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In addition to the sounds being of a high standard, they're also a little different in character to the familiar Korg/Roland/Yamaha soundsets. In short, Sonic Synth provides a real alternative to buying another synth module. Again, Omnisynth includes a Sampletank engine and enables up to 32 instruments to be used at once. For example, it's not unusual to see the whole GM sound set squeezed into 16 or 32MB of ROM, but here each GM set is hundreds of MB in size, and the sounds are sampled to the same high standard as any of the other Sonic Reality libraries, making Omnisynth a real bonus. GM tends to get a bad press, not only because the sounds are very safe, but because many are poorly sampled or crammed into too little ROM space.
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A great piano needs lots of memory, but again those here are more generously sampled than you'd expect to find in a hardware synth, though the sounds do perhaps perhaps lag behind some of the dedicated piano libraries now available.Īs Omnisynth is currently being bundled, I gave it a quick spin and discovered both economy and large GM libraries plus a few GS/XG‑style alternatives. Also worth checking out are the excellent choral pads, which include a good Mellotron‑style choir and a 2001‑style 'Monolith' choir.
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There's a good choice of textural pads, synth leads and electronic basses, plus the usual sax, cello, marimba, piano and organ patches, all eminently useable. I particularly liked the acoustic basses and the strings (there are some surprisingly useable solo violins) as well as the ethnic instruments, though I felt the flute sounds were a bit mixed some sound much more natural than others. All the sounds are comparable in quality with what you'd expect from a workstation keyboard, except where the sounds are built up from layers - these are sampled as a single sound, so there's no way to go in and change the balance. The majority of the sounds are sampled exceptionally well, though I did come across one or two patches where low‑velocity notes didn't seem to trigger the sounds correctly, and on one violin patch, two notes refused to trigger at all on low‑velocity notes while every other note on the keyboard worked normally. In all, there are 20, including the usual reverb, relays, modulated delays, dynamics, EQ and distortion, There are also some useful guitar‑style effects such as distortion, wah, tremolo, rotary speaker simulation and so on. You can change effects or switch them off altogether to save on CPU overhead if you need to, but on the whole, they're actually reasonably efficient on CPU usage.
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Each patch loads quickly with its own control settings and effects (and the latter are fairly impressive). However, once you've told it where the sample files are located, everything works without a hitch. I've always found Sampletank's interface user‑friendly, but visually boring.
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Because the playback engine is a version of Sampletank, other Sampletank‑compatible libraries can be used to extend the soundset, and at the time of writing (mid‑September 2002), the Sonic Reality web site is offering Omnisynth (a serious attempt at creating a good GM soundset) plus a Sonic Reality library CD‑ROM of your choice with Sonic Synth for the basic download cost of the synth. Up to 128‑note polyphony (CPU power permitting) is supported and up to four effects per plug‑in instance can be selected.
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No minimum spec was provided with my review copy, but based on using it, I would suggest that you need 256MB of free RAM and at least a G3 or Pentium PIII PC. The player can operate on up to four MIDI channels (one stereo output per plug‑in) and up to eight Sonic Synths can be run at once. Sonic Synth is VST‑ and MAS‑compatible (RTAS‑ and DirectX‑compatible versions are due soon) and it has most of the features of Sampletank XL, excluding that program's Akai sample import feature and sound library.
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All the sounds are categorised into sections such as pianos, guitars, drums, basses, orchestral and ethnic instruments, pads, leads and so on, and in each case, the panel control settings of Sampletank are optimised for the patch in question, with effects added as needed. At the same time, it can take advantage of the high RAM capacity of modern computers to provide longer and/or more generously multisampled sounds than you'd get from a ROM‑based instrument. The idea is that instead of presenting a themed set of samples, Sonic Synth offers the same type of sound palette you'd expect from a high‑end workstation synth. Sonic Reality's Sonic Synth comes on three CD‑ROMs and is based around a library of sounds for IK Multimedia's Sampletank virtual instrument, but to offer the user a complete package, a Sampletank LE player is included. Sonic Reality's new Sampletank‑format library comes with a free player.