Absynth 3 vs Absynth 4

I just got Absynth 4 and had a short go at it. After my first hour or so with Absynth 4, I must say that I am little disappointed with a few things, namely CPU usage and the import.

If things stay the way they are, Absynth 4 will not make Absynth 3 obsolete for me. Absynth 4 has great new features that are really nice. My top 3 are the enhanced flexibility of the modules, wave morphing and the step sequencer templates for the envelopes.
I also recognize that some new features come with a price (in CPU usage) but I would expect that an imported Absynth 3 patch would use nearly the same amount of CPU and sound more or less the same.

The first thing I did, was import a couple of my Absynth 3 patches I had just recently created. I did not go through all of them but one particular patch I had created with Absynth 3 and was quite fond about, sounded pretty mangled to me after beeing imported to Absynth 4. I even reimported the bank but the problem remained. I had to make adjustments to the Master Filter, to get the patch to sound more right, but somehow I still preferred the Absynth 3 Version. That is is not my idea of an import, since I would recon that Absynth 3 Sounds are a true subset of the Absynth 4 Sounds.

Besides, a comparisons under Cubase SX also showed that the same patch used about 50% more CPU than with Absynth 3. I have seen that this problem has also been posted on other threads.

If needed, I can post both Versions of my patch, namely the .glo File and the .ksd File, so you can see for yourself if you have not had this problem.

 

Please see my posts here:
http://www.native-instruments.de/forum_de/showthread.php?t=41078
http://www.native-instruments.de/forum_de/showthread.php?t=40980

I'm surprised that there are not more reports about import problems. Makes me wonder what people are actually doing with Absynth...

Anyway, I'm confident that these issues will be ironed out soon. They cannot ignore such blatant bugs, can they?

werner

 

I've had the exact same experience. The GUI is ugly and the parameters blend into the background too.

You have to turn the wet level up by 6db to get the same effects wet/dry ratio as Absynth 3! This is just one of the many examples of things that don't translate well and I don't have the time to narrow down through trial/error, research and list each one. Makes me wonder if the Absynth 3 factory presets are even the same when loaded into 4.

The import function is in serious need of improvement!

 

well, they did a good job at ignoring the hanging note bug in ab3.