Synapse Audio Minimoog emulation "The Legend" for VST/AU and RE released!

[fmr]

hey guys im not back today i think, is THE LEGEND still recommended if you got MONARK, Minimoog from Arturia and Diva? (i love diva!), im not in the need of 100% accuracy stuff.... thx

I think The Legend is the best sounding Moog emulation. I also have Monark (never use it anymore with The Legend and an SE-02), and Diva (which is SO much more, but just happens to do a reasonable Moog emulation). Arturia, to me, is the worst emulation - which doesn't mean it's bad in any way, just not as accurate sounding - though it gets points for usability.

Considering the "bang-for-the-buck", and how much more you get with DIVA, I wouldn't think twice. You have so much more in DIVA than a Minimoog that almost outrageous to compare it with one.

And it can recreate some pretty faithful "moogish" sounds too.

[Echoes in the Attic]

But the demo has to have a restriction, right? So, it is either time limit but fully functional or sound limitation with noise!
Yes, there are some like NI demos, but the demo also has limitation and still people regret buying some NI synths then sell it in the 2nd hand market, right?

Yes most VSTs are unlimited time demos, with all kinds of restrictions (noise, no saving or recall etc.) and they work great. All are better options than limited time. Obviously people still sell plugins with unlimited time demos. How could it be otherwise. People sell things.

The solution for me, is just to be decisive! Just decide within the limitations if I want this or not! Although I took ages to decide either to upgrade to Dune 3 or not from Dune 2, but I didn't care too much about it and it wasn't a priority. I didn't really asked for extension for the demo when the time finished! It is just happened that when I decided to upgrade, the demo was updated and reset, so I took another few days to demo it and see if it can work under Wine in Linux.

Well that's great for you that you can be decisive. But it doesn't help Synapse at with other potential customers who may not have the time. I'm not looking for a solution, I said that Synapse aren't doing themselves any favors with this policy, because it will often have the consequence of someone not buying something they might have if they had been able to casually go back to the demo every so often. For some, it might be just the right thing for a specific track and that's when they purchase. I, like many others, could happily go on without The Legend. But if they want to sell something with lots of alternatives, they might want to make it easier for people who don't "need" it immediately but might get eventually won over from a fresh listen/play.

[e-crooner]

The demo of the new version of Memorymoon's Messiah has 3 seconds of silence, that is a useful limitation. Although those 3 seconds feel much longer. I suppose 1 second would have been enough as it would do the trick, i.e. keep people from using the plugin for production.

Although it is a loose Prophet emulation, it can make Minimoog sounds as well, it actually has 2 Minimoog-inspired LP filters.

[mholloway]

The Legend wins my pick for best MM software. The sound is huge and rich, the UI clean, clear and easy as pie to work with. I never cared for Monark's interface; even with a highly similar set of controls, it just not a pleasure to work with the way the Legend is.

There were rumors floating around a while back that Synapse was working on an Oberheim Ob-Xa emulation, hmmmmm.......would love to hear more about that

[Echoes in the Attic]

The Legend wins my pick for best MM software. The sound is huge and rich, the UI clean, clear and easy as pie to work with. I never cared for Monark's interface; even with a highly similar set of controls, it just not a pleasure to work with the way the Legend is.

Absolutely. And I think they made some smart decisions in what to modify from the original. So while they matched the sound quite well, they weren't slavish to the original design. ADSR ftw! I really don't think having full ADSR takes away from the original, it's a worthy improvement. OR the re-ordering of the osc section for a more left to right logic (setting waveforms and then tuning moving to the right). And I definitely appreciate the 12db filter. Was that a common mod on the minimoog? You see it in a few moog soft synths.

[recursive one]

hey guys im not back today i think, is THE LEGEND still recommended if you got MONARK, Minimoog from Arturia and Diva? (i love diva!), im not in the need of 100% accuracy stuff.... thx

I think with Monrak and Diva you have it covered. Monark for accurate representation of the Minimoog sound and Diva for general purpose analog poly stuff.

I think so... Never tried the Legend though, but I really don't see how it can offer anything that is not covered by Monark and Diva. Maybe slightly different character but i'm not sure it's actually worth the price.

I wish we had as much Virus replicas in software as we have Moogs

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

There were rumors floating around a while back that Synapse was working on an Oberheim Ob-Xa emulation, hmmmmm.......would love to hear more about that

Richard from Synapse mentioned a few emulations in the pipeline: a P600, an Oberheim, and maybe even eventually a Memorymoog. I'd love a status update myself.

[EvilDragon]

Monark is cool but the overdrive/feedback is really weird and to me doesn't really sound analog.

That overdrive and feedback absolutely does sound analog. And the actual early Model D NI used as reference does distort in exactly the same way (I played it on multiple occasions)

There's also this comparison between the original and Monark: https://www.native-instruments.com/foru ... us.191811/

[AnX]

There were rumors floating around a while back that Synapse was working on an Oberheim Ob-Xa emulation, hmmmmm.......would love to hear more about that

Richard from Synapse mentioned a few emulations in the pipeline: a P600, an Oberheim, and maybe even eventually a Memorymoog. I'd love a status update myself.

now the big (as in lots of work for Synapse regarding mac stuff) update for Dune3 is done, hopefully they can crack on with new projects

[Echoes in the Attic]

Monark is cool but the overdrive/feedback is really weird and to me doesn't really sound analog.

