Silen Audio Infinite Flow

[bermudagold]

Since this tiny niche is KVRs dominant demographic,...I figured I'd feed the beast lol
Another synth promising the apparently elusive "analog" in a modern execution
Rent to own...interesting trend here for folks who don't want to participate in the race to the bottom in devaluing their IP, without being completely inaccessible to hobbyist or dsp gamers
buy the way bmanic is this yours?...

[HiEnergy]

Vintage analog... *yawn*

[egbert101]

$179.99 OK DUDE.

[martiu]

with that UI and price tag for first product i wish them good luck

[Choikdoi]

Can I have a subscription, please?

[miloszz]

Very bizarre - trying to do PWM on the Pulse oscillator with the LFO and it's stepping across the range instead of sweeping the pulse.

The dedication to mining individual synths for the voice variance component is interesting but nothing else about this is particularly interesting and the interface is poor.

[briefcasemanx]

Some of the sounds, pads in particular sound nice, but that price is = nah, I'm good.

[zerocrossing]

I passed on this initially, because of both the price and lack of polyphonic aftertouch, but both issues have been resolved. The price is now $110 (down from $130) and polyphonic aftertouch has been implemented and is working without fault as far as I can tell.

Here's my little review.

It could definitely use a UI overhaul. Having to tab around for basic things is a mistake, IMO. Lot's of wasted space on things like a giant waveform display, or a huge oscillator detune/spread display. Do we need a debug screen style display of adjustments? Silly. That said, at least things are clear and I never really felt myself wondering what stuff did. No "init" preset or button. To get an init preset, you have to load a new instance and it's set to have oscillator unison out of the gate. Not great.

The unison oscillators sound really great. 8 oscillators? No complaints there. Voice unison... not great. As far as I can tell you only have voice variance presets to give you detuning per voice, and you have to manually pan voices for voice spread. There's slop too, but I wish there were standard detune and spread controls.

Filters... sound good with lots of types characters, but I found a bug where if you crank the filter resonance on the diode LP and move around the cutoff it crashes Bitwig's audio engine. Why isn't there a filter tracking control? There's a nice empty spot in the filter section, but I have to add it in a mod matrix slot. Bad UX. Overdrive aliases a bit if you go up high, but sounds pretty fat though most of the range. Having two filters with modulatable mix settings is excellent. Reminds me of my old Pro 2.

Modulation: A decent amount on the table. I hate the analog modelers who think 2 EGs and an LFO are sufficient. 3 ADSRs with some interesting slope options and 3 LFOs with a lot of cool shapes. Great mod matrix where almost everything is a destination. No MPE, but polyphonic aftertouch.

Presets are pretty good, but no preset browser.

Effects: The saturation is a bit aliasy, but has some cool abilities and can sound very good. You have a global filter that's got the same controls as the regular filters, but no ADSR2 amount. The great news is, effects parameters are all mod matrix destinations, so you can easily set up the filter to behave like a paraphonic synth. The Chorus sounds spectacular to me. Not "analog" but like some great Eventide chorus. Lots of flexibility. I'd use this as an effect plugin if it were available. Flutter is like a tape wow/flutter effect and is really great for warbily old tape machine effects. especially if you use it in conjunction with the effect filter. Delay is basic, but good, but very digital sounding. The filter isn't in the feedback path, so each repeat sounds the same as the one before it if you have feedback cranked. Reverb is similar in a way. Lots of cool and interesting stuff there, but if you are looking for a basic plate emulation, load up another plugin. I mostly found it good for creative stuff, and was barely able to get anything remotely natural from it.

So, that's my mini-review. I like it a lot, though I think it could become great with some extra development. I'd contacted the developer about polyphonic aftertouch, and a few bugs, and he's responsive and has addressed my requests. I'll probably go for it for $110, but I'm also going to request some oversampling in the filter drive and distortion effects. Overall, it's nice to have something that does good analog modeling but isn't another bog simple emulation of something that was new in the 1970s.

[hey212]

Thanks for the review! Been curious about this one. Might let it marinate a bit longer and see if the workflow improves.

[drsyncenstein]

I passed on this initially, because of both the price and lack of polyphonic aftertouch, but both issues have been resolved. The price is now $110 (down from $130) and polyphonic aftertouch has been implemented and is working without fault as far as I can tell.

Here's my little review.

It could definitely use a UI overhaul. Having to tab around for basic things is a mistake, IMO. Lot's of wasted space on things like a giant waveform display, or a huge oscillator detune/spread display. Do we need a debug screen style display of adjustments? Silly. That said, at least things are clear and I never really felt myself wondering what stuff did. No "init" preset or button. To get an init preset, you have to load a new instance and it's set to have oscillator unison out of the gate. Not great.

The unison oscillators sound really great. 8 oscillators? No complaints there. Voice unison... not great. As far as I can tell you only have voice variance presets to give you detuning per voice, and you have to manually pan voices for voice spread. There's slop too, but I wish there were standard detune and spread controls.

Filters... sound good with lots of types characters, but I found a bug where if you crank the filter resonance on the diode LP and move around the cutoff it crashes Bitwig's audio engine. Why isn't there a filter tracking control? There's a nice empty spot in the filter section, but I have to add it in a mod matrix slot. Bad UX. Overdrive aliases a bit if you go up high, but sounds pretty fat though most of the range. Having two filters with modulatable mix settings is excellent. Reminds me of my old Pro 2.

Modulation: A decent amount on the table. I hate the analog modelers who think 2 EGs and an LFO are sufficient. 3 ADSRs with some interesting slope options and 3 LFOs with a lot of cool shapes. Great mod matrix where almost everything is a destination. No MPE, but polyphonic aftertouch.

Presets are pretty good, but no preset browser.

Effects: The saturation is a bit aliasy, but has some cool abilities and can sound very good. You have a global filter that's got the same controls as the regular filters, but no ADSR2 amount. The great news is, effects parameters are all mod matrix destinations, so you can easily set up the filter to behave like a paraphonic synth. The Chorus sounds spectacular to me. Not "analog" but like some great Eventide chorus. Lots of flexibility. I'd use this as an effect plugin if it were available. Flutter is like a tape wow/flutter effect and is really great for warbily old tape machine effects. especially if you use it in conjunction with the effect filter. Delay is basic, but good, but very digital sounding. The filter isn't in the feedback path, so each repeat sounds the same as the one before it if you have feedback cranked. Reverb is similar in a way. Lots of cool and interesting stuff there, but if you are looking for a basic plate emulation, load up another plugin. I mostly found it good for creative stuff, and was barely able to get anything remotely natural from it.

So, that's my mini-review. I like it a lot, though I think it could become great with some extra development. I'd contacted the developer about polyphonic aftertouch, and a few bugs, and he's responsive and has addressed my requests. I'll probably go for it for $110, but I'm also going to request some oversampling in the filter drive and distortion effects. Overall, it's nice to have something that does good analog modeling but isn't another bog simple emulation of something that was new in the 1970s.

I reported the crashing diode filter a while ago, should be in the pipeline.
Another thing is that not everything can be controlled by midi. As someone who uses Bitwig's remotes a lot i reported that too.

[drsyncenstein]

Version 1.16 has been released. Filter seems fixed.
Also on sale now: https://www.silen.software/products/inf ... in-section

[zerocrossing]

Version 1.16 has been released. Filter seems fixed.
Also on sale now: https://www.silen.software/products/inf ... in-section

Thanks. I’ll give it another go tomorrow. I kind of like their approach of a vintage style sound with a novel feature set.

[trusampler]