Product Reviews by KVR Members

Despite being a free plugin, this is perhaps the best vocoder I tried to date. As the name suggests, it is intended not for those ugly robot-voices or sci-fi effects but to actually *sing* ! With an accurate choice of the proper carrier (for example by using an external analog synth as I do, even if the builtin synth does a nice job already) you can literally produce choirs or even solo vocals with a fidelity I would have never expected by a vocoder. This goal is perhaps achieved by the choice of using as many as 512 bands. The author made definitely a great job. Only drawbacks, if we want: no 64-bits version available; with Reaper I often experience crashes when loading a project with multiple instances of Cantante (but I can't tell whether it is a bug with Reaper or with Cantante itself). If you are looking for something more than just robot-voices, well, try this vocoder and consider a donation!Read Review

I don't love this synth in particular. Despite that, I had to use it because I found some preset sounds, after a slight modify, very suitable for a recent project of mine, and I could not easily reproduce them with other synths (they just had that particular "groove" I was looking for) Unfortunately Sprike is full of bugs. I don't know it these just show up on my config (Reaper, Win 7 x64), anyway here are the most annoying ones: 1) With expection of the first time, everytime I reopen the GUI all numbers and readouts of the various pots/parameters remain empty, blank. The only way to retrigger an update is to load a different preset. 2) After some minutes, the LFO of the Flanger effect stops working and I have to reset the plugin to restore its normal workings. I suspect a similar problem may affect other parts aswell, because after several minutes of use it's not uncommon that sounds may start sounding different because some component "went to sleep". If anybody can notify the author of these bugs he is welcome, I am not familiar with Github and forks.Read Review

In a word: I love Lokomotiv. Despite its simplicity (few parameters) it is capable, with some creativity and little efforts, of some very original and *rich* sounds and textures often hard to achieve with other synths. I too love the hard sync. Filters are great and by intelligent usage of resonance and keytrack one can easily achieve whistle-like sounds without having to play with tens of parameters. By using distortion over highly detuned sawtooths interesting sounds can be obtained. Sound quality is superb IMHO. Even the most basic waveforms sound interesting and rich with this synth. The included presets aren't perhaps fully indicative of the full potential of this synth. I'd have rated it 5/5 if it were not for a little bug (I contacted the author hoping he will cooperate and fix it though): sometimes the noise generator stop working. I am experiencing this with Reaper (I don't know whether the same happens with other DAWs or HW configs though), and only (possibly ?) when multiple instances of Lokomotiv are used and depending on the order of tracks. By now I could circumvent this by simply changing the order of tracks though. A good and versatile little synth, great job. I hope to see a x64 version soon with the bug I listed fixed.Read Review

This is IMHO one of the best pianos around, I am referring to the Steinway Piano preset, even better than many commercial instruments or gigabyte-sized sample libraries. I usually add some external EQ for a more natural sound though. I'd have rated it 5/5 if it were not for some minor issues: -The parameters *apparently* cannot be stored (this at least happens with Reaper, I could not try with other DAWs). If I need to modify something from the defaults (tuning in my case) I have to set it by hand everytime I reload my project. This is very annoying (I'm trying to contact the author to understand whether it is an actual bug or a problem with Reaper) -The GUI panel takes some good seconds to open, something I never experienced with any other VST -The A and A#2 (Steinway Piano) have a very subtle hissing noise at beginning which in piano solos can be heard and slightly annoying (something resonating while recording, possibly the samples were not fitlered/cleared) Despite all, it's definitely a *great* piano considering it's free !! One of the pianos I like to play the most. Good work. I would like to see the issues I listed above fixed someday though.Read Review