Product Reviews by KVR Members

I already have a few distortion options in my studio, so I wasnt really looking for a new one. The marketing for Cyberdrive caught my eye (81% discount) and I had some cash rewards on my account, so I wound up paying like $9 for this.

My expectations were low, but somehow this multi distortion plugin is immediately interesting and sets itself apart from Trash/2, Bite, and various NI plugins, as well as Bitwig and Cubase's native distortion stuff. The sound character itself is tight, manageable, has many styles, tones, strengths, stacked distortion engines, and effects engines on top of that. This is not some throwaway distortion plugin and immediately fits in my tracks, and I already use a few other products in my templates.

One moderate criticism and the reason Im giving this 4 out of 5 stars -- there are zero presets.

There are many types of distortion (64!), 3 distortion engines, a feedback engine, dynamics controls, tone control, motion (chorus, etc) control, cabinet sim, filter mode switches, and space (reverb), and there are a good number of control knobs under or around each, and yet there are no presets for any of it. All controls have to be manually reset, 1 at a time. You right click "reset to defaults". This could have included 10-20 presets, at least. Ive made a couple myself, but a plugin like this should have some presets. Great otherwise.

This musical randomizer... is what?

It is a few things, all quite interesting and inspiring-- a magic random sampler, sequencer, effects unit, advanced indexer with text search, and its a musical and rhythmic secret weapon. Per note effects, lock to key, ADSR, and modulation, and standard sampler features such as note latching, "magic" looping (auto alignment with your DAW), lock notes, mono mode.

I fed close to 400,000 samples into this thing (just aimed my entire existing library locations at it -- (looking at you Triaz)) and within seconds Rando had indexed them all. I prepared for a 10+ minute long wait, but this was done within 5 minutes. Most plugins and instruments I own, which do a 1-time indexing process, take much, much longer to do this process. Rando also has the ability to hold multiple sample locations, and to iterate from them independently.

Once Rando mapped a batch of samples to the keyboard, I started to play and realized... there was an intelligence to the mapping system under the hood, and there are a lot of interesting sound and rhythmic possibilities. The onboard 64 step sequencer has a decent standard feature set including swing time, note on/off, the ability to load musical or rhythmic sounds, sequence transpose, etc.

Had to edit this: Rando can map out long loops, short loops, 1shots effortlessly, and the long loops match tempo or key at will. You can make a giant hybrid sampler channel on your DAW and play melody, harmony, bass, percussion, etc, all in one interface!! lmao this thing is great!.

The "randomize" button, on many other plugins can be a mixed bag. Sometimes randomize features make a lot of noisy crap and very occasionally find some synergistic sounds, but Rando seems to reduce the amount of crap and elevate the amount of useful sound palettes that occur from randomization, and I very much enjoy it.

And all of this is still being actively developed, with the dev building new features and killing bugs at the same diligent level they supported their wonderful product Rewind (the always on tape machine) after release. I have strong confidence in this developer, and am very much loving putting this new product in all my projects. Thanks Dennis.

I picked up Pendulate years ago, played with it for a night, then forgot about it and never picked it up again.

Then I got an email about an update and decided to reinstall this and give it a fair listen.

Pendulate sounds good, and it sounds better than it did years ago. If I recall correctly, years ago it was noisy, glitchy, and dangerous lol, but today it seems more stable, more musical, and honestly pretty good for a specific range of sonic characteristics.

Pendulate does gruesome mono bass synth/drone sounds quite well, runs with minimal CPU usage, and its VST3 plays well with cubase 12, 13, and bitwig 5.1.9/5.2 beta. The sonic palette that you can pull out of Pendulate isnt the widest or most interesting, but the FREE pricetag, excellent low end sounds it produces, improvements over time, & addition of MPE allows me to give this 4 out of 5 stars. This is a fun synth and the vendor doesnt force iLok or any such nonsense.

This works as intended in Cubase 12, 13 and Bitwig 5.1.9. Ive only spent a couple hours using Harmony Bloom and the plugin is being actively developed, so I'll come back later and add more details. Update: Details added - I love Harmony Bloom!.

