Orangator is my favorite soft synth, and it isn't just because it's free. You can do just about anything with this. It's definitely versatile! It's perfect for someone who wants to learn about patching synths or just about analogue synth programming in general, all of the usual stuff is there. 10 oscillators with flavour options: Sinus, Sawtooth, Square, Triangle, |Sinus|, 2xSawtooth, Noise, and Custom (editable graph). Noise generator. 2 LFO's (Sinus or random). 3 very usable envelopes. A graphical envelope (editable graph). Resonant, Cut Off, Average, and Average Resonant Filters. The option to load 2 16 bit samples for manipulation by all features mentioned and will be treated as an oscillator. Effects such as overdrive, cyclic feedback, and reverb.
Orangator is an excellent piece of software, and gives people without the money to buy or the friends that own great gear the chance to work on their own patches and generate their own sounds for use in their sampler setup or in trackers and sequencers.
It's just great! You'll be surprised at how easy it is to create drum loops from scratch in just 2 oscillators!
The filters and sample-load features are useful for providing resonant sweeps on pre-recorded synth riffs or drum loops. he filters sound great on data being processed in Orangator itself, but the sound is satisfactory when done on pre-existing samples as well. Loading loops is tricky, though. You have to load a sample, set the mixer length to SampleX, then fool around with the Oscillator's frequency and render over and over to get it right. I apply the resonant filer to it by having the Graphic Envelope control the filter's frequency. Don't forget to set both the calming speed and the calming dependence really low! :-)
Orangator's only real downfall is the lack of a cohesive manual. The "Read This!" file is hardly sufficient. This is made up in part by lots and lots of preset files packaged within he archive. It takes a long time as a user to "click" with its cumbersome interface. You can e-mail me for some groovy preset files I've done. Don't get excited, though! I'm not donating my grea sequences to you! Simple synth patches only.
Released: 1997 | 
