraid it doesn't catch my interest like the classic Uematsu works though.

Re Sampletank, it's a mixed bag for sure, but given IK multimedia's near constant desire to devalue their products it is very easy to find it on sale. Same for Miroslav.

[HaganeSteel]

To be honest that song sounds fine to me, mix wise. I don't notice anything amiss, be it EQ or compression. I'm afraid it doesn't catch my interest like the classic Uematsu works though.

I'm not showing you the Chains of Promathia stuff either.

That stuff legitimately hurt my ears when I first heard it.

But you can hear that a lot of processing went into that, and that takes a lot of time for me.

I'm spoiled by Edirol because they pre-EQ and pre-compress all their stuff, and it's made me way too complacent.

Re Sampletank, it's a mixed bag for sure, but given IK multimedia's near constant desire to devalue their products it is very easy to find it on sale. Same for Miroslav.

Yeah, I think I'll wait to see if they have Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals and decide then.

Currently, I need really aggressive staccato brass ensembles, and I'm very curious about GPO's Project Sam stuff, because they didn't use Project Sam for Second Edition.

[HaganeSteel]

I hate to bump this thread, but I have to come back in here and say this because I know people will probably find this thread when they research Purity.

The other reason is that I know Sky Cha reads this thread and I want to give him some legitimate feedback for the future.

After using Purity for a good while now, I have a problem with it, but it's maybe not as big of a problem as I'm making it out to be. It does practically render this synth unusable for me as anything other than backup.

Part of why I bought Purity was because I loved its string sounds. They seemed to recreate the character of my Roland, but there is a problem with the String ENS 2/Violins waveforms that renders them unusable for me.

Okay, Purity is mostly machine tight, but this problem is twofold:

First, for the String ENS 2 waveform: The attack transients are inconsistent between samples. The String ENS 2 waveform has a fast, spiccato-like attack from Gb3 to Bb3, but a legato sample starts on B3.

The problem with this is that when you play arpeggios and your strings are hitting, for example, G3, Bb3, and D4, the D4 note plays a legato sample and sounds like it has a slightly delayed attack as a result.

Second, Purity pitches some samples down, and this makes their attacks noticeably slower.

The upside is that after doing so many tests, I can say that Purity nails the sample timing. So the problem is not the engine, but rather the sample editing.

Now, Purity is not the only synth with issues like this. The Emu Proteus 2000 Section patch also has the exact same issues and people seemed to use that patch just fine, and I'm also fairly sure problems like this existed in my Roland as well.

I know for a fact that Edirol Orchestral has tons of issues like this with its spiccato string sounds.

The problem seems to be a combination of having too jarring of a sample transition, and also pitching samples up/down having an effect on their attack transients.

I can say, though, to Purity's credit, that you can fix this problem yourself by doing a hard transpose on the multi-samples, which means you can tune the actual samples themselves rather than just moving the keyboard, and then transpose your music accordingly. I've done this. It's not perfect, but I think it can work.

So whether this is a big deal or not is really up to people who read this.

This sort of thing is actually pretty common in synths, but I would feel guilty if I didn't say anything here, and I also want to make Luxonix aware of how important it is to have a smoother transition from sample to sample.

[tapper mike]

Silly Human you ask too much.

I've been playing guitar since the mid 70's I've got 8 guitars currently and I've owned hundreds. I flat pick with a variety of different picks as well as well use a thumb pick finger pick with both synthetic, banjo picks flesh and more. I cringe when I hear most guitar emulations. Real guitar is the only one plausible/tolerable to me. I know how tuning affects the timbre as well as gauge of the string, pick, the location of the fretting hand the approach of the fretting fingers as well the same for the picking hand.


Wait for it.......

Not yet....

I've heard some wonderful renditions of keyboard players playing virutal guitars. It still didn't sound like a real guitar to me but for the inspiration of the tone and the skills of the performer made it happen. So it may be simply me not believing in the tone enough to make it a reality.



Now.....
Some of my best loved songs featuring strings and flutes growing up didn't weren't actually produced with violins or flutes. Mellotrons.

So my point is this, Both believers and non musicians are less concerned with unnatural artifacts then engineers and non believers. If you don't believe it sounds realistic you are more likely to fight it then let it be.


If Luxonix wants to move into the high end of things. Which would cost considerable amounts of money and be reflected in the pricing structure they would be better off to take a page from DSF MSO and Emulator X environment.



Quite frankly I've had GPO and Miroslav and a few others to boot. Nothing comes close to MSO. A good portion has to do with the environment and a good portion has to do with the dedication in actual recording and mastering the original samples. It takes a lot of money and time and dedication. Some production manager simply wanting to get the product out would take short cuts or not over see the production properly. In the end the product would fall short.

Oddly after all that my favorite orchestral sounds don't come in software form.
They come from a Korean Hardware manufacturer.



Then again I may be swayed by belief as performance can make all the difference.