Product Reviews by KVR Members

Although there are many free libraries for Kontakt, Artvera's product never disappoints. I like relaxing music, I try to create some of my own compositions, and with the Exposure and Undersea Empire libraries, inspiration comes instantly. I never get tired of sitting down at my computer in the evening and just playing the beautiful sounds from these libraries. I would just like to see more patches for Undersea Empire, although with the Random function and some minor editing I can get more nice sounds, but I'm a bit "lazy" and prefer to be surprised by another beautiful, ready-made complete sound. And as always, it's a pleasure not only for the ear, but also for the eye. The beautiful graphics are the icing on the cake. Thank you very much Artvera for another beautiful product.

It's OK. Similar to numerous other synths I've used but I'm a "preset jockey" and frankly wasn't much there to be interested in...but worth a look for free.

An excellent clipper that lets you go at least 1dB louder than all the others and sounds cleaner at the same volume. Tested against Gold Clip, Ash, Fire The Clip, Classic Clipper, Saturate, Standard Clip, etc. They all have their own unique sound, and Buzzcut is a welcome addition to the list. It's found its place on my master bus and I think it'll stay there for a while :).

Surprisingly good high-gain amp sounds for a freeware plugin. Does, what it should and this very musically. No typical digital shrillness or harshness, but nicely balanced sounds, which can make a real tube amp obsolete. Dynamical reaction is good, so is the harmonics reproduction.

For my ears no typical Marshall, Rectifier, 5150 or Soldano sound, it has something of all, but no too intense uniqueness, but the result sounds really good and is widely usable, in my opinion not only for Metal.

Three complaints nevertheless: No informations about the used cabinets/speakers, for me 1 and 2 sound very useful, while 3 sounds too thin for my taste (I think, this is based on an EVM12L or Legend cabinet), while the addtional cabinet section controls are very useful.

The second one concerns Transpose, for my taste, even if I followed the manual instructions, too much latency, I also had preferred a mixing option with the original signal, so that you could use this function rather as an octaver.

The third concerns the noise level, without using the noise gate you will not become very happy with the sounds, but the noise gate works good and this problem you also have with a lot of other high-gain amp plugins too.

In comparison I find the full version a little bit overpriced, but it certainly also will find it's fans. I think. Good work, so certainly worth giving it a try.

I have several GForce synth plugins, and they have excellent audio quality! The patch management system could be a bit better. I have some nice impOSCar synth on my latest song called "In The Right Direction", which is currently at the top of my music website, which can be found at this link if you want to hear it:

https://www.soundclick.com/aaronaardvark/?content=songs

Great performance ! Easy on my CPU and really good sound quality. Get the bundle and you get the Pulse-Tec EQ with it.

Audio Map is an innovative sample-mapper-player plugin that expands on visual mapping ideas from tools like XO, Atlas, or Abyss. Samples are displayed as dots in an multi catergory XY map, playable and selectable by hovering with the mouse, curves or draw freehand-lines.

Core Features

Curve and Path Drawing: Draw curves or freehand paths to flexibly auto-map samples to keys—combinations possible for creative layering. XY Coordinates: Map sorted by properties like sample length, noisiness, brightness or other ones; global Attack/Release to quick shorten or declick Samples; Polyphonic; Quantisation.

Analysis & Loading

Load sample folders, tool analyzes automatically and sort into categories

Linux Support

Native Linux support available (this is not official yet but i use it on Linux), but polyphony not fully functional yet—minor XY calculation errors exist. The developer delivers quick updates;

I find the tool really great for Linux users, and it's fun to use my 20,000 samples more quickly and creatively than listening to them one by one (you know the "find the right snare" meme?). I think the tool is very effective and creative, and it finally allows me to discover samples that were hidden in the crowd.

Forecast: i bet all issue will be fixed soon so its 5/5.