So far this is one of the better euclidian sequencer / advanced arpeggiators I've seen in the software space, and the control you have over note timing is much deeper & more advanced than most. The dev has included many scales and "note collections" to make pattern generation interesting.

Update: from 1.2.9 forward:

Dev has listened to feedback and added more stock presets, has expanded the feature, and I no longer have any sort of DAW transport sync issue in any DAW. This works wonderfully, and as time has passed Ive really begun to enjoy it.

At first I was just using this to generate melodies and harmonies by locking it to my DAW transport, but when you trigger HB with incoming MIDI notes (your keyboard), it becomes a mega-arpeggiator with powerful options! This is wonderful, powerful, musical, well supported, and the dev has livestreams constantly to demo and explain the product.

I've already left a bad review for Loop Engine 1 as well as Chords, Chords Pro + Notes, and all for similar reasons. One main reason, really.

That being said, there was no way I would buy Loop Engine 2, based on my earlier experiences (timing issues with simple loops in all DAWs, crashing on MIDI export) with WA's other Loop Engine-based products. However today I was given a copy of Loop Engine 2 in a larger Pluginboutique bundle, so I figured why not? They couldnt POSSIBLY have left the DAW loop timing issue in ANOTHER version of this same plugin, could they have??

Yes. Yes they could, and yes they did. Is Loop Engine 2 just Loop Engine 1 with a new version number?? I cant even see any differences between version 1 and version 2. When I try to export MIDI from this, it freezes for a second and does nothing(Bitwig), just like all the other versions. In Cubase 13, this does export MIDI after a 5-6 second freeze.

The big issue -- in Cubase 12, 13 & Bitwig 5.1.9, Loop Engine 2 doubles up the first note in any loop(only Cubase), AND cuts the final note in the loop when the arranger loops around. (Bitwig AND Cubase).

Try it out - try any version of Loop Engine, from version 1 to Chords Pro + Notes to Loop Engine 2, and see what you can see.

Ive emailed the vendor about this. They act confused, they ask for videos of the issue, but they do not fix the issue. The only way to avoid this is to turn off cycle/loop mode in your DAW, which isnt something I should need to do to accommodate a looping plugin.

Its my fault for actually installing this, and thinking the issue would be gone. If its been there this long, they have no intention of fixing it.

I'll start by admitting that I already own a couple fart instruments and a handful of fart samples, and I've been trying to become knowledgeable and invested in this genre for the last few years. I may or may not have created a few of my own using a good field recorder and some mics, so I know the perils and pitfalls of mic placement, room acoustics, and of course what sort of meal makes the best muse to get started.

Right now Flatulus is the king of the kontakt instrument fart sounds game for sure, with Fartman and Fartman2 being essentially just as good but with slightly less good audio quality. Flatulus has many farty, sloppy, protracted fart sounds, well mapped key switches and banks/modes for mod articulation lololol, effects, and some presets. There are a few farts in Flatulus that will blow your mind, including some just really, really long farts. I love it. I will undoubtedly have some of this on tracks at some point.

Its another mediocre analog-sounding synth, and I got it inside a larger Pluginboutique bundle where I was forced to accept it along with other products. I think this was inside the bundle to force me to give UAD my email address and install their product portal.

I honestly didnt need or want any more analog synths, and this UAD PolyMAX synth is extremely regular & extremely mundane. The presets included arent numbered- for good reason. There are roughly 100 presets, and they are all sounds Ive heard 1000x by now and can create myself on my dozens of other synths.

If you are all about that analog sound and have no analog hard or soft synths, this can be acquired for $29 along with 8 other products inside a pluginboutique bundle they just put out. The free synth 'Vital' and also 'SurgeXT' have comparable analog sounds if you dont want to spend $, and there are dozens of other higher quality multi synths out there that do these sounds plus a lot more for your money.

