ReFx Nexus 3 (N3) Finally here!

[mgw38]

I regret buying this, didn’t know t replaced nexus 2. Afraid to look at my old projects and all the presets I used..I’d pay to downgrade back to n2

Not sure if I would go as far as to say that I regret it, but it was certainly the most useless purchase I made in a while. At least so far. It literally broke everything.

In case you want to downgrade until they have fixed all the bugs. Just start the reFx Cloud app, disable the automatic updates option (otherwise it will always automatically replace N2 with N3 as soon as you start the reFx Cloud), uninstall all reFx plugins and use the old Nexus 2 installer to reinstall Nexus 2. It appears that Nexus 2 has no issues with the upgraded library. Unfortunately, they no longer provide you with a Nexus 2 installer, so if you don't have that stored somewhere, you are out of luck.

I am seriously stunned by the bugginess of this release. It is not that there are bugs, because there always are. But the type of bugs would have been very easy to sort out pre-release if they had followed just the most basic quality assurance procedures. We are talking about crashing authorization, presents not loading and the like. Such bugs simply should not happen. Makes you wonder what else does not work under the hood.

If you are on the fence about upgrading, don't. There is no financial incentive to do that now and the risks of the update breaking your projects is just too big.

[dblock]

When do the expansions go on sale?

I believe they are indeed on sale now, not much of a discount on the newer releases though, unfortunately.

Thanks!

[KenjiDeVries]

However Refx explicitly told me:
1) now that Nexus 3 is out, I can NOT sell a Nexus 2 license.
2) and if they found out I had 'given it away', they may suspend my license.

That is indeed something that pisses me off. I have Nexus2 and no intend to upgrade. Been looking for someone to buy it from me quite a while (which is hard enough because I have to sell it incl. all my expansions which makes it more expensive). I'm glad I have downloaded all expansions and the master key file recently before this refx cloud bs came up. And I'm happy to live in the EU where we have the right to re-sell licenses...

[msvs]

thanks, but we can't add layers to build our own patches?

no this never was and never will be in Nexus, at least not in the foreseeable future
Nexus stays what it should be and what it was made for: powerful preset workhorse

[noiseboyuk]

thanks, but we can't add layers to build our own patches?

Nope. It's not a full synth in that way. Avenger for all that.

You can configure more under the hood than with Nexus 2, but there are still surprising limitations. For example, you can't add a reverb send to a layer, or put a chorus in a layer, you can only do these things to the patch as a whole. If the patch has been configured to include a chorus on a layer then you can enable or disable it, and you can now fix arps / sequences on a layer-by-layer basis, but that's about it.

[DPhil]

However Refx explicitly told me:
1) now that Nexus 3 is out, I can NOT sell a Nexus 2 license.
2) and if they found out I had 'given it away', they may suspend my license.

That is indeed something that pisses me off. I have Nexus2 and no intend to upgrade. Been looking for someone to buy it from me quite a while (which is hard enough because I have to sell it incl. all my expansions which makes it more expensive). I'm glad I have downloaded all expansions and the master key file recently before this refx cloud bs came up. And I'm happy to live in the EU where we have the right to re-sell licenses...

What a bummer. Now there are not only problems for the ones that upgraded to N3 but also for all Nexus owners in general.

[compactus]

btw for me N3 works inside Komplete Kontrol with preset files from Freelance Soundlabs made for N2, including Previews.
Had to reset the font size, but now it's working here

[Amram]

Why no demo to download?
Roland cloud have one.

[Caine123]

Any Feedbacks if the upgrade is worth it?

[steve.lindqvist]

That onboard synthesis was already integrated in Nexus2. You skipped the fact that they were talking about a rough outline of the Nexus history, starting way before 2006. It wasn't related to the new version specifically. In fact, presets purely based on the internal synthesis engine were the ones with less CPU demand compared to sample based ones (mostly stacked layers) in Nexus2, at least on my system. So no, I don't think that the synthesis engine does any harm in therms of CPU demand in Nexus3 - this behavior seems more like some fundamental performance problems.
If something groundbreaking were new about the onboard synthesis engine, they would have advertised that much more aggressively - especially since the new feature list ist not that long.

Ah fair dos.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I did a test. Nexus 2 - 16 instances of a Trap SQ was around 25% on my system settings. Nexus 3 - practically identical. However, project load time seemed significantly longer.

