Plugsound Vol. 5: Synth

This is hands down the most complete synth sound package for the money. I got mine for $30 (an absolute steal) from Big Fish Audio and haven't looked pack.

The user interface is ridiculously easy to use, there is everything laid out in front of you and there are loads of things you can tweak.

The sounds are brilliant, there are very, very few sounds that I would change if I could. The sounds are very rich and enjoyable to play. The legato mode really makes for a brilliant sound for leads and pads. With just about everything covered, and very much so in the bass department, it would be hard to even use more than half of these sounds, there are just so many of them. The quality is all there.

The legato/mono feature is the king of the mountain and there are ADSR and tweaking with filters to create wonderful synth sounds. Everything is there at your fingertips, no need to invoke other filters, the filters that are included are more than enough.

The documentation is good, but only serves as a simple reference for dummies and to list the available presets. It requires no documentation, so I'll give it a 10 anyway.

The number of presets is ridiculously enormous. Every possible bass you could ever want is right there. There could be a few more textures and pads and vocal/choir sounds, but it's still very good for what you get, most musicians would never use all of the sounds, there are too many of them!

Customer support is ok. There is no real need for customer support, the product is so simple to install and use.

This product provides you with a great collection of synth sounds for you to use in your musical scores. There isn't much missing from this collection. There is so much bass in this that it's impossible to use it all. Overall GREAT value for money, this is a key buy and you cannot pass this up. You'll probably get more out of this than with a lot of other commercial synth modules and for much less.

Plugsound is very stable, there has been no crashes as I've used it several times, and have never had any issues.

Overall a brilliant product. This is one sound module that you shouldn't be without. This is a key buy.

I took a chance and bought this plugin, and I love it. The most important thing for me was finding a believable mono/legato implementation for certain bass styles that I enjoy playing, and from my perspective this is nailed in the UVI engine. In general the sounds are rich and inspiring and there are plenty of them. The Pads are expecially nice. The UVI Filter sounds great and the LFO tied to the amp, pan, filter, pitch is pretty neat and useful.

The GUI has two modes, and the newer 'advanced' mode (which is now the default) makes the synth feel stable and professional.

I found that I couldn't navigate the patches from any of my HW controllers (so it requires using the mouse on the screen). I think navigating patches from HW is important when working with other people in the studio, hopefully this will be considered in an update. Also the patch and bank names don't appear in the Cubase SX or SONAR/DirectiXer MIDI tracks inspectors.

Relative to other popular VSTi's that I have, I find the Plugsound staff to be relatively invisible on the web so it's hard to get that warm feeling that if there's a problem or concern that it will be addressed in a timely manner.

Copy protection is done via online authorization, tying the synth to the harddisk (two authorizations are allowed) which worked without a hitch. However I noticed after buying my second plugsound module I had to re-enter all my information again for that plugin as well...(there doesn't appear to be a "Customer Account" type database in place)

At any rate I'm now a confirmed plugsound addict, and I'll seriously consider additional modules as they come out. It would be nice to see other sample library producers consider the UVI engine, it has a lot of promise.

I've only had this for a couple of hours so this is an early days review. So far I am very pleased with the Plugsound vol 5 synth. Whilst it is essentially a preset synth there are facilities to alter the tone of the sounds (particularly the filter). The sound quality is excellent.

The GUI is pretty friendly, though there is room to make things a little clearer on-screen in future versions. Looks very similar to the forthcoming Atmosphere!

The sounds are what I bought the thing for and, on the whole I'm impressed. Some of the pads and filter sweep sounds are stunning - I can definitely hear Wavestation, M/T range and D50 in many sounds. The analog sounds are good but there are far too many (well over 100)bass sounds - great if you're into dance but I'm not. Many sound like filler material. If you are into dance I suspect you'll have some decent bass gear or samples anyway. I would have much preferred a load more pads and sweeps though! Some good voice sounds included, but I would have liked a few more treated choir-ish sounds without the tinlky bits.

There are 512 presets and (despite the overkill in the bass department) there is plenty of variety and you'll definitely find a fair few useful sounds. Even some of the texture fx sounds are quite good.

I have yet to really interrogate this product, but there are already a few things I think Plugsound could bear in mind.

Obviously the ability to load in new sounds would be nice.

They could make one instance of Plugsound 'truly' multitimbral (as on the PPG Wave VST) rather than launching different versions (I use Cubasis VST - you can only launch 4 VSTi's. Come on Steinberg!).

Perhaps the styling is a little odd - sort of fifties meets Ultravox!

Maybe a future Plugsound dedicated to voice and choir sounds and textures.

Overall, given the price of this program I think anyone who hankers after real synth sounds yet only wants limited tinkerability will be made up with Plugsound 5.