Straightliner

I agree with the previous reviewer that this soft synth deserves greater recognition! Perhaps this soft can best be described as a function generator in the disguise of a synth; at it's core, it's an exceptionally powerful wave-shaping engine that extends the oscillator and envelope toolsets in bold and beautiful ways. And it sounds fantastic! Some may not like the GUI because of the lack of eye-candy (no knobs, for one thing); but I found Straightliner's GUI fast, easy, fun, and very readable causing no distraction as I manipulated the synth's parameters. The waveform displays provide the user with immediate feedpack to adjustments made to many of the oscillator parameters; and there's a large osc parameter list to work with! It really does feel like you're playing with pieces of string that directly represent the oscillator waveforms; I would guess that with enough knowledge and practice, you could make almost any waveform shape that you could think up! It should be noted that Straightliner uses flac and XML file formats which are well known and widely used.

Yes, indeed, this is the golden age of the soft-synth industry-many of the soft synths that we all know and love are produced and supported by micro companies like rs-met.

Bottom Line: Straightliner is a found treasure, a jewel. It won't capture you with a gadget-filled, breath-takingly gorgeous GUI-it doesn't have one of those; But what it does provide the user with is complete, and noteably the oscillator and envelope toolsets are superb; really well though-out. And to repeat for emphasis: The sound of Straightliner is excellent!

A solid 10/10