Stand alone soft synths

[Mark_Knecht]

Hi,
Does anyone have a favorite stand-alone soft synth that would rival the nest hardware synths?

I found quite a cool little one recently called SimSynth. Old, but comes with some good retro-ish sounds, and a little sequencer built in. Costs about $30 if I remember right.

I will soon have a new water-cooled PC in my studio, and sometimes I will want to run this machine with some stand alone programs. I've played with Reason, but couldn't work within the format. Reaktor looks really promising, but I could find sounds that interested me. I've heard of, but not heard, AbSynth. What else?

I'd most like to find something along the lines of a VA synth like the Nord Lead series, or Virus C, or even the M2000. It should come with a good set of patches so that I can just use it out of the box.

Is there anything out there like this? Does any of this stuff really work? Should I just smoke somethign and go see Carlos tonight?

Thanks in advance,
Mark

[Mark_Knecht]

BTW - not interested in samplers schamplers at this time. I want a synth.

Thanks,
Mark

[B.Ray]

Have you tried the NI Pro-52/53? Its modelled after the Prohpet 5. It sounds OK to me.

Since I bought my Creamware cards, I pretty much have all the synth bases covered (no pun intended).

There's a nice little community of 3rd party developers putting out new synths on a regular basis for the Creamware DSP cards.

Creamware

Zarg Music. Good stuff! Designed by John Bowen.

Neutron

Celmo

Wavelength

And tons of free/shareware stuff here among other places.

If you're interested, check out Planet Z. Its where the Pulsar community hangs out.

[Steve Moore]

Any users of the MiniMax MiniMoog knock off? Any good?

I have my old MOBO originally purchased for PT but not compatible (1 gig, 384k, Athlon). I am thinking about sticking it in a box and making a separate stand alone PC for softsynths and music notation. I may even decide to ditch PT MIDI and go with a separate sequencer. Any thoughts on the merits?

[Mark_Knecht]

B.Ray,
No, that's another one. I'll check into it.

I hadn't really considered Creamware as I was thinking this machine is likely going to be an Athlon XP 2600+++++ and I'd do native processing. Since I'm going to run Linux on the box a good percentage of the time I'd have to look into Creamware support there, but it's certainly worth a shot.

MiniMax is a Creamware synth, correct?

Mark

Originally posted by B.Ray:
Have you tried the NI Pro-52/53?

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[who]

Check out www.KVR-VST.com. The focus is on VST synths, but alot of them run as standalone, or you can use a host like Bidule to run them.

[jsmooth226]

i would try absynth it has some really good virus like sounds.....peace

[B.Ray]

Mark/Steve,

Yeah, the MiniMax is a Mini Moog "knock-off" that runs on Creamware cards. Its actually an upgrade to their MiniScope synth (one of several synths that comes with the Pulsar II card).

I haven't demo'd the MiniMax yet but I like the MiniScope very much. If its an improvement over the MiniScope then it should be awesome. There are sound examples/MP3's on their site (see link above) and also some user reviews on the Planet Z site in the Pulsar discussion area.

Maybe you can find a Guitar Center or Sam Ash that has a system set up that you can check out. The Creamware work environment is fun...you connect everything together with virtual cables. I really love mine...I have two cards now...Luna II & Pulsar II.

As far as Linux support is concerned, I think your're out of luck there. They currently support Win 98, Me, NT4, 2K, XP, and Mac 9.x with Mac OSX on the way.

[Mark_Knecht]

who,
Thanks for the idea, but the link wouldn't work for me. Off to Google later to check it out.

jsmooth226 - I played with absynth online last night and though it was a good candidate to start with. I was totally unclear from their web page whether it runs stand alone. Their other products do, but I hate to 'ass u me' anything... [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img] The price is about right, and the thing comes with 700 sounds. Looks like fun and much less work than Reaktor.

B.Ray - The CreamWare stuff is really quite nice, and the demos, at least of couple of them, are lucious by headphone anyway. (late night listening...) I've been talkign with the Linux comminuty this morning. They've approached CreamWare numerous times about providign info so that we can write our own drivers, but they have steadfastly refused. Bummer.

I need to at least consider this stuff before I buy any outboard synths. Thanks for the good idea.

Mark

[B.Ray]

Mark,

Here is a cool looking VST/VSTi host that may help you out. It's called Chainer and it can hold 100 plug-ins (mixed type). For $60 bones, this might be the ticket. (It's actual plug-in capacity is really unlimited because you can load other instances of Chainer within Chainer channels; it runs in stand-alone or VST modes. In other words, each Chainer instance can hold 100 plug-ins but you can run multiple instances of Chainer).

I haven't tried it yet but it was recommended by someone on the Cubase board. I'm going to try and check out the demo tonight.

There's another new host called VBox by Bias but its only VST 1.x compatible (no VSTi's, 2.0) and it costs $99.