I have been stretching, warping, manipulating samples for a long time, at least 26 years now, but I am always looking for the best creative stretch algorithm and I just havent found exactly what Im looking for in all that time. Mind you I have not purchased any of the more expensive time/tone bundles or tools, and I dont own any of the cinematic voice effect tools. I have always looked for affordable or free time/tone tools, and Im always left wanting just a little more creative freedom.......

Then I found PaulXStretch, and my life has been altered lol. Quite seriously, I found this tool last night and have spent almost 12 hours straight making gorgeous drone and ambient music using multiple instances of PaulX on my workstations's desktop. I havent even opened my DAW in 12 hours, and this is weird. I have generated 100s of new drone samples for my projects, and I feel like I have a new workflow that will be with me for many years to come.

The stretch quality of this free (GNU) software is on par with paid products, native DAW tools (such as bitwig or cubase's algorithms), serato, etc, but goes WELL BEYOND any of these tools in terms of creative freedom. I can turn a 5 second sample into a 20 minute long drone masterpiece if I pick the right source file, and I can run 4-5 PaulX instances at the same time, creating a never-ending drone and ambient environment. I can stretch vocal samples to a point where other other stretch engines will lose most of the original sound character and vowel shapes, but paulX allows extreme stretching while still preserving that character.

This is an insanely fun, totally free creative tool and I cant recommend it more. I plan to donate to the dev because they deserve it.

This is a big meh. If I had spent even $20 on this, I wouldnt be happy.

Got this for free, along with the Loopcloud Sounds promotion. They claimed if I signed up for even a free trial, I would get this synth, so I went ahead.

I immediately noticed the UI seemed a little thin, with lots of wasted space and large knobs with labels like "bright/dark", "fast/slow", or "effect" and I saw that there are lots of "dice" icons everywhere to.. randomize. The number of presets included with the basic "USYNTH core" is right around 100, and the interface immediately goes to work trying to get you to buy new preset packs from UJAM. Paid presets say "available for download" without any indication they are premium preset packs, and if you dont know this and click to download one, then UJAM yells at you and demands you buy this pack.

The sounds that come from USYNTH are mediocre. Some are thin, narrow, 1 dimensional and I believe I heard a little bit of digital distortion crackling on a couple of them. Meter was not in the red. Not all the sounds inside USYNTH are weak, and I did indeed find some nice quality stuff, but overall the value just isnt there compared to many - if not most - other software synths. The playback mode is sort of nice (it plays a lot like UJAM's Carbon or other guitar synths, where you have keys that are switches and mode buttons, and then keys that trigger note/chords).

If this synth was $20 (or free), it would feel priced correctly in terms of the shortage of presets and the pressure to buy more. If UJAM added some more base content and really warmed up/expanded the synthesis engine, it might be worth trying out, but as of now it isnt super good. Im not entirely sure what sort of synthesis it even uses, and it might be a sample player for all I can tell. : /.

If you are someone who searches for more and more refined, purpose-built effects and/or transition sequencers/tools/toys, this is among the very best out there.

This brings to mind plugins such as NI's "The Finger" (a Reaktor-based effects sequencing tool), Sugar Byte's Turnado, or Cableguys Shaper Box, but imo the interface, sound quality, and overall feature set of Transit are more refined. The transitions and/or effects sequences you can design with this are attention-grabbing, mind-melting, liquid audio-style sounds, and I am immediately a big fan.

One star removed for (apparently) no MIDI mapping or binding?? I see a menu item that says "Randomize MIDI assign on/off/DAW", but I see no other options anywhere, including right click/context, that allow me to map anything. This was just released, so hopefully a patch? I cant possibly be missing something so obvious, and I've put some time into reading docs, etc. Ill add the star when I find MIDI mapping.

Update: dev got back, doesnt seem super interested in making MIDI map features any better, and Im not sure if this is just in Bitwig or all DAWs. I can make Bitwig and Cubase map MIDI directly and overcome this issue, but it would be nice to have a native right-click or mode switch MIDI map function for efficiency.