Not only does it sound awesome, but it also has an intuitive and simple yet powerful GUI, which has drawn me back into editing sounds and enjoying learning more on FM synthesis, something "the other FM vsynths" had turned me off by virtue of their confusing GUIs that only an engineer could love
I digress;
I have been doing progressive rock and electronic music for close to 20 years now, and as a lover of hardware analog synths, I had a very hard time convincing myself that VST based synths could be in fact better than hardware counterparts !! As a software engineer I understood the advantages of using a computer's CPU and system which rarely hard synth manufacturers can "afford" to build, so theoretically, a synthesizer using software on a computer could be more powerful and have more features than a hardware based synth, I understood that, but until recently my experiences had made me skeptical and kept me away from using VST synths for serious recording or live playing.
I finally saw the advantages of using VST instruments to exploit synth automation and with the audio rendering engine in Cubase, I no longer had to sit through a 20 minute song(well, it's Prog you know) four or five times to record my hardware synth parts, now I could simply select "Export Audio" and in a few seconds render all my VST synth tracks, WOW !! Until recently, the only vSynths I barely liked were either too CPU hungry, had audio artifacts, sounded lake crap, or were too hard to edit; Why oh why would Arturia not offer a choice of either their market friendly "emulated hardware face", or a "modern interface" that can exploit the fact that you can make the GUI anything you want for their synths like the CS-80v or the Moog Modular V ???
So to make a long story short, I downloaded all the major player's demos and freewares, actually purchased all of Arturia's products, only to find out most were unuseable and even worse, in the case of all the Arturia synths, they did not behave like most VST well behaved applications, the volume and velocity did not work as they should, and patch changing was a nightmare, so after many bouts with trying to get a decent recording out of the Arturias, and fighting with their excessive CPU hunger, I sold them ALL !!
I went back to using my hardware synths, with the exception of a handful of vSynths which seemed to work well, some of those include Superwave P8, EVM Ultrasonique, Cygnus-O, MiniMougue, and a Taurus vSynth, all guys I use now regularly. I still wanted to find a powerful, modular vSynth like ABSynth, but affordable so that I wouldn't want to drive over a cliff if it didn't workout, and I got shafted again as I put out cash once again and bought the Sytrus(from the makers of Fruity Loops), a monster that had potential, but has various audio artifacts, CPU hungry, a GUI close to IMPOSSIBLE to figure out, and worst of all ZERO support, even their forum is close to dead, no good documentation or ever any updates since it came out. I tried hard to love it as I paid good $$ for it, but I just could not make sense of the complicated layout, and worse, the audio artifacts were driving me crazy, so my search continued....
I did a search for top rated vSynths here and Rhino came up a lot, I had also read a lot of buzz over Rhino on this site, and although at this point I was going to just spend the $$ and get a hardware based analog like the Alesis Ion or the Fusion, I went ahead and downloaded your demo AND WAS BLOWN AWAY !!!
Rhino behaved so smooth I thought for second it was a rompler, I almost cried when I realized this was the MONSTER I was looking for and even more, it did FM synthesis, but it made it look easy ! YIPEE !!!! My program changes from my sequencer worked fine, I was even able to send multiple program changes during my sequence, all worked well, no audio artifacts, my CPU usage never went beyond 9-11% in Chainer, and this with SEVEN other vSynths loaded in there !! I never had more fun, I was editing FM sounds and finally understood things like the operator matrix and coming up with musically valid patches, YES !!! The manual and tutorials are all great, and by the look of this forum there is great and friendly support. I got up and running and making all kinds of great sounds in no time. The 6 user control sliders are GENIAL, I reprogrammed my Evolution midi controller sliders to them, and then I read in the manual you can control up to 16 parameters on one slider, WOW !!!
This is the best testimonial I have ever written about ANY SYNTH, hardware or software based, your tremendous product has convinced me to save my money and instead of buying that Alesis Ion, as soon as I can, I will purchase your incredible synth(next week!)
Thank you for having developed one of THE BEST Vsynths I ever used, you made a "Virtual Convert" of this old vintage hardware addict. Totally looking forward to getting a decent Firewire or USB based audio device, loading Rhino on my laptop using Chainer, then blowing away our fans at live concerts, I can finally say I trust a VST based setup to work now, maybe if I get enough dough I'll get me a Receptor instead !!!
Warm regards, -Stephen G. Rivera,
composer and keyboadist for Azureth, BTW, I will be happily using Rhino on our upcoming commercial CD, "The Promethean Syndrome"
