energyXT

[Version 2 review]

What was once a secret weapon inside the vst/midi arsenal (I was a power user of version 1) has become with version 2 something that I wouldn't call the dignified successor. While version 1 always left the feeling of already being somewhere near to completeness (despite the couple of bugs that always seemed to appear after a beta update), now XT2 leaves me pretty much left with only a select few of the features of V1 (needless to say there's no backwards compatibility), and overall disappointment.

The modular area is quite poor and misses almost all the little tools that made it quick to get something going. The sequencer on the other hand got an impressive overhaul but still feels like there needs to be done a lot more. A lot of the intuitivity of V1 got lost somewhere in the development process.

Positively remarkable is the new cross-platform orientation. Now not only Windows but also Linux and Mac OSX are supported. Nevertheless, this additional work seems to also be negatively reflected in the quality of the software which differs greatly between platforms. In general, bugfixing and support has come to crawl compared to "the old days". Hardly any sign of the developers and the (also in the licence mentioned) community support is (compared to the XT1 days) non-existant.

Overall a disappointing experience.

The patience for the promised compatibility to version 1 projects is running low on power. Maybe the aim of the energyXT project changed in the middle of the progress ? I wouldn't know. I'm only sporadicly checking for any news for it nowadays. Maybe the deal with Behringer will bring a bit more wind into the sails of XT software again.

If you find a copy second-hand, it may be worth to get because of XT1, which was at 49$ good VFM at that time.Read Review