Proteus X

wow,
there sure is a lot very stern, serious rules when you want to add a review.
is this a german site? lol.
anyhoo.
i've had this vst synth for half a year now. for starters : mine was included with 0404 emu soundcard. the package cost $99. i don't quite understand how they can sell here the synth only ,for more than the synth and a soundcard!
proteus x has a lot of sounds. you get 3 CDs. 1 with garden variety + GM, 1 with drum loops, 1 grand pianos.
most of these sounds are rehashed old proteus module sounds(sounding a little brighter than originals though). acoustic pianos are pretty good, pretty, very good. drum loops sound kind of all samish. seems like they are all variations on 5 or 7 loops.
the good thing is you can load any selection of presets, mix them from diffrent banks or sort them by type(e.g. strings only). then you can use them in single or multi mode. multi have 16 channels. then you have the usual filter, asdr etc plus 2 FX processors.
on my 2.4 celeron within sonar when i tried to play more then 15 notes at a time cpu was jumping to almost half.which is higher than from any other of my VSTis.
and latency was set to around 5o ms. this thing is not the most cpu efficient instrument. you have an option to play samples with a pre roll from your hard disk but that wasn't helping much in my case.
i know, i know- celerons are only good for typing.
however, i get way more"cpu for the buck" with other synths.
bottom line ; if you need a soundcard, very clean and quiet soundard, go buy one of the EMU line. you'll get a synth (more expensive versions come with soft emulator which will also sample for you) thrown in for free.
pianos and strings are very good, you get lots of bases and so on( i didn't like the pads though).
i'm sure you will fid many sounds useful. 100 bucks!
would i buy one separately for $150 ?
probably not.
unless you really miss those old proteus sounds.