Generator - has anybody given it a try ?

[Robert Williams]

Hi Mike and all,

I downloaded the Generator 1.5 softsynth and immediately fell in love with it.  To be
able to actually build a synth, module by module on the screen, and then patch it all
together by clicking and dragging with the mouse is beyond words.  The demo gives you
something like 10 or 15 pre-made instruments like the Juno, plus a nice effects device
to boot.  It is fully MIDI capable, and one of the nice things I found was that if you
build yourself a virtual Minimoog for example, you can have full polyphony with it,
which is something the Mini can't do.  The only "slight" drawback is you need a fairly
fast PC and a fairly nice sound card to really take advantage of it.  I have a Pentium
120, with 16 Meg of RAM and an AWE 32 soundcard.  On most of the pre-set instruments,
I can only have 1 - 3 voice polyphony before maxing out my processor.  Lowering the
sampling rate helps, but a slight degradation in fidelity occurs.  Now if I had a
Pentium II at 450 MHz, with about 120 Meg of on-board RAM, then I would never have to
buy another synth again, just build whatever I want on the screen and control it with
my generic MIDI keyboard.
There is another slight drawback, and that is the full blown version of the software
costs about $300.  Kinda spendy for a piece of software.  But then when you look at it
as being able to imitate any synth in the world with full polyphony, then maybe it's
not such a bad deal after all.  I never thought about taking a PC on the road with me
to use "live," as an instrument, but I guess if you had a real powerful laptop it
would do the job just fine.

The stuff is definitely addicting.  The demo allows you to play with it in 30 minute
increments before you have to shut it down and restart.  But that first 30 minutes
goes by in a heartbeat.  I HIGHLY recommend everyone check this thing out.

Robert

Michael Buchstaller wrote:

> There is a PC program called Generator 1.5 from Native Instruments.
> With this program , one can construct his/her own modular with
> standard modules like vco´s, vca´s, filters, sequencers and much more.
> I have tried it, and the results are amazingly good (at least to my ears...)
>
> Has anybode else tried this program ? What are your thoughts about it ?
> For a short period of time, it  made me think about thrashing my soldering
> iron and scope and to do it all in software - well not really, but i liked it very
> much !
>
> -Michael Buchstaller