Ethnosphere

In general:

Ethnosphere is very easy to install. I love that about it. Drag drop done. Most of the instruments sound real and the quality of the recordings is high. Its intention is to allow the user to inject a little ethnic flavour into their songs. It is not trying to be the king of virtual ethnic instruments. This job (adding ethnic flavour) it does admirably.

There are a few complaints. The first is the volume: turn it up! At the highest volume level, the meters don't even go halfway. The second is the number of instruments that are a single sample. With some it sounds fine; I don't mind. But with others it sounds terrible. The third one is the loops. I LIKE the loops. Many of them are excellent. BUT... they just don't work in this instrument. What's the tempo? Who knows? Can I beat slice them? No. And since they're spread across the keyboard you can get other unknown tempos along with obviously pitch-shifted percussion. The loops are almost useful, but not quite. Give them to us as WAV files and they'd be excellent. Finally there are a few glitches, but I'm trusting that they can be repaired.

The user interface is nice enough. The sound varies from very good to very bad - mostly good, though. Features are limited, but unnecessary. Documentation is not needed. There are many presets, some good and others... not so good. Customer support seemed good to begin with, but when I sent them my review and listed the patches that have bad sample sets, they just ignored it. Value for money is pretty high, but I'd have to say now that the Plugsound modules do it better - if only they had a specific ethnic module. Stability is excellent, though - I haven't had any problems at all.Read Review