UVI Falcon 3

[d-zone]

The site says (at the bottom):

Buy Falcon, get a
$100|100€ VOUCHER
As an added bonus, each Falcon license includes a $100 / 100€ voucher good towards the purchase of any soundbank or Falcon Expansion on uvi.net. Enhance your Falcon experience immediately with one of our premium instruments like PX Memories, Austrian Grand, Nagoya Harp or Key Suite Digital for a massive fuel injection to your new sampling workstation. With over 100 libraries available ranging from pristine acoustic instruments to rare vintage synths you’ll be sure to find a sonic ally that compliments your needs. (Voucher code delivered by email after registering Falcon)

[geiger167]

I bought it this evening, having dabbled in some cheap libraries with the free workstation in past and enjoying them. Falcon installed no issues, so bought three expansions with the £100 voucher, two installed no problem, the third Organic Arps wont install, the download is failing so will try again tomorrow, think the servers are being hammered lol

[Dirtgrain]

Any recommendations on what to use the voucher on?

Shade is my favorite effect from UVI. I use it a lot, and I dig what it allows me to do quickly. I also use Drum Designer a lot--fast to get something down that I like, and often I keep the drum sounds I picked/tweaked. I use Thorus, Phasor and Plate now and then, and I don't regret getting them. Relayer has some nice features. Sparkverb is quality, but if you have a bunch of reverbs, it likely won't stand out.

[bmanic]

...try working with multiple keygroups in the tree view, changing common parameters in one go.. yeah, you can't do that. Nor can you select multiple elements within a keygroup in the tree view and edit common parameters all together. It's unbelievably dumb.

I can't even think of a time I'd really want to do that. I use different key-groups for different sounds and I expect to set them all up uniquely.

.. great excuse that one: "I would never do that so the workflow problems don't bother me..".

For instance, try working with multiple keygroups in the tree view, changing common parameters in one go.. yeah, you can't do that. Nor can you select multiple elements within a keygroup in the tree view and edit common parameters all together. It's unbelievably dumb.

It's not true, that you can't do it at all. You can select keygroups either on the keyboard layout or in the list view and for these selected keygroups then you can change a parameter for all in one go.

But yeah it's not consistent in every term, as you mentioned with the tree view example, where this doesn't work but should...

That was my whole point. I simply replied about the tree view itself because that's what always gets thrown out as a "great feature of Falcon" as a defense of it's workflow. While it's nice that it does have a tree view, it's incredibly frustrating that the actual use case for the tree view isn't being utilized at all. It's not a novel new invention. It's a very established thing since forever and Falcon is utilizing none of the real power of a tree view. In Falcon, it's almost literally just a view.

.. we'll see about the workflow. UVI Falcon was by far the worst workflow of any of the big complex synths/samplers, in my opinion. They have quite a lot to improve if they want to make it anywhere near intuitive or quick to use.

I will agree that Falcon was never intuitive (I only know it as well as I do because I read the printed MOTU MachFive manual cover-to-cover back in the day), but I think it does almost as well as it possibly can given its primary design constraint: Packing a HUGE amount of functionality into a single plugin window.

I don't think Falcon's any more difficult to program than Kontakt (which I don't think does as much as Falcon- although I have only worked with Kontakt 4-6). But it definitely has its own unique workflow and learning curve; definitely not something where you can just hit the ground running.

It's not about difficult to use, when doing basic simple things.. it's about effective workflow when doing complex things. That's where things fall to pieces, though even some seemingly simple things are convoluted as hell (see my point about sample looping below). I've already talked about the huge limitations of tree view (and I didn't even mention the complete lack of drag & drop, no copy/paste, no duplication of any kind etc. etc.). There's also no saving/loading/presets for layers or keygroups from the tree view (you can save keygroups with another right click menu from the sample mapper/keygroup mapper area!). At least for programs you can drag and drop them from your browser to Falcon but you can not drag a program from Falcon to the browser for quick saving, for that you need to go through the menu.

Another example of just how convoluted and screwed up the workflow in Falcon is:

Open up the sample editor, drag a sample to it. Now add a sample loop. Try A/B testing between different loop modes and loop on/off while retaining the loop points you first set. Have fun.

(hint: you can't switch loops or A/B anything. The loop points are deleted every time. There is no button for toggling loop on or off nor any other way to experiment with looping in reverse, ping-pong etc. It's all done through the right click menu and everything is deleted when you want to change something).

