The public reaction - and I strongly suspect sales figures - to 4.0 was so dire I think reFX realised they had to up their game in order to survive. And this is the result.
https://youtu.be/7MH5oi5CaEo
The whole architecture has opened up to fully access the wavetables, samples and oscillators and all the associated controls. There's the mod matrix, filters and envelopes. There's a new routing / mixer page for quick edits, an FX page with drag and drop re-ordering, a new black hole reverb (noting Eventide's product has now achieved the status of Auto-tune or Hoover as a branded term so ubiquitous it becomes short hand for everyone), exporting of ARP patterns to a DAW, right click midi learn and 70 new presets.
Can you start with an Init and build a complex patch from scratch? Still not sure, but it's clear you can do vastly more than you ever could. That immediately leads on to another big unanswered question - could people make and sell third party libraries? There used to be a strange very small sector here which reFX clamped down upon. I suspect this will continue, which will cause gnashing of teeth. Is there even a mechanism to save banks of user patches and transfer them to other users?
There's likely still an omission or two, AFAIK there's still no multi-out. And clearly it will never be a synth for pure programmers, many on KVR will shrug. But for those who like the Nexus instant hit but want to get right in to make things their own, this will be highly useful. Maybe even the ARPs and SQs will be more useful in that with DAW drag and drop you can easily change the melody around root note progressions to make it more useable.
I think this is as close as we'll ever come to reFX saying the word they never use - "sorry".
This is a "soft launch". My upgrade price from 3 is £110 (partly due to the terrible exchange rate). with the Christmas sale not far away I'll wait for that.
EDIT - some answers on patch creation and selling thanks to FigBug.
Q Can you create a patch from scratch?
Q Can you make and sell third party patches?If you go the the ... menu in the toolbar, load preset template, there are 9 blank layouts you can start from. From those you can build your own patches. You can build your own synth patch (virtual analog/wavetable, but not sample based).
The editing is mostly opened up, but you still can't add / delete oscs, add / delete layers, change samples. Everything else you can edit.
This method works just fine in Nexus 3, it's just that nobody seems to be doing it (for good reason up until now). I just did a test on my PC using Nexus 3. The user folder is pretty well hidden here:Save a bunch of user patches, move them into a folder, get the user to copy that folder into their content folder. As long as you aren't distributing reFX samples, I don't see why that wouldn't be allowed.
Users/Public/Public Documents/reFX/very long random letters/user presets.
I simply copied my test patch, then put it into a new XP Test folder I created alongside all the others in my content drive (the main presets folder sits in a subfolder of Nexus2). Make sure the folder name begins with XP.
This means that third party banks really should be technically possible, but I think folks will need to be careful they don't use any samples in the patches, or any existing melodies etc in arps.
FULL DETAILS
New
Added "ROM Extension 4" expansion to showcase some of the new features.
Added "Routing"-page (replaces "Effects", "Trancegate" and "Layers" pages).
Added complete routing overview of the entire preset.
See which generators route into which layers, and which layers route into which FX-groups.
Quickly and directly adjust basic parameters directly from the routing page.
Added generator-inspector.
Parameters of individual VA-oscillators, sample-players, and wavetable-players can be adjusted.
Added layer-inspector.
Two filters, amp-settings, adsr-curves, etc. can now be directly edited.
Added FX-inspector.
The FX have been moved into FX-groups. Multiple layers can now route into the same FX-group to save CPU.
FX can be freely arranged via drag'n'drop, even between FX-groups!
You can add, remove, toggle all existing FX.
All FX-groups have their own LFOs and routing-matrix.
Added new reverb-type called "Black Hole".
Added new insert FX "wide mono". Creates a mono signal and then widens it using psychoacoustics techniques.
Added "random preset load" button (the die next to the previous/next buttons). Click on it and it loads a random preset from the list on the right. Very cool to get some surprising presets you may have not heard before.
Added "hold" button. Once engaged, it keeps on playing all notes until you press a new set of notes.
The brightness of the keyzone-note indicators now depends on the velocity of each key.
Added ability to change the number of key zones.
Added "depth" parameter to both user LFOs. They are modulatable via the mod-matrix as well.
Changes
Moved instance-settings and preferences to the "backside". Click on the reFX/Vengeance logos.
The whole UI now has more of a "hardware"-look.
Shimmer effect is a bit more pronounced now.
Arp-parameters that have no effect for that mode or tempo are now visually disabled.
Replaced cloud-sync with adjustable user-data path (configurable in the cloud app).
Fixes:
Shimmer for the ArtsAcoustic reverb-types was very noisy.
macOS: Ableton Live disabled automation lanes when NEXUS was used as an Audio Unit and the project was loaded.
Improved stability and general bug-fixes
