Acustica ALICE-9 synth

[c0nsilience]

I'm checking out the demo and it sounds really good. The GUI is nicely laid out. My primary complaint would be the rather large footprint, which is unavoidable with a sample-based synth.

[autodafe]

my first test, just fiddling around with some arpeggios on AL9

[Funky40]

my first test, just fiddling around with some arpeggios on AL9

thank you VERY MUCH for that video !
you just ruined ALL my GAS for this thing. Which is great, haha.


are these unnicely overpronounced highs your work, or is that the synths own presets ?
it has a "clickbait the ear" Sound for my taste. Whie i like some nicely massaged highs otherwise. But not this.

[UltimiGiorniRecords]

It’s marvelous how, with every synth release, someone always finds something intriguing and inspiring about it. I own several hardware synths and nearly every soft synth on the market, but this one left me particularly unimpressed. Good luck, though! Personally, I’ll pass—I just can’t find a single reason to justify the purchase.

[mambo888]

I see 170 EUR price at a discount, full price 250 EUR. At current USD rate that's 200 USD including the discount. Can this do what the thing8 does? Why not just combine the two and offer change of skins from Thing to Alice? That would be added value.

Like this IMHO the price should be between 50-100 USD, but that's just my opinion. I hope they succeed though, not saying it is a bad sounding synth. Whatever is it's speciality, by the time you add bass, drums and various other instruments, it will sound close to any other synth I already own in the mix. I will wait for the "bundle" price in the distant future.

[db3]

It's around €100 with the intro coupon code ALICESPECIAL

NB) There's an update out which has changed the knob colours. God knows why, the GUI looked great and now looks a mess. This version also seems to crash Ableton regularly for me (Mac).

[chagzuki]

The blurb claims there's special secret sauce at work, and it does sound organic in some way. Does the demo go out of tune over time? After playing with it for 10 minutes it seemed very out of tune, and I couldn't see any parameter that I'd accidentally changed.

[audiojunkie]

my first test, just fiddling around with some arpeggios on AL9

Thank you for making your excellent demo video!! It is really helpful!!

Initial sounds are good. But that’s how static samples are.

What I’d love to hear would be how the synth performs when doing modulation and the use of midi cc and lfo changes. That’s how to see if a sample based synth really shines or not.

Is there any chance you could do one that focuses on these aspects?

[c0nsilience]

It sounds good and big, but is a rather large install.

[Echoes in the Attic]

Are the crazy cpu spikes when changing presets mac m series only? Or even M1 only?

[Gam456]

Initial sounds are good. But that’s how static samples are.

Sample on this synth are not static, there is a drift.

[db3]

Are the crazy cpu spikes when changing presets mac m series only? Or even M1 only?

With my M1 Max, Ableton Live average CPU and track performance meters don't show a spike. However, if I change the CPU meter to show 'Current', then it does show a big spike for a second on changing preset. This hasn't really bothered me in use because Acustica did something to smooth/silence significant glitching which was happening on preset change since the first release of Thing. It can however still cause a slight audio glitch in the project if the DAW is running.

[chagzuki]

I like the sound of the presets, so I played a bit with the superstereo settings. Basically, every preset is doing hard-panned doubling to sound as big as possible. I thought I'd play with the stacking in Diva to compare the results, and perhaps there were fewer phase artefacts with AL9, so maybe there's something to be said for how this feature is implemented(?). However, I doubt there'd be scenarios where such an effect would really sit correctly in a mix, as it makes that one element take up the soundstage and brings it ultra forward... hence why it sounds good on presets.
With that effect turned off this strikes me as a quite ordinary synth, quite nice to use, but really the same as so many others. So I think I'd only be interested if it turned out that the superstereo effect was actually doing something uniquely good, and that I had a reason to use it in a mix.

[NeSpesha]

Cross Modulation sounds good at some settings and with Mega Quality option.

[BONES]

Where I draw the line is when GUI designers include silly fake scratches and dents on the UI to make it look more "real." That is so, so lame and pointless, IMO. If I want to look at an old, beat up synth front panel, I will look at my 40-year-old Sequential Pro One.

Those are my favourites! Vacuum Pro and Schwa Olga, for example, look totally awesome!

4GB? Doesn't make it in any way tempting, opposite TBH. Makes me think it must be sample based for that amount of bloat in any synth.

Yeah, that and the fact it says it's sample-based in the first sentence on its web page.

Anyway, I absolutely love the interface graphics and was quite taken with some of the presets but the range of timbres in the factory bank didn't really impress me much. Where I really lost interest was when I started to play around with the controls myself. The filter is just OK, not what I'd hope for in a $300 plugin, and some of the effects seemed a bit strange. e.g. The saturation effect did not behave in a comprehensible way. On one patch I turned the Drive up full and nothing changed, so I increased the Mix and it all got much quieter, without actually sounding any different. So I tried it on another patch and got even less out of it. I also experienced the CPU spikes when changing patches on my PC, which is neither here nor there, really.

After half-an-hour of playing around, I uninstalled it. Pity, because I love the way it looks. Sadly, it doesn't do anything to justify spending 99 Euros on it.