The Aquios X4 is in the Prop Shop....

[electrofux]

I agree I think the criticisms on UI in these forums are rather harsh. The writing needs more contrast and maybe a slightly tighter font. I hate how everyone wants every synth to be similar to one another in design and workflow, but it make sense in terms of efficiency. If you spend a minute or two with any RE though you'll soon get used to the workflow.

It just simply wastes alot of screen real estate which is limited and therefore it influences usability. Say you want to add a player, then you end up scrolling and just because the device looks arguably fancy? While there is nothing bad about uis that leave some air between controls, in this case however it feels wasted when at the same time the knobs are tiny (FX sections).
And why should there be this huge Display which offers nearly no information when the device is already that big.

[miscend]

Props should just hire these guys to do the Reason Factory soundbank. Everything they do is very useable and polished.

[Michaellos]

sorry the gui is for me unreadable... it sounds good but with this gui and tiny knobs i will not buy it....


I could understand if there was a lack of real estate on it, but there's a lot of empty space.

Exactly. I hope that GUI would be improved someway. These tiny, hardly recognisable knobs & buttons ruin good impression of the instrument.

[Vyckeil]

Reminds me of the customs skins on Winamp. It really whips the Llama's eyes when viewed on a 4K screen... gaudy and illegible.

[spacefarmer]

Can't download and test in the moment,
but it seems, that you can't change the waveform of a single of the four patchvoices.
That is the only reason why I won't be interested anymore.

[QVprod]

Can't download and test in the moment,
but it seems, that you can't change the waveform of a single of the four patchvoices.
That is the only reason why I won't be interested anymore.

This^ is the major downside to this otherwise awesome sounding RE. The omission of those waveforms being selectable pretty much kills the creation of user patches without loading multiples in a combinator.

[scratchnsnifff]

I havent trialled but first thing i noticed was that the UI is pretty messy and cheesy. The Hydronexus already was cheesy with the insane size of controls for not so spectactular stuff like Delay, Reverb or Distortion suggesting this is something extremely cool or innovative. And the layout of things didn't really make you comprehend what the hell is going on with the device again suggesting something really extraordinary is going on when it is "just" an IDT.

On this however everthing is all over the place even more, bad unreadable fonts at times vertical labeling (very bad), tiny knobs, ALOT of wasted space, and the background graphics make stuff even more unreadable (at least in the upper part). Take the FX controls, they are very tiny when at the same time the whole FX section has so much wasted space. I have the feeling one third of the size can be saved while still having bigger knobs.

On the other hand the sound is really nice and IDTs have a very good CPU use. Since i am a Controller Freak and would map stuff to my controllers the UI is not that important. So i am still considering since i am looking for that kind of sound. Price is high though AND THERE IS NO LIST OF REMOTE ITEMS. I hate it when companies dont provide that information and i never understood that this isn't a requirement for publishing in the Propshop.

IDT? Haha call me a noob but I am unfamiliar with this term?

[Benedict]

Instrument Development Toolkit - is part of Props' SDK and is a semi-easy way to build sample based instruments using an interface, not unlike NN-XT (with fx), scripting and then GUI stuff.

The hope was that IDT would see some Kontakt style libraries ported to RE format. This is probably the best showing in that regard so far (except perhaps for that camouflage GUI).

[Jonathan10]

Nm i am not buying this. It is like Dying star with better presets. No way to shape or evolve the sound. And the worst part is you cant select the oscillators individually. With this little customization i am out! Reason is all about customization. This thing is a good effort but reason romplers really seem second rate i hope in future that changes. I wish there was reason version of keilworth audio phalanx

[tobypearce]

I have been keen on a Nexus style romper in Reason. Newer synths sound fantastic but are harsh on CPU. A sample based player like this is much kinder of CPU. However, I'm put off by the fact the lack of customisation, and I have to agree that the GUI looks better from a distance than for the actual user.

[Jmax]

I tested it out.

The sounds are beautiful and well crafted with lots of great presets and some very nice choir/string sounds.

However, the GUI just kills everything.

First off, the camouflage in the upper portion makes everything very difficult to see. The knobs every where are to small!, but beyond that the white font color is very hard to read in contrast to the backround. The font style makes it even harder to make out the text. I also found some knobs aren't labelled at all close to the bottom.

Please, do a complete re-design on the GUI, as the sound is brilliant. I would have considered buying.

J

[Nirude]

nirude strikes again.

Aquios-group - small 3k.jpg (642.36 KiB) Viewed 3730 times

But this time I was a bit lazy, cameras are from VK-2 -scene. And the main UI was so hard to duplicate in Photoshop so I ended up
using the original texture-file...

[Ashpool]

nirude strikes again.

Aquios-group - small 3k.jpg

But this time I was a bit lazy, cameras are from VK-2 -scene. And the main UI was so hard to duplicate in Photoshop so I ended up
using the original texture-file...

