Atmosphere gives Absynth a kicking

Here's some pretty good patches

I was able to grab some pretty good Absynth patches at:
http://www.kvr-vst.com/bank.php

They are free!

 

I recently wrote a review of Atmosphere for a swedish magasine, so I did a pretty thorough test of it. And yes, it has alot of great sounding presets, but is it really worth $399?
Well, that depends...if you're a synth programmer then it's IMHO not worth it,even tho the sounds are great the filters are kind of corny. And compared to NI stuff they suck.
But if you just want a whole lot of sounds to play around with and have $399 to spend, then Atmosphere is great.

When I fire up Absynth and starts playing around with some of the presets, it's like Ned says, controlling the Enterprise..


Cheers
Frederick

 

I'am with frenzy ...

The one that could give Absynth a kicking could be Absynth 2 ;-)

I love most of the sounds of Atmo but now I'am taking them " elsewhere " to begin some stimulating tweaking & mangling and not a " passive " layers mating game + light tweaking.

Now back on the Enterprise !!!! )

 

Take away distribution cost and dealer mark up, NI could sell the same patches online for half the price and come out better. You never see them in stores. It is either special order or get them from an online music store. If they were available online for half the price I would already have them. As it is, I'll just search out the many free patches online. Same goes for the other expantion packs, except for Battery of course. Who wants to do a 1 gig download.

Robert

 

I just wonder - Spectrasonic has delivered a real hattrick - a $400US sampleplayback plugin sold three times under different names... Not that you would just buy it once and then pay for the libraries - you're buying a bass module, one for drums/loops and one for pads. All in all that sums up to $1200US. You'd be way better off if you'd invest that money in REASON and buy some refills with the overhang.

I might add though that Absynth is quite a beast to program, and the library that comes with it is very ... different. It is lacking sounds that you could use in everyday studio situations, where you'd need a warm fat pad that supports your playback rather than demanding everyone's attention.

It seems that the old hardware-days (where you would be presented with the most promising synthesis concepts carrying the crappiest sounds one could imagine - K5000 anyone?) have successfully transformed into VST. For the price of Absynth and it's capabilities, the sounds provided seem somewhat limited. I see that as an unforced error that should be corrected. Updating / expanding Absynth's library like quarterly or so with some cool patches would definitely be attractive.

Just my 2 cents. And I would never use it for bass.

regards, Jo

 

They're not even samples at all you moron.

 

You people all need to shut up already. Atmosphere is a thing based on samples, and Absynth is an actual synthesizer. If you're a moron trancehead who doesn't know how to design his own sounds, go ahead, get atmosphere. But if you know what you are doing, Absynth is much more flexible. Of course Atmosphere has more good sounds out of the box. It has more good sounds than Reaktor out of the box too. Does that mean Reaktor isn't as good? Not at all.

What a lot of you people complaining about Absynth need is some education in sound design and synthesis. Bitching that the new patches aren't free... how about MAKING YOUR OWN patches? Saying you need patches to be inspired proves you're a talentless moron you shouldn't be making music in the first place. Period.

 

Well,
Some of us don't have the sound modeling skills down, so we need a good set of presets. Like- I am a classical composer, and never had much training in the areas of "creating" sounds froms scratch for instance.

However- I do think absynth comes with an incredible set of sounds out of the box. They stand out, and add a textural quality to music that can't be duplicated very easily. Thats what it's all about right? Using as many sound sources as possible to create an overall sonority- like an electronic orchestra.

I think absynths creators weren't concerned with giving us a bunch of generic sounds that are obvious in their use. "Oh theres that arpeggiator sound that fits there because I heard the same thing in a Peace Orchestra track.." More like-- sounds that inspire us to write oustide of what we are used to.

 

Damn... I just wanted to say I admire your .. I donno .. coolness like .. so .. I donno, hard to describe.

Just... I admire it, lol. Your calmness in the face of my... stuff.

Dang.. I i.. hmm ...

 

A word of support

I Don't know about Atmosphere, but I was curious about the differences between an actual analog synth and using absynth to model the same waveform. So I set up an experiment to test the this.
I used a Prophet 5 and sampled a simple triangle wave with no envelopes or freq. cutoff and loaded this wave into absynth. Then I used the triangle wave in Absynth to make a match. from there I matched the filter on the Prophet 5 and Absynth using both waveforms
in Absynth.
The results were remarkable! when I was done, the Absynth patch that I had made with the Prophet 5 Sample was very close to the original Prophet 5. Not quite as good, but really very close. I'm a fan of true analog and I think it won't be long before virtual catches up.
The main thing I discovered is that harmonic structure of the Prophet waveform has a randomness to it, whereas the Absynth waveform is a perfect structure. This randomness adds to the beauty and fatness of the prophet sound. In my opinion Absynth's ability to
sample waveform's makes it a very powerful form of synthesis.
A lot of people seem to want to have things handed to them on a silver platter without much effort. Other peoples effort dosn't seem to mean much these days. Absynth is an exellent synth for creating your OWN sounds!

 

As far as Absynth vs Atmosphere goes-the demos of Atmosphere ARE amazing sounding-Eric Persing's been one of the top sound designers around for years. However,I CAN get close to Atmosphere sounds with what I have.Could I get Absynth-type ORIGINAL sounds out of what I have if I didn't have Absynth?Highly unlikely...
ew

 

Re: A word of support

That's all I was trying to say...

 

But then again, there's the Max and Csound heads out there that scoff at people who use programs like Absynth. But then again, the Max users that do that are usually the same ones spending hours making their synth work with a force feedback joystick. Can someone say, "Pretentious Synthesis?" hehe

Not that I'm bashing all users of those apps, most are great and share their ideas, etc. But there's a few people who you could swear use Csound just to look cool.

 

As for me, I personally will not be updating to the next version of Absynth unless it has an abundance of new features. I plan on being quite happy with Reaktor 4.