Phenome

Have been following the development of Phenome a while with anticipation and i must say that i haven´t been dissapointed.

I wonder why there isn´t a review here by now. It´s an amazing little (well "little") soundfont Player/VSTi with all the essential features one could need in their SF2-playing-needs.

User Interface:
In the latest Version 1.6 the built-in browser is by far the biggest addition and helps tremendous with browsing presets and soundfonts. I can easily browse my huge soundfont collection within seconds. I also love that you dont have to double-click a soundfont to load it. One click. Done. That´s the way it should be!

All the control are in a nice shape and layout, at least to me everything is clear upon the first start (well, okay i must admit i opened it several times by now ;-).

I personally don´t like the default orange colour much, but each to his own taste. Perhaps in one of the next updates Phenome might be even skinnable? Who knows.

Sound:
Phenomenal! Sorry, couldn´t resist. I´ve browsed and played now literary hundreds of my personal soundfonts and the quality vs CPU is fine. If i want to have that little extra bit of detail and crisp sound i can always set the Quality Mode to "High". But i´m fine with the default setting.

Didn´t had much time to check out the library, but what i hear so far is very nice for a freeware by an independet developer like Mr.Prodyon.

Features:
Once again for a freebie this thing does what it does very well. I love the possibility to easily layer soundfonts for big fullblown orchestrations and arrangements. One moaned that 8 parts wouldn´t be enough - well then just open another Instance and there you go! The CPU overhead is minimum when opening Phenome. Of course when playing hundreds of voices i can easily hit the 50% mark of my DAW. (Dualcore CPU 2GHz). But when i pay some attention i can live with that perfectly. (It´s time to upgrade my DAW anyway). The built-in arpeggiator is also cool since it is one thing that i´m often missing with various other plugins. I can add so much live to a performance. One wish i have: Any chance of getting a flanger or reverb in the future? :-)

Documentation:
At present there is none, so lets see when Mr.Prodyon comes up with a proper manual. (But for me it really doesn´t need one currently, most of the controls are self-explanary and there are also much helpful hints that pop up when you hover over a control).

Presets:
As i said previously, still have to proper check out the factory library! What i have heard so far is really excellent!!

Customer Support:
Never had any troubles with Prodyon so far.

Value For Money:
Excellent! Of course because it is free :-)

Stability:
Nothing bad experienced here so far, no crash, no problems. I hope it´ll stay that way.

So for a conclusion i can suggest Phenome to everyone who runs a Windows DAW and has a huge selection of Soundfonts and wants to browse and play them with a breeze. I have heard rumours that it won´t play some Soundfonts or something but until now i can´t confirm that. I had some Soundfonts where there was no sound at first but it was simply because those Instrument/Preset was located on different "Slots" than Number One. So i just clicked on the Preset and was able to choose the sounds afterwards.

Go and get it! :-)

PS: I apologize for any wrong sentences or mistakes, english isn´t my native language. Read more