Arturia Augmented String Intro - FREE untill April 30th

[Monkberry]

I'm liking what this intro version is doing and am looking forward to the eventual full version with deeper editing features. It sounds great so far. I'm on a 2019 i9-9900K w/ Coffee Lake processor and CPU is around 30% in Cubase 12 Pro.

[fmr]

I'm liking what this intro version is doing and am looking forward to the eventual full version with deeper editing features. It sounds great so far. I'm on a 2019 i9-9900K w/ Coffee Lake processor and CPU is around 30% in Cubase 12 Pro.

It's consistent with what I get too, in a similarly spec'ed system.

[Teksonik]

That meter shows you the CPU usage of the max taxed core. It's not using 40% of your entire CPU but 40% of a single core. Still high, but just wanted to clarify that.

True but the meter does match what's shown on the plugin's GUI. I've got synths that barely move the meter when playing five notes. Again it's off loading quite a bit to the GPU which is baffling for a sample based synth.

Arturia.png

Augmented Strings is the least efficient plugin I have installed taking over first place from Pigments.

Let's be honest while it can make some nice sounds they are nothing new or groundbreaking in any way. It's not like this is next level synthesis requiring next level CPU power.

Anyway if the idea was for the Intro version to inspire me to buy a full version then....epic fail.

[melomood]

I suspected this wouldn't be making sounds I couldn't work out with what I already have. It is pretty. It would be nice if the samples were extractable. Are they?

[Teksonik]

I did some presets for Strings and yes we know the issue related to the CPU consumption.. But I want to say, it's not a simple sample based like Kontakt, you got multiple engine from pigments, it works very well but yeah, your CPU need to be on steroid xD

Well that explains why the high CPU demand because it's using PIGments' engines. But the thing is the resulting sounds of Augmented Strings....just like in PIGments....do not justify the CPU demand.

One could easily put together similar or better sounds in Kontakt for a fraction of the CPU demand and since Augmented Strings uses a fair amount of RAM for each patch that tells me a lot of it is sample based.

These new Arturia plugins are simply not optimized properly for the quality of the resulting sounds...in my opinion. You shouldn't need next gen processors for last gen's sounds.

[billcarroll]

I think it sounds lovely. Bounce that shizz down. Hard to believe it’s free.

[stash98]

I think it sounds lovely. Bounce that shizz down. Hard to believe it’s free.

Exactly. I just sample it. It's a perfect synth to sample from.

[mooter]

its been downloading for over an hour and is still at about 25% done.

Download failed after 3 hours ...

Same here, trying since last night. Taking hours to download until it gives me a download error and I need to restart ASC just to get it to continue where it left off.

Try downloading from the website? Watch the dl speed go crazy.

All the dough they're raking in and they can't upgrade their servers? This happens every time with a release.

[Teksonik]

I think it sounds lovely. Bounce that shizz down. Hard to believe it’s free.

Why bounce when you can replace it with a better sounding, more efficient plugin?

I'm not saying it sounds bad just not good enough to justify the cpu demand.

It's like owning a sports car that only gets five miles per gallon but isn't any faster than one that gets twenty MPG.....kind of pointless.

[billcarroll]

I think it sounds lovely. Bounce that shizz down. Hard to believe it’s free.

Why bounce when you can replace it with a better sounding, more efficient plugin?

I'm not saying it sounds bad just not good enough to justify the cpu demand.

It's like owning a sports car that only gets five miles per gallon but isn't any faster than one that gets twenty MPG.....kind of pointless.

I hear you. I like the sounds and functionality though. It's ok to differ on this.

I get the struggle with CPU, and yet I still like this offering and direction from Arturia. CPUs are getting much faster, and I'm sure Arturia will optimize as well. We shall see.

[Greenstorm33]

I think it sounds lovely. Bounce that shizz down. Hard to believe it’s free.

Why bounce when you can replace it with a better sounding, more efficient plugin?

I'm not saying it sounds bad just not good enough to justify the cpu demand.

It's like owning a sports car that only gets five miles per gallon but isn't any faster than one that gets twenty MPG.....kind of pointless.

I hear you. I like the sounds and functionality though. It's ok to differ on this.

I get the struggle with CPU, and yet I still like this offering and direction from Arturia. CPUs are getting much faster, and I'm sure Arturia will optimize as well. We shall see.

Maybe having additional products based on Pigments' sound engine will be the impetus they need to lower the CPU usage. I love the synth but you can make patches that bring my i7-9750H to its knees.

[Teksonik]

It's ok to differ on this.

Oh absolutely and as I wrote a few pages back I am grateful for their generosity but I'm just trying to give some user feedback.

I get the struggle with CPU, and yet I still like this offering and direction from Arturia. CPUs are getting much faster, and I'm sure Arturia will optimize as well. We shall see.

Yes CPUs will keep getting faster and if a plugin gives a good return on CPU invested then that makes sense. But ones that don't can only be classified as inefficient.

This is what I should have posted earlier. It shows the "Go To" preset with 4 notes playing. None of the patches I tried have more than 8 note poly although it can go up to 16 which for long evolving pads is useful to give the patch "breathing room".

FL-AS.png

Again this in on a 6 core 12 thread CPU with a turbo speed of 4.7 GHz.

The point I was trying to make earlier is that I have fully finished projects that don't use 40% on the same system.

Oh and you can turn off the Animations which are literally nothing more than eye candy so that can save a few cycles of GPU use.

Anyway I came within a mouse click of uninstalling Augmented Strings but I'll hold on to it for a while and see what the future holds.

I get the feeling this is the first of a series of such plugins so let's see how Arturia responds to feedback that I trust the beta testers and sound designers are passing along to the people who write the code.....

[noiseboyuk]

The GPU side of the resource use can surely be improved. Turning off the animations doesn’t make all that difference, and it’s then just a static image.

I guess part of the reason the CPU is so high for many patches is that most of the engines under the hood have to be running at once to make the morphing and other controlling seamless. So that’s the trade off - real time flexibility at the expense of the CPU. Which really is fair enough I guess.

All this talk of “yesterday’s sounds” is as ungracious as it is tedious. You can say “I can do it all another way using just 12 separate plugins and 14 automation parameters” all day, but so what? The package here is high quality, quick to use, is geared to real time performance and - oh yeah - free. If you’re not into that, bully for you but find something more productive to do with your time than whining about a nice new free plugin on Internet forums.

As for a Rompler - it sorta is really. Typically I guess people think of Romplers as purely sample-based, but they don’t have to be. The main criteria is in whether or not you can program yourself in depth and that isn’t the Simple version here - it’s 50 presets with macros. I suspect the full version will not be a Rompler.

[seangm]

Just started playing around with it and I like the sounds, some of the "lofi" stuff sounds kind of Mellotron-y to me which is awesome.

[teilo]

Once again, Arturia is utterly clueless about software delivery. No CDN. Complete BS. Multiple times had the download error out, forcing it to start all over again. And of course, this means that they are hammering their bandwidth even more, what with all the re-downloads. They know about this problem. It's happened every damn time they do a free plugin, only this time it's much worse because the download is huge. Kills downloads also for all paying customers. Idiotic.

EDIT: If you want to download this fast, skip their crappy Software Center app, and use these links. Downloaded in under 2 minutes on my company's 1G internet:

Mac:
https://updates.arturia.net/products/au ... 0_1964.pkg

Windows:
https://updates.arturia.net/products/au ... 0_1964.zip