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 Native Instruments Absynth At a Glance  
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arrowReleased: early 2000?  arrowVersion:
arrowRated: 9.3/10arrow User reviews: (6)
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arrowSoftware: Win XP, Mac, OSX,
castol writes:
Absynth is single timbral(at the moment) nearly latentless softsynth that excells at rythmic wavestationesque sequences. You get 6 oscilators that include 40 + different wave shapes, plus the ability to draw and reshape your own unique waveshapes(as partials or as a wave), fm and ring modulation(plus a few other modes) there are no more than 4 different ways to set the pitch characteristics of each oscilator, a filter for each oscilator plus a global filter with 8 different filter types, which are if memory serves me correct; 24db lowpass, 12db lowpass, 24db highpass, 12db highpass, a comb, a bandpass, a band reject and probobly a few others i'm forgetting. 3 lfo's with too many parameters to list. Graphic envelopes with up to 68 breakpoints, these can be set up as pseudo sequencers, have lots of scaling options, retriger and loop modes and your only limited to the number of parameters that can be modulated by envelopes(some parameters are not availble, which is kind of sad), but still in some of the presets there are 8 or more different envelopes whiring around, you'd swear there was a step sequencer running! A waveshaper, a global ringmodulator, and an awesome efx section which i really think really stands out and makes this synth sound so great. there is a lot of depth to this program, and the user interface is just absolutely gorgeous! of note is the demo version which is very genorous in what it lets you do. basically the only things you can't do as compared to the registered version is save your patches and or load complete banks(you can import single patches however). you also can save the output of absynth to an aiff file, which is what i'd be using it for when i registered it....sample fodder.

Good Points
Awesome GUI, mad mad moduluation matrix. An out of the ordinary efx section, not your basic reverb, chorus, delay, flange, distortion. though with the 3 effects your given you can do all of these and a lot more. very good at creating very evocative ambient textures, and mini sequenced synthy mayheim, unordinary sounding, and can make your standard fare of synthy sounds. the envelopes are just too good to be true! latency is not there, though i haven't really tested this to an extreme.
Bad Points
it's only for the mac, and on the site it doesn't seem very likely it will be ported to anything else. currently only monotimbral. the learning curve is a bit much just because there is so much depth to the program and so many parameters you can tweak, everything is layed out in a very logical order once you get your head around it.
 

 Native Instruments Absynth Specifications:

Digital IOs:

Maximum Resolution:48k@16khz
Filetypes supported:
aiff audio export (stereo interleavened or dual mono)
Hardware supported:
Anything that supports Soundmanger

 Absynth Links

Absynth Review @ Sonic

Try the Virtual/Soft synths links page for more..