So I downloaded this thing and was very surprised by the demos. Pretty amazing stuff. Incredibly easy to use too.
It's a modular software synth with an unusual tracker, and is very easy on the CPU.
The synth itself is made up of "machines" (of which there are many available). These themselves come in two flavours - Generators and Effects. The Generators are the sound sources with stuff including a physical string modeller, a TB303 emulator, a kick drum synthesizer, sample playback, analog waveforms, and loads more. The Effects also have great variety, including choruses, distortions, flangers, a sample-rate degrader, resonant filters, vocoder, pitch-shifter and many many more. There are a number of third parties constantly writing new machines.
Inside each of the Generators and Effects, you create patterns to create either the musical blocks or pre-determined sweeps and modulations. These patterns are made up in the same way as your standard tracker, except that each Generator has its own set of parameters depending on what it does. For instance, the TB3003 machine has parameters including filter cutoff, resonance, modulation speed, waveform type; while the Fuzzbox effect has merely mode, Q and distortion level. The Generator patterns can have has as many tracks as you want, while the Effects only need a single track.
These patterns are then entered into the pattern list in the sequence you want them to play.
The machines are joined together and a straight-forward manner on the Machine page. This page is like a canvas on which you place your machines, join them together and then join the final outputs to the Master machine. The Master machine controls the final output levels of everything connected to it, and anything connected to it gains a pan control. An attributes window can be opened for each machine to set the default parameters or edit the parameters in real-time while the song is playing.
Each Generator can be connected to any number of Effect machines, or directly to the Master. The Effects machines can also be routed through any number of other Effects before reaching the Master.
Play your sequence and the patterns of each Machine get played in the order you specified.
The sound quality is superb, the processor time is minimal (I use it quite comfortably on a P200!), and the interface is incredibly simple.
The program has a lot of fans with a number of sites on the net dedicated to it. Demo songs are relatively abundant, and Buzz 2 is on its way. Can't wait!
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