That overdrive and feedback absolutely does sound analog. And the actual early Model D NI used as reference does distort in exactly the same way (I played it on multiple occasions)

I'll take your word for it as I don't have a minimoog. I have seen and listened to other comparisons with hardware minis where it doesn't sound anything the same. I guess there must be a huge variety of hardware feedback behaviors. Whatever The Legend was modeled on for example is totally different.

[EvilDragon]

Yeah Minis from different eras all had different behaviors in various aspects. Famous old story says that Rick Wakeman, back in the day, had something like 5 or 6 Minimoogs, and he could discern between them blindfolded when all the knobs and switches were set to exactly the same positions (well, as much as physically possible).

[e-crooner]

So anyone can make a mediocre Minimoog emulation and claim it sounds so different because they modeled a specific Minimoog sitting in their basement (a synth that nobody else has ever heard)

[BONES]

Yeah same with buying a house, you cannot host a party with friends/family and demo living in the space for 30 days before making up your mind. What that has to do with demoing music software - I honestly do not know.

Clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with it as the house will have little or not impact on the quality of the party. OTOH, a car is a very complex piece of equipment with which many of us form an emotional attachment. It has a lot of features and functions that you won't get to test but nobody worries about that because it's just common sense that you don't have to test every little feature in order to make up your mind. You get a feel for the thing and you make a decision. It should be the same with software - you don't have to spend 100 hours fully immersed in a softsynth to get a feeling for whether or not you will find it useful. As I said, you should be able to work that out without even downloading the demo, just as you work out which car you think you might want before you start test driving. The demo should just be a matter of a quick confirmation that your impressions were right (or not).

These aren't complicated things we're looking at. You get 28 days to demo 3DS Max, probably the most complex software anyone could buy, and in the 6 years I worked for Autodesk I never heard so much as a single complaint that 30 days wasn't long enough to demo the product.

Bones, I think a much better analogy is a workstation keyboard or synth in a music shop. When I was a kid I would go play keyboards in the music shop after school with minimal restrictions. There were no 30 day restrictions. I could sit there and play using my headphones.

I bet they absolutely hated you. OTOH, I used to spend a lot of money at my local music shop so I was allowed to take things home and try them out in my own set-up, maybe for a week if I wanted to push it, which is much closer to what we are talking about here. So if I was unsure about a purchase, I'd wait until I knew I'd have plenty of time to put into it before I went in and asked to borrow their demo model. It's not hard, it just requires you to be a bit organised.

What a horrible comparison a car is a physical object that wears of when driving, exploiting on the road. So its understandable why there is a 15 minute drive. Software doesnt wear off, doesnt exploit, doesnt break, selling copies of it doesnt require any labor, you just copy and paste it. Come on Bones

The point is that we do it and it works. I have several times completely changed my mind about a car purchase based on that 15 minute drive. Hyundai had a thing where you could borrow one of their cars for a week to try it out and pretty much nobody bothered because it doesn't take a week to work that stuff out, even when you are looking to spend tens of thousands of dollars on something that may or may not save your life one day. Normal people would think you were some kind of weirdo wasting 100 hours trying to decide if something as inconsequential as a VST plugin was worth spending $100 on or not. It is completely out of all proportion.

Would you like me to give you some other examples if the car one doesn't work for you? How about clothing, how do you reckon you'd go if you tried to return a new pair of jeans after 3 months because they weren't comfortable or you didn't like the way they looked on you? Even if they still had all their tags on and looked perfect, I reckon you'd have no chance. Or how about a new TV? It could sit in your home for months and still be like brand new but how long do you think you'd get to return it if you weren't happy with it for any reason? I reckon a week or two at best. Yes, there are other factors at work here but, again, the point is we have no trouble making these decisions and living happily ever after with them. That tells me that anyone who can't make up their mind about a VST plugin after 30 days is likely to be a nightmare customer in the longer term, someone you'll have to "handle" for as long as they keep using your products. Who needs that?

[BONES]

hey guys im not back today i think, is THE LEGEND still recommended if you got MONARK, Minimoog from Arturia and Diva? (i love diva!), im not in the need of 100% accuracy stuff.... thx

You're pretty well geared up already. The Legend is a very good synth, but so are Monark and Diva. It will give you something similar to Monark, only that it's polyphonic and it has Unison... And it's possibly the best of its class (but Monark is quite close)

The deciding feature for me would be oscillator sync. Since Rich put that in the last Legend update it has risen several notches in my estimation, despite all the restrictions of having to sound like a MiniMoog. If you can put up with that filter or use it for sounds that don't expose its inherent weakness, Legend is an excellent option now.

Considering the "bang-for-the-buck", and how much more you get with DIVA, I wouldn't think twice.

Diva is almost twice the price, it would want to be a lot more capable. I demo'd it when it was half-price and couldn't see the value of it then, I certainly can't see any "bang-for-buck" at full price.

You have so much more in DIVA than a Minimoog that almost outrageous to compare it with one.

The same is true of The Legend, it goes way beyond what any MiniMoog could ever do. It's only held back by that awful filter.

[e-crooner]

The same is true of The Legend, it goes way beyond what any MiniMoog could ever do. It's only held back by that awful filter.

I doubt they sell an emulation of a classic analog synth and ruin it by giving it an "awful filter."

I suppose you simply don't like the Minimoog sound that much and would not be too fond of the hardware, either