Mother Ship Astrobelt

Interface:
Beautiful (and neat and compact!), and one of the things that drew me to this VST in the first place. You can select from four different color schemes, which is a nice touch, too.

Sound:
For great sweeping pads, organs, or just about anything else you want to whoosh (which includes ethereal leads) this is #1 in its price range. There's some amazing delays and filter work (and filtered delays and delayed filters) going on here. And it's soooo light on the CPU. Amazing.

Features:
While primarily designed with pads and other ethereal sounds in mind, I was impressed with the range of Astrobelt's sound. A good way to try this is to download the demo and shift-click the randomize button to get a bank of 128 randomized presets (note: I *LOVE* that each preset is given its own unique name... that is a WONDERFUL nice touch). With minimal tweaking ANY of the randomized presets can be turned into to something unique. And it's light on the CPU.

Documentation:
The provided HTML documentation has good information on all of Astrobelt's features. You'll still benefit most, of course, from tinkering -- which is easy to do on this synth (start with a randomly-generated patch and develop it from there -- this is a perfect synth for beginners as well as for advanced users who want to develop new sounds very quickly).

Presets:
Not amazing presets, but when you factor in that the randomize bank feature gives you unlimited unique presets, this gets a 10.

Customer Support:
Haven't had anything go wrong, but when I ordered, I had the full version within a few hours. Can't beat that.

Value For Money:
There are no other VSTi like this one out there (aside from free) which offers the value for money of this instrument (I paid full price). Did I mention it's VERY light on the CPU?

Stability:
No crashes in FLStudio or SONAR 2.0 VST-Wrapper yet. Again, it's light on the CPU: I could hold a three or four-note chord (with all of Astrobelt's bells and whistles) in FLStudio on my 2.5Ghz P4 and only peak at around 4 or 5%.

Bottom Line:

Astrobelt is an absolute joy to use with an extremely high bang for the buck factor and a sound to match. I actually go out of my way to include Astrobelt in my music now because I love working with it and the way it sounds so much.