Your version looks better than the original
Brilliant work, as always

[miscend]

Nm i am not buying this. It is like Dying star with better presets. No way to shape or evolve the sound. And the worst part is you cant select the oscillators individually. With this little customization i am out! Reason is all about customization. This thing is a good effort but reason romplers really seem second rate i hope in future that changes. I wish there was reason version of keilworth audio phalanx

Well it is a rompler not a synth. You are only going to get limited editing abilities.

[dustmoses]

I don't have money to demo this (I like the option to buy at the end of trial if used in tracks.)

DNA labs has a bad habit of overdoing it on reverb and delay, I really think they should have a seperate "dry" folder of all presets. Hydronexius for example I'd say 90% or more patches I need to turn down reverb and delay just to hear what I'm really working with.

Is that the case with this one? If so not interested too expensive, Hydronexius wasn't a bad buy on sale (i think it was $69 or 79 black friday sale.)

[mind2069]

@nirude, looks fantastic again, sent it to the dev, at the same time make the small buttons medium sized

[QVprod]

Nm i am not buying this. It is like Dying star with better presets. No way to shape or evolve the sound. And the worst part is you cant select the oscillators individually. With this little customization i am out! Reason is all about customization. This thing is a good effort but reason romplers really seem second rate i hope in future that changes. I wish there was reason version of keilworth audio phalanx

Well it is a rompler not a synth. You are only going to get limited editing abilities.

Actually even old classic romplers like the Roland JV2080 (and pretty much every major hardware rompler like Motif, Fantom, Kronos) allow you to change out the oscillators (parts) in order to create your own patches. They function pretty much exactly like synthesizers.

[selig]

Is this instrument not like Expand!2?
Was hoping for something similar (four sections that you can swap out), but the comments so far don't give that impression.

[TritoneAddiction]

The download doesn't work for me. It gets to 4.2 Gb and then it fails. I've never had this problem before. Oh well, it's not that important. I have plenty of stuff to play with already. It's just a little strange.

Seems like everyone here loves the sound of this RE, but to be honest I'm not terribly impressed judging by the demos and the videos available on youtube. I find most synth sounds pretty cheap sounding and the realistic instruments (strings/brass) lose their realness as soon as you play around with several notes. To be fair there are a couple of sounds in there that I like too.

Of course it would be better if the download actually worked so that I could try it myself before discarding it too early.

[frog974new]

The download doesn't work for me. It gets to 4.2 Gb and then it fails. I've never had this problem before. Oh well, it's not that important. I have plenty of stuff to play with already. It's just a little strange.

...

the same matter for me
tried 6 times , each times i've the message " broken/corrupt files" , can't install this Re .

[JiggeryPokery]

Is this instrument not like Expand!2?
Was hoping for something similar (four sections that you can swap out), but the comments so far don't give that impression.

Probably for the best. I'm always weary of products, companies or institutions that need to point out how cool, hip, and/or exciting they are by including an exclamation mark in the name!2. Such a motif is normally indicative that they are neither/nor.

And while I'm here, Internet companies that can't spell their own frigging name!2 get my goat too. (Optimizr: We have scanned your website and have identified a numbr of issues. Me: I have glanced at your website and identified just from your domain name and front page logo that you can't spell for shit).

Sorry, I digress, yeah swappable sections: no, it's one of the things that makes IDT a bit of a lame duck in some respects; only one complete sampleset (blob) can be loaded at a time. Even though that blob can compromise multiple groups of samplesets, as in Hydro/Aquios, they can't refr to any othr blob or sample. (TBH I don't know if Kontakt can do that eithr, but what that can or can't do should not be the determinant to, and limits of what IDT could have been capable of!2). While an inclusive blob for each sampleset within a device does have some short-term advantages, in the long run the system should have been more like ReFill-in-a-Rack-Extension, where samples were independent of the instrument, hosted in the "private" RE foldr, so any sample could be loaded from any instrument within the RE, which would have allowed hot-swapping of at least sample sets.

As it stands now, if we wanted reuse a group of samples from Blob J in Blob P, you need two complete sets of samples (for example, the "misc" sets in Republik; those aren't reused samples from the individual instruments, they're dupes). This might be ok for the cheap wavetable spam with resampled SubT waveforms or whatevr, that are measured in a few MB, but for the sampled instruments IDT was designed for, to do that is wasteful, and it's !2 odd considering patches in RE's do allow reference to individual samples stored in the public foldr (for example, I included the X~705 drum kit samples in the public foldr of that device); it would have been little!2no issue to have set up the system to use the private foldr to host the samples, and have IDT instruments file reference the samples from there, a single "pool", or even from the public foldr so usrs could access the samples for any othr sample-loading device. IDT also largely doesn't allow file compression*, unlike ReFills. So that additionally compounds the size issue of big products. With a ReFill-as-RE approach, the private/public folder could have hosted compressed samples; thus IDT products could have both been smaller and infinitely more flexible for both dev and user.

