Rhino

Rhino is an amazing piece of work. First, let it be known that I do darkambient/dark-trance kind of music with soft-synths, voice, and my guitar so Rhino is the PERFECT soft-synth for me.

The UI takes a bit of getting used to, but once you spend some quality time with it puttering around with Rhino becomes easier - the learning curve on programming it is significant, because it's one powerful tool.

Presets a-plenty on the Big Tick Website, all the banks I've played with so far are very musical and useful. If you run out of presets, you're probably hopeless (lol).

CPU usage varies radically between patches, some taking very little of my 2.53GHz. Pentium 4, some taking close to 40% or more for complex, evolving sounds. At first I was concerned, but the high-CPU sounds don't require a fistful of notes to work well so it's not as big a deal as it could have been.

It's very stable, more so than I am (lol) in my two hosts, Orion Platinum and Tracktion.

The last thing I'll say is about how it sounds TO ME, a very subjective thing: I used to own an UltraProteus that I had to get rid of, along with a TG33, a TG55, and a U-220. No soft-synth I've bought ever had the breathy, airy evolving sound of some of the patches on my now-departed hardware.. UNTIL RHINO CAME ALONG. I can finally honestly say I don't miss my rackmount gear any longer.Read Review