I missed my old roland juno 106's, I had done a lot of work with them and regretted selling them. I tried to find one at a reasonable price but they are hard to get now (in Australia at least) or overpriced so I started looking at other options. I found out about Creamware and Uknow on the net and read as much as I could, the reviews were great. I have had the card and synths for two and a half weeks now and despite a still outstanding issue I am very happy, the sounds of the synths are great, I love analogue stuff. I am looking forward to learning more and getting into the other areas's of this equipment. Thanks to everyone here I have been reading my head off to get clue's and ideas.
Ken
Why you bought your Creamware product?
I bought my Noah Ex 2nd hand off ebay after selling my Virus C. I was just interested in the analogue synth emulations; the Protone, Prodyssey and, of course, the Minimax. I've not been disapointed; IMHO the synths sound far better than my Virus ever did, with more detail and clarity and on the whole a deeper more convincing analogue recreation.
It seems that I'm one of very few people who doesn't like the Virus sound. I know many people love it but it just leaves me a little flat. Yeah, the filters have a nice tone (perhaps a little too sickly sweet for my taste) and in it's mid range the Virus can produce a pleasing sound, best suited for soft leads and pads. I found the oscillators thin though, and the bottom end unsatisfying, osc sync was spongy and the aliasing in the top end was quite nasty.
I should never have bought the Virus; I was too easily lead by the almost universal acclaim it first received. I started to regret my purchase almost immediately; I used the Virus less and less, preferring VST's and the synths on my Korg Oasys card, and so after a year and a bit I decided to jump ship.
After selling the Virus I was able to buy the Noah and still have enough change to buy an Oberheim Matrix.
I use the Noah alongside my Oberheim and my Waldorf Pulse and whilst they do have a perceptible edge (particularly the Pulse), the Noah doesn't come off too badly by comparison and sits well in a mix with them. The Virus, on the other hand, sounded underpowered and, well, a little boring.
Of course there's also ADAT, USB and the remote software and really good effects.
Its just a shame that for whatever reason (poor marketing, too expensive?) the Noah has been a loss-maker for Creamware.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: spectrum on 2005-01-15 12:53 ]</font>
It seems that I'm one of very few people who doesn't like the Virus sound. I know many people love it but it just leaves me a little flat. Yeah, the filters have a nice tone (perhaps a little too sickly sweet for my taste) and in it's mid range the Virus can produce a pleasing sound, best suited for soft leads and pads. I found the oscillators thin though, and the bottom end unsatisfying, osc sync was spongy and the aliasing in the top end was quite nasty.
I should never have bought the Virus; I was too easily lead by the almost universal acclaim it first received. I started to regret my purchase almost immediately; I used the Virus less and less, preferring VST's and the synths on my Korg Oasys card, and so after a year and a bit I decided to jump ship.
After selling the Virus I was able to buy the Noah and still have enough change to buy an Oberheim Matrix.
I use the Noah alongside my Oberheim and my Waldorf Pulse and whilst they do have a perceptible edge (particularly the Pulse), the Noah doesn't come off too badly by comparison and sits well in a mix with them. The Virus, on the other hand, sounded underpowered and, well, a little boring.
Of course there's also ADAT, USB and the remote software and really good effects.
Its just a shame that for whatever reason (poor marketing, too expensive?) the Noah has been a loss-maker for Creamware.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: spectrum on 2005-01-15 12:53 ]</font>
My first creamware board was a TDAT-16, And the A-16 Optical breakout rack I bought back in early 1997. We had been using Analogue Tape recorders and large Mixing boards for our studio and I thought I would try a computer based Recorder. The first Boards creamware made were the old TrippleDat's that fit into an ISA slot. My studio partner wanted to do digital recording with ADAT's, and the creamware TDAT-16, with optical ADAT lightpipe I/O's, seemed perfect for editing and even mixing. And pro-tools was too expensive. It wasn't without its problems but it did work great. I started out on a brand new 'state of the art' PII-266Mhz computer. wich let me record and playback about 26 tracks. Back then I just used the onboard effects with the TDAT mixer and record the final St track back into tripple-Dat. Then I would usually add enhancements to the sterio track with the firewalker and osiris plugins. I used a Roland R-8 MK-II drum machine for my own music and so I bought Cubase for my MIDI sequencer just so I could sync it with Trippl-dat. Back then you had to assign Midi I/O's in tripple and cubase to a physical destination using a MIDI patch bay. Which I used an old Opcode Studio 64X, and physically route an output channel back into an input channel to get it to work.
A couple of years or so later they came out with the first Pulsar card and 'Anton'- the tech at the canadian office- talked me into buying one and it worked great. After I bought a few plugins for it I consequently needed more DSP power so I bought a Pulsar SRB(pulsar