____

* Before anyone writes in and disagrees with that statement, two things: 1, I've probably just got rogrd by NDA , and !2, I know what you're going say. Please don't. I said it "largely" doesn't. Sometimes it does. But mostly it doesn't!2

[selig]

Is this instrument not like Expand!2?
Was hoping for something similar (four sections that you can swap out), but the comments so far don't give that impression.

Probably for the best. I'm always weary of products, companies or institutions that need to point out how cool, hip, and/or exciting they are by including an exclamation mark in the name!2. Such a motif is normally indicative that they are neither/nor.

And while I'm here, Internet companies that can't spell their own frigging name!2 get my goat too. (Optimizr: We have scanned your website and have identified a numbr of issues. Me: I have glanced at your website and identified just from your domain name and front page logo that you can't spell for shit).

Sorry, I digress, yeah swappable sections: no, it's one of the things that makes IDT a bit of a lame duck in some respects; only one complete sampleset (blob) can be loaded at a time. Even though that blob can compromise multiple groups of samplesets, as in Hydro/Aquios, they can't refr to any othr blob or sample. (TBH I don't know if Kontakt can do that eithr, but what that can or can't do should not be the determinant to, and limits of what IDT could have been capable of!2). While an inclusive blob for each sampleset within a device does have some short-term advantages, in the long run the system should have been more like ReFill-in-a-Rack-Extension, where samples were independent of the instrument, hosted in the "private" RE foldr, so any sample could be loaded from any instrument within the RE, which would have allowed hot-swapping of at least sample sets.

As it stands now, if we wanted reuse a group of samples from Blob J in Blob P, you need two complete sets of samples (for example, the "misc" sets in Republik; those aren't reused samples from the individual instruments, they're dupes). This might be ok for the cheap wavetable spam with resampled SubT waveforms or whatevr, that are measured in a few MB, but for the sampled instruments IDT was designed for, to do that is wasteful, and it's !2 odd considering patches in RE's do allow reference to individual samples stored in the public foldr (for example, I included the X~705 drum kit samples in the public foldr of that device); it would have been little!2no issue to have set up the system to use the private foldr to host the samples, and have IDT instruments file reference the samples from there, a single "pool", or even from the public foldr so usrs could access the samples for any othr sample-loading device. IDT also largely doesn't allow file compression*, unlike ReFills. So that additionally compounds the size issue of big products. With a ReFill-as-RE approach, the private/public folder could have hosted compressed samples; thus IDT products could have both been smaller and infinitely more flexible for both dev and user.

____

* Before anyone writes in and disagrees with that statement, two things: 1, I've probably just got rogrd by NDA , and !2, I know what you're going say. Please don't. I said it "largely" doesn't. Sometimes it does. But mostly it doesn't!2

OK, good to know (I've not yet dug into the depths of the IDT SDK, FWIW). Maybe an update could address at least some of these issues (fingers crossed, but breath NOT held).
(from a fan of Native Instruments, even though they can't spell for crap half the time…)

[kimothebeatmaker]

I won't be buying this for the simple fact they haven't updated hydronexius since 1.0.1...for 120 bucks I'd rather buy expanse or antidote, zero, or something else.

[Oquasec]

So many of these RE is getting bought when 10 hits

[QVprod]

Sorry, I digress, yeah swappable sections: no, it's one of the things that makes IDT a bit of a lame duck in some respects; only one complete sampleset (blob) can be loaded at a time. Even though that blob can compromise multiple groups of samplesets, as in Hydro/Aquios, they can't refr to any othr blob or sample. (TBH I don't know if Kontakt can do that eithr, but what that can or can't do should not be the determinant to, and limits of what IDT could have been capable of!2). While an inclusive blob for each sampleset within a device does have some short-term advantages, in the long run the system should have been more like ReFill-in-a-Rack-Extension, where samples were independent of the instrument, hosted in the "private" RE foldr, so any sample could be loaded from any instrument within the RE, which would have allowed hot-swapping of at least sample sets.

As it stands now, if we wanted reuse a group of samples from Blob J in Blob P, you need two complete sets of samples (for example, the "misc" sets in Republik; those aren't reused samples from the individual instruments, they're dupes). This might be ok for the cheap wavetable spam with resampled SubT waveforms or whatevr, that are measured in a few MB, but for the sampled instruments IDT was designed for, to do that is wasteful, and it's !2 odd considering patches in RE's do allow reference to individual samples stored in the public foldr (for example, I included the X~705 drum kit samples in the public foldr of that device); it would have been little!2no issue to have set up the system to use the private foldr to host the samples, and have IDT instruments file reference the samples from there, a single "pool", or even from the public foldr so usrs could access the samples for any othr sample-loading device. IDT also largely doesn't allow file compression*, unlike ReFills. So that additionally compounds the size issue of big products. With a ReFill-as-RE approach, the private/public folder could have hosted compressed samples; thus IDT products could have both been smaller and infinitely more flexible for both dev and user.

Ah that makes sense. Was wondering why something like that would be left out. Not sure if Kontatk is capable (probably is), but UVI libraries definitely are capable of swappable sections. I think it does still require loading of the entire sample set though.