Arturia's V-Collection expanded with five more emulations

[mhschmieder]

OK, that didn't take terribly long. My own patch ports are far superior to what the auto-converter did, for the Mini V. It's the only data point for comparison that I have, so I can't extrapolate. I think this is unique to the Mini V as the filters changed so significantly.

What is interesting is that the filter parameters in the auto-ported patches are not the same as in the originals, just as mine aren't either. But they are adjusted in the opposite direction to what I did by ear! Very strange.

Unfortunately, I had too much trouble hand-drawing replicas of the curves used for the motion recorder, so for those patches I'll need to re-do mine from scratch by starting with the auto-converted ones and then adjusting the parameters that differ to my parameters and resaving in my sound bank with my patch name. There seems to be no way to import/export a curve.

Oh, another caveat about the auto-converter that is specific to the Mini V: there are some weird tuning issues with some patches, where my patch ports are fine but the auto-converted ones are off by almost a whole step in some cases.

[jloeb]

Unfortunately, Synclavier V is useless as a plug-in, unless sticking with stock presets and no tweaking.

The problem is that the GUI is WAY too tall for a 23" wide screen monitor. It's the same size as the standalone version, plus plug-in decorations at the top, which add another inch or so.

Not at all! You can resize using the arturia logo menu in the upper left corner to see as much of the gui as you like.

[mhschmieder]

Cool (sort of); that didn't occur to me to look there. Thanks; I'm used to using the mouse to resize.

It's still kind of funny though, as resizing from the default of 80% (which is HUGE and TOO BIG FOR MOST SCREENS) to 60% (70% is also available), shrinks the pixel mapping ratio but retains all the wasted vertical space in the layout itself!

[mhschmieder]

I did some thorough bookkeeping of presets tonight. I lost a half hour at first as I looked in the wrong place for the old presets: my User account directory on the Mac. This was where they were stored before V4, and there's LOTS that weren't converted last night!

I think with V4 they had already pulled in most of the earlier extras, to remove the problem many people had of duplicates. Then they added more extras over time, but those got loaded under the special "/Library/Arturia" directory for each VI.

These do match to what was converted last night, and the one I mentioned for SEM from N. Ubu that only had one patch in the converted bank, only had one in the previous edition as well.

It's still hard to compare, because each VI had its own way of doing it before, and some of them were extremely indirect.

So now I see what they're up to, normalizing and rationalizing the scheme to be universal, simple, and easy to find and maintain. I thought they had already done that with V4, but they had simply made a first pass at it and only done it for SOME of the VI's at that time.

Also, duplicates were NOT avoided in the conversion last night, so in some cases I have two of the same patch name. I'm going to leave it that way though as it's easy to see what bank a patch belongs to. For the Mini V in particular though, it's again interesting to see how different the "same patch: is in the V5 factory version vs. the ported patch from V4 using the patch translator.

As I said before, I think Mini V is the only VI where one may not want to trust the conversions as "final versions" of the patches. It's still probably a time-saver to start from there though, due to how difficult it is to manually recreate curves for the motion feature.

Overall, I now much prefer the new preset manager. My initial anger was due to being time-sensitive on my projects (as always) and realizing it was going to slow me down in doing the transfer from V4 to V5. But Arturia were clearly thinking more about the long-term, and being less concerned about the initial hit for existing projects. In the big picture, they did the right thing.

[terrybritton]

I am still on the fence about purchasing this as a new user, and apparently have only one more day till their special is over and it goes up from $399.

I could fit it into my budget, but really, this was not a planned item, only having been put in my face this month.

I read some reviews from folks who were past users who liked the new GUI interfaces across the board, but I'm still not sure I need more vintage synth sounds.

Ah, well - the struggle to keep my wallet in my pocket continues!

Terry

[doodles]

It's still kind of funny though, as resizing from the default of 80% (which is HUGE and TOO BIG FOR MOST SCREENS) to 60% (70% is also available), shrinks the pixel mapping ratio but retains all the wasted vertical space in the layout itself!

Exactly, And this happened in previous versions as well.

[terrybritton]

I am off the fence and made the move - now a very ecstatic owner of the V-Collection latest version!

This collection is totally amazing and for me, a "really old synthesizer", several tons worth of inspiration! My first "synth" was a Farfisa Mini-Compact purchased with paper-route money when I was 15 (very circuit-bent over the years!), so I am even amazed how much darn fun I am having playing that thing - in full Duo-Compact glory! (That Farfisa Mini-Compact cost the same as this entire package of 17 synths cost me now, though admittedly 399 dollars was worth a lot more in 1967!)(I had a very big paper-route and a very dependable bicycle.)

Why did I wait? Well, I guess I'm a waiter, that's all...

Thanks for blazing the trail for us, all you early adopters here - you definitely helped me make this (good) decision.

Terry