Best Service

100 | COMPUTER MUSIC March 2008
reviews
CONTACT: Time+Space, 01837 55200 WWW.timespace.com
FORMAT: PC and Mac, AU, VST, RTAS and standalone PRICE: £169
Cast your eyes over our pint-sized critiques, which this month include an ambitious
synth ROMpler, a sheet music organiser and a rather nifty virtual piano…
Mini Reviews
BEST SERVICE
9
VIR2
B
illed as “part
synth, part
interactive
sonic revolution”,
Vir2 and Bunker 8’s
Kontakt Player
2-powered synth
ROMpler can hardly
be accused of
underselling itself.
A collection of
2000 patches covering such
standard fare as leads, basses, pads
and FX, syntAX unfortunately can’t
live up to its own hype. Although
some of the sounds are indeed
fairly pleasant, albeit unspectacular,
many of the patches are weak,
dull-sounding or just pointless. Little
effort has been made to put the
Kontakt Player 2’s
engine to good use
(the so-called
“expert” view gives
you an ADSR to
tweak and little else),
and the sheer volume
of the available
patches makes
locating the wheat
amongst the chaff a
testing task.
If you simply can’t get enough
presets and have plenty of cash to
spare, syntAX is a reasonable buy,
but those on a limited budget
would be far better off
investing in something like
reFX Nexus or Arturia
Analog Factory.
CONTACT: Time+Space, 01837 55200 WWW.timespace.com
FORMAT: PC and Mac, AU, DXi, VST, RTAS and standalone PRICE: £110
syntAX
A
n oganisational
utility for
managing digital
sheet music, chord
charts, music software,
lyrics and notes,
software doesn’t get
much less glamourous
than Power Music.
But with ever-increasing
amounts of
information to be
stored, it’s not hard to
imagine that there are
computer musicians out there
who would benefit from just such
a utility.
The majority of Power Music’s
main screen area is taken up by a
window for displaying sheet music or
lyrics and chords, with smaller panels
for creating playlists and searching
through your music library.
The program
enables the creation of
charts with lyrics, and
includes useful chord
generation and
transposition tools.
Songs can have
category types and
audio clips attached to
them, although there’s
no sheet music editor,
and you can only import scores as
image files.
If you’re in desperate need of a
way to organise your sheet music,
then Power Music is a
decent enough solution, but
it certainly feels a little light
on features for the money.
6
7
Galaxy II
CAMBRON SOFTWARE
CONTACT: Cambron Software WWW.cambron.co.uk
FORMAT: PC (600MHz, 256MB RAM, Windows XP SP2 or later) PRICE: £50
Power Music
W
e’ve seen our fair share
of piano ROMplers here at
cm, so it takes
something special for us to really
sit up and take notice. Galaxy II is
just such a beast, offering a
substantially superior experience to
other virtual pianos, and a degree of
control over the sound rarely seen in
a ROMpler.
The quality of the recorded
samples is superb – the included
Steinway D, Bösendorfer and Blüthner
are all captured at pristine quality. But
perhaps the most impressive aspect
is the way that Native Instruments’
Kontakt Player 2 has been used to
give the user control over all of the
important aspects of the sound,
including dynamics parameters for
punching up or softening the patch,
and noise controls for adjusting the
level of hammer, damper, pedal and
string noise.
As well as the array of traditional
piano patches, some more esoteric
global presets are supplied, including
lush pads and warped tones. While
the former simply layers the pianos
up with some fairly generic samples,
the effect works really well, and the
wide variety of timbres available right
off the bat is a great touch.
Overall, Galaxy II is the best
piano ROMpler we’ve ever
had the pleasure of playing.
CMU123.rev_mini 100 25/1/08 16:24:50