When it comes to sims - have it all use it all - But Amp Locker hands down is the best value over any other maker - the year end sales can not be beat and the quality is top notch. Great customer service in every way. Updates are thoughtful and provide new content available for purchase as well as fixing any issues you can report. A small developer with a long history of solid work who understands what it is to be a guitar player in the real world. Years ago when the Audio assault Sigma was released for $5 before Amp Locker existed that was a good deal. Combine that with the fact that years later the Sigma amp is in Amp Locker - something that a lot of developers would not have done when it is so much easier to abandon old apps.

Seriously you can not get a better deal then Amp Locker - Get on the mailing list and hit those sales.

I've already got way to many clippers, but I'm really liking this. This is a different and a fresh approach. It somehow uses noise to modulate the clipping to avoid inharmonic distortion and aliasing. I was able to push an already pushed mix even more without any audible consequences, reaching one extra dB than before, easily. When pushing hard the distortion is somehow more pleasing and the material remains clear and open.

It's a really well laid out plugin, but it takes a little time to get used to and understand everything and some settings are a little hard to grasp at first. Luckily there are helpful pop-up tips when you hover over the various buttons and sliders so that makes it more easy. It's got delta mode, so it's easy to set up and listen to how much you are affecting, and autogain. Both linear and minimum phase OS up to 16x is a big plus. Wish it had offline settings though. I appreciate the graphics also, and being able to see what your doing to the waveform.

I've been facinating by using noise in various subtle ways to enhance sources, so I really enjoyed playing with upward noise also, for adding textures. Reminds me a bit of fidef and similar plugins.

It's not just a clipper, but a creative sound-shaping tool! Everything seems very well thought out, and I'm not missing much, except maybe a manual. And offline OS settings.

Would recomend trying it out.

This sampler is by far the most infuriating thing I have ever used. I really wish I liked this more then I do, and even despite the issues I have it is still the most powerful free sampler I know of.

The good part of this plugin is that it can do just about anything. It is a fully featured sampler which allows you to not only map each key to individual samples, but also map samples to different velocities, with the full version allowing you to round-robin samples. It comes with an extremely versatile set of modulation options, and is also a fully featured synthesizer, allowing you to map subtractive oscillators like samples to individual keys, as well as load full wavetables into the sampler part to do wavetable synthesis. The wavetable synthesis part surprised me, because it is only talked about in the manual, so unless you read it, you may never actually know it exists. Lastly, you can take the project files and use a program called "ConvertWithMoss" to create soundfonts, which I very much needed.

The bad part about this plugin is the UI and it's somewhat unstable nature. Despite the other reviews, the UI, while visually very nice, is one of the most difficult to understand of any plugin I have ever used. It has caused me immense levels of physical and mental suffering. I am not entirely sure why I seemed to struggle with it so much while everyone else didn't, and why I had a significantly easier time using other notoriously difficult to learn plugins like Dexed or Sytrus. The subtractive and wavetable synthesis options I mentioned took way longer to find then I would have liked, and I even had to write notes down so I don't forget where they are (which you can see below in case you have trouble finding them). This plugin is also somewhat unstable, frequently giving error messages which can optionally be logged into gigantic debug files around three hundred megabytes each. It rarely fully crashes my DAW, so I can often just close them without issue, and I will likely report these bugs in the future.

Overall, this thing is incredible functionally, but that power is wrapped in one of the most horrible interfaces I have ever had to suffer using. Despite this, I might actually still buy the full version just because it is so powerful, and with enough pain I will eventually understand how this thing works.

Here are the notes I wrote about these that I mentioned earlier, in case you want to do synthesis in this plugin:
-To add an oscillator, go to the "Regions" tab, then right-click, then select "New region." Below that, click where it says "<none>" under "Sample/Matrix" and select one of the waveforms.

-To do wavetable synthesis, simply load a wavetable into the plugin and set it's note region like any other sample. Then, in the "Sounds" tab, use the "PW" knob to cycle through the wavetable. TX16Wx should automatically detect it as a wavetable when loading, which will tune it and set the mode to WT (this mode can be found in the "Regions" tab, next to the "Sample/Matrix" column).