First impressions are mixed. Install was a cinch, downloads very quick. Its probably true that it is superior in pretty much every way to Nexus 2, although there are still a fair few shortcomings.

1. Poor tagging. This was a draw for many of us that tags are now - finally - in this preset-machine. Initially none at all showed up, but after clicking around the colours for a while suddenly they showed (I realise I had to be in All... no idea what changed). However, its a pretty miserly bunch that we have to work with - just dark, bright, active, spikey, wide and dirty. That's it. And even then, only the new expansions and new ROM content are tagged. Apparently out of 403 pads, I only have 1 that is dark. 8 are "active" whatever that means... there wasn't any prominent motion in them. Sadly, this meagre selection is close to useless.

2. No genre search. This seems a staggering omission really. Nexus is really placed as a synth for genre-fans. Many expansions - certainly all the christmas ones, but not only this - straddle multiple genres. The text search only works for patch names, so typing hip hop in doesn't even result in any patches from hip hop 3.

3. No names for layers. If they're tagging expansions, they should also name the layers. The facility is there to name them yourself from a simple drop down list, but this should be pre-done really, as in Avenger.

4. The mixer is probably the weakest link. They've persisted with this odd horizontal layout, where it would seem much more intuitive to make it vertical. The graphical faders are pretty bad, there's no scale or no GUI at all in the case of anything set to zero or centre - it looks like there are no controls at all in these cases. The graphical layout is very odd, the tube-map style graphics are confusingly meaningless really, a simple vertical signal path flow would be much more useful, with the pan, volume etc below (and a proper volume fader). There's no user customisation of what effects can be applied within layers - you can switch off and on if they already exist, but that's it. A proper send / insert system would have been much better. Finally, no sep outs still, which is a very tiresome omission.

Overall, it feels about 50% of what could reasonably be expected of it. No-one was expecting full programability, but ReFx have failed to really see through most of the opening out of the interface and browser. The tagging we know will roll out across the range, but the options are so poor I honestly wonder if its worth the bother. I doubt many of the other shortcomings, such as the mixer, will get addressed.

And yet. Despite everything, it IS a lot quicker and simpler to work with than Nexus 2. And - the single biggest thing for me - I can run it on the desktop and a mobile, which is worth the upgrade price alone.

Thanks for that information. I can totally relate to that.

Regarding the layer names, you can change the type in the features tab, so that you can better separate them in the arp tab. But such cumbersome handling you have to do yourself(!) is contrary to the ease of use concept of this instrument:

[GMusic]

Any Feedbacks if the upgrade is worth it?

Well, not all the expansions are tagged. But the new preset browser is nice. I personally am not the biggest fan of this flat looking interface. I kinda liked the more flashy futuristic look of N2.

[steve.lindqvist]

Besides the usual bugs that a first version has (it takes some time, that's normal, even if a paying customer expects a functional product), for me personally, I have to say that I just would have been satisfied with a purely revised HDPI GUI.
But unfortunately I lost more than I gained (only from my personal user point of view).

Got:
- Scaleable HDPI GUI
- Better browser
- Editable layer arps (doesn’t work stable at the moment)
- New content (very high quality, but not needed as hardcore user, I buy further expansions anyway)

Lost:
- Loading presets with the arrow keys: gone
- Effect library: completely gone (huge one!)
- Saving own effect presets: gone (huge one!)
- Locking effect settings including limiter: gone (huge one!)
- Locking modulation settings: gone (how am I supposed to use the new macro controllers? The settings get lost switching to another preset)
- Locking arps and trance gates does need an extra click
- Skins: gone

Wished for:
- Visual color differentiation of expansions (just like the icons in the new cloud app, I still can hardly find my the expansion I’m looking for)
- Precision time align (sample accurate midi timing)

I very much hope that the Lost section will be delivered as soon as possible.

[Loudness_Contour]

Any Feedbacks if the upgrade is worth it?

I don’t regret upgrading. I like the new library browser and the new arp. I never liked the old ones.

Please note that N2 won’t be available anymore after upgrading.

[mladi]

Glad i didn't upgrade after reading that.. ..so i have to thank you guys!

[simmo75]

Are there more than just trap and EDM factory presets?
I’m really not into EDM personally.