Arturia Minifreak VST

[SLiC]

Here's the link to the vi-control thread in case anyone wants to double check with them over there:


"Thursday at 8:41 PM
#11
sostenuto said:
I just upgraded my V Collection from 8 to 9 for $149. To my surprise, I got a separate email from Arturia with a MiniFreak V serial number. I didn't know that was included in the upgrade. So this was an even better deal than I thought."

https://vi-control.net/community/thread ... -v.135247/

That's the advertised price see- 149 upgrade from any version to V9 including MF.

[BONES]

I don't begrudge the choices of others. They don't need saving and I don't ride a white horse. They certainly don't owe me an explanation. Life is short. Play on.

The thing is, though, other people read these threads and they will be here for many years. They are only useful if the information in them is as objective as it can be so it is important to be accurate. You, like EnGee and a couple of others, acknowledge the shortcomings of this particular instrument, but decide you can live with those, which is great. It's the people who can't hear a negative word said that distort things and devalue the thread.

[Dirtgrain]

It's the people who can't hear a negative word said that distort things and devalue the thread.

You swim in hyperbole all day, and you follow up with this. STFU.

[BONES]

OK, so you've outed yourself as one of them, then.

[EnGee]

Anyway, I hope that Arturia addresses these shortcomings issues (low volume and labels, among others) and try to polish the synth as they are doing with Pigments.

Another thing, why these synths are consuming lot of cpu compared to synths like Dune 3 and Icarus?! Even Massive X and PhasePlant consume less CPU (compared to the complexity of the preset and clarity of sound). Arturia should keep optimizing their synths. I don't use u-he synths because of the high cpu. (Hive is so limited out of the box, so I don't count it).

[Vortifex]

Gave it a second try but it's not for me. The core sound is very hollow and thin for my tastes and takes a lot of work to get something usable. Its main strength seems to be modulated evolving tones like the Keys preset 5th Element, which I liked and thought was one of the better ones out of a mostly mediocre bunch.

As is typical for Arturia they've wasted UI space, which would have been better spent on enlarging the mod matrix. The UI has an annoying quirk/bug whereby it always reverts to default state when you open it. Overall for a digital synth I prefer Massive X as it sounds much more impressive to me, the only downside being its poor preset system.

[Septic Underground]

Its cool, modulation + sequencer is good done, volume is low yes, have to raise the gain to my SSL a bit. But, as mentioned earlier, it eats a lot of CPU, it is multicore that I can see in my monitors, but its eats 4x25% on my 2019 MacPro.
That is too much for such a synth, I hope there will be some CPU tweaking down the line. But I guess this is the price to pay for a port of a HW synth. Remember the first batch of ACB legendary synths that came to Roland Cloud? That was even more horrible at start. It is okay now.

But I have fun playing with it. it has a modern sound. Great for Filmmaker™ tracks.
https://www.youtube.com/@FILMMAKERMUSIC/videos

[LoveEnigma18]

Another thing, why these synths are consuming lot of cpu compared to synths like Dune 3 and Icarus?!

Agree. CPU usage and slow loading times of plugins are the two biggest issues with Arturia plugins (not all, but many), and they are pretty annoying IMO. They are doing their best to improve them with regular updates, but so far the results haven't been up to the mark, at least with CPU usage.

Slow loading times of plugins (and preset loading) can be improved significantly, though, if you put the Arturia resources folder on an SSD. This folder can be up to 30 GB in size depending on the stuff you own. So, that's a precious amount of hard drive space which you could utilize for sample libraries instead.

[tony10000]

I am really enjoying MiniFreak V. Great value for the price I paid. Very quick easy to get around on and I can come up very diverse and quite usable sounds very quickly. Love the range of waveforms, mod matrix, and effects.

[Neon Breath]

For the ones who care, interesting streaming tour of the synth from Arturia. Lots of tips and tricks in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA0ne0u7GDY

[tony10000]

For the ones who care, interesting streaming tour of the synth from Arturia. Lots of tips and tricks in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA0ne0u7GDY

At the end, I asked him about the volume issue. He said that the volume is low to allow for more headroom and demonstrated that the volume increases when you add polyphony and effects. He also addressed the CPU utilization issue and said they will be tweaking it to improve it.

[rezoneight]

This was a great presentation and I like how he addressed the volume "too low" issue: turn it up.

[Hanz Meyzer]

I tried this plugin now, and have to say that I am impressed. It turns out to be a very nice reduced algorithmic concept. The presets are very well made, nicely balanced and well thought! The GUI is clear and visualizations are great!

This is outstanding work, and IMHO the first time Arturia brings something really new on the table. Not a copy-cat vintage synth emulation which already had a ton of poor UX compromises when it came out 50 years ago... And then copying also those compromises... But why stop here and not including all the features into the one-and-complete workstation a.k.a. Pigments? And then optimizing the code, so it runs like a Zebra?

[JS_SEA]

Soundwise, to my ears it is measurably worse than most similarly priced VSTis. It's got a very weak bottom end, which makes it sound thin and weak in that very "digital" way that most of us don't like. I don't just think there is nothing special about it, I think the core sound is actually very poor. I'm sure it's nothing you couldn't fix with some heavy-handed EQ but what's the incentive to bother, when there are so many better softsynths out there, many of which are cheaper?

Not sure, but Arturia might have made it sound this way intentionally to have a different product than existing products.
I agree "thin digital sound" is a good description, but
what about DX7 sound to bring another example?
Some like it, some don't!

[aMUSEd]

Soundwise, to my ears it is measurably worse than most similarly priced VSTis. It's got a very weak bottom end, which makes it sound thin and weak in that very "digital" way that most of us don't like. I don't just think there is nothing special about it, I think the core sound is actually very poor. I'm sure it's nothing you couldn't fix with some heavy-handed EQ but what's the incentive to bother, when there are so many better softsynths out there, many of which are cheaper?

Not sure, but Arturia might have made it sound this way intentionally to have a different product than existing products.
I agree "thin digital sound" is a good description, but
what about DX7 sound to bring another example?
Some like it, some don't!

Of course they didn't - what they did was create something that has more of a West Coast character than some people are used to - using algos derived from boutique hardware modules from Noise Engineering and Mutable Instruments. The sound is pretty much the same as you would get if you combined a couple of those modules with a filter and effects section plus multiple routing and modulation possibilities.