Emulator X

So what is really getting on my nerves is that E-MU released a buggy program. There are tiny little details which make the programm crash. These crashes I experienced are reproducible. But after I understood what made this proggy crash, I really started enjoying the whole thing. The presets are really nice, especially the proteus composer bank and the hip hop producer bank. But with some of the other banks there is an issue concerning the length: they weren´t edited properly, meaning that there are quite long parts recorded which include nothing but silence. This, of course, results in heavy cpu load. cpu load is in general an issue with this program i was told by other users. i´m using a p4 with 3.2 ghz and one gigabyte ram and a serial ata hard disk, and don´t have to much trouble. but i think a 3ghz cpu and 1 gb ram is a must with this program.
After I had much trouble understanding the architecture of this program, I was rewarded with great sound, nice automapping functions and nice general usability. You have many outputs, more filter types and better filter quality than anywhere else and a nice synthesizer architecture including a huge modulation matrix. The convertor software works nice, so i can use my old exs and akai programs in the ex in a sensible way. i once was really blown when i bought the extreme analogue sampling cd for the exs. combined with the synthesizer architecture and the variety of filters of the ex, i have a quasi full featured virtual analogue synthesizer with best sound quality.
Plus, it´s real fun to create your own presets of your samples. In about 2 weeks I created my own custom bank of about 70mb samples and 50 presets or so. Everything useable. The automapping functions, including the setting of loop points and crossfades, are a great help.
I don´t like the ex so much for drums, because it´s hard to edit single keys as a visualisation of the note u play is missing. here, battery is my choice. For chopping loops and so, there are better alternatives to.
But for anything else the EX is great!
Once again: BEST filters ever, high quality interpolation, nice sinthesizer architecture, useable presets.
BUT you must be prepared to work a lot with it in order to understanmd its GUI. It took me about 6 or 7 weeks until I could work with all its features. But it was worth it!Read Review