Look, I know I'm very emotional about this whole workflow thing in Falcon but that's because I would LOVE to LOVE Falcon. The whole concept is amazing and UVI has been extremely generous with the updates and it's clearly their flagship product (reflected by the price too!). It just hurts my soul that such a good piece of software, on the surface, can be so neglected and so convoluted inside. It's just painful.. and oh so painful to use.

[seismicfm]

I've bought and sold Falcon 4 times. It's the best sounding synth I've ever used, and the most difficult. Maybe 5th time will be different.....

[sacer]

they have a offer to buy 2 expansions and pay only one. Cart should be updated automaticly, but it's not working.

Yes it's not working correctly.

Might be a cache issue. Can you try using private browsing ?

Thanks !

Now it has worked with an other Internet Explorer. I have used Edge instead of Chrome.

I have downloaded everything, except of Organic Arps. Uvi Portal and direct download from Homepage are both not working, can you please check the issue ?

[i need Help]

Falcon should be a fun synth to use but, ehh? Idk why but it’s one of the least favorite plugins I own. Maybe because of all the points being made here about it’s intuitiveness, factory library, workflow, etc.?

I’m not really even excited about this update tbh lol.

[bmanic]

Ok, so I finally did manage to download Falcon 3.0 update and it has a few workflow improvements, so thank you UVI for that. It still has all the flaws and problems I've mentioned in various places (including the emails I sent a few years ago) but at this point I'll take any and all improvements provided.

I did however find a bug, 100% reproducible and very simple:

Played notes get stuck infinitely if you change octave tuning or semi-tone tuning of the part while having any midi notes playing.

[Zoopy]

Played notes get stuck infinitely if you change octave tuning or semi-tone tuning of the part while having any midi notes playing.

lol this bug has existed foreeeeever

[Aloysius]

This is f**king amazing value. I've been thinking of getting it since v1. Definitely jumping in @ v3.

>> You can also register and download your UVI products at uvi.net/my-products
^ Working better for me than using UVI Portal to download.

[bmanic]

Played notes get stuck infinitely if you change octave tuning or semi-tone tuning of the part while having any midi notes playing.

lol this bug has existed foreeeeever

Never noticed it before.. but then again I never really used Falcon so I always did all pitch changes within the actual editor and not in the part view. Strange that UVI hasn't fixed this as it could be a really annoying bug for people who use Falcon multi-timbrally. All you have to do is play a midi sequence and tweak the pitch while it's playing and you're screwed.

Another bug:

The Tape Echo effect's stereo routing is broken when inserting it on the mixers master channel. Explanation: It's a mono effect when it's at 100% wet.. however even when you set the knob to 0% wet, aka "dry" the stereo image is completely screwed up.

It works as expected on individual parts/channels but not on the master.

[bmanic]

This is f**king amazing value. I've been thinking of getting it since v1. Definitely jumping in @ v3.

>> You can also register and download your UVI products at uvi.net/my-products
^ Working better for me than using UVI Portal to download.

Careful with that! I've registered a few products that way and these products DO NOT SHOW UP in UVI Portal after that. I registered the products I got through the Image-Line sale. Went through the my-uvi old legacy system instead of UVI Portal and now none of those products show up in the portal app. In general, the portal app is just terribly buggy and can't seem to find most of the things I've bought from UVI over the years.

Their system is completely bugged and they can't figure it out (it's now like 3 months since my last correspondence about this issue and they basically said "hold on.. we'll get back to you" but never did).

Could be just my system though. It is admittedly getting a bit on the old side as I'm still stubbornly on OS X Big Sur as it "just works" for most things.

[bmanic]

.. speaking of the effects in the mixer section of Falcon. Is it really not possible to re-order them with drag&drop yet? Heck, is there ANY way of re-ordering the effects in the mixer???

Also quite disappointed they haven't changed the mapping/re-mapping curve editor at all. You still have to pretty much always rely on the presets or the math formula to get things you could do very quickly with a spline based system.. and if you need to do complex shapes it's a nightmare. I was really hoping this would be one of the things that would be upgraded to a more modern solution.

[trusampler]

UVI seems to have fixed the low latency issue I was having with several audio interfaces. Now it's playing smooth at 16 samples latency with no pops and clicks, and Soul Drums is rocking beautiful now! Great job UVI!

[bmanic]

Also question:

How do you guys find any of the new presets? There should be 1600 new or edited old ones according to the release trailer video. But how on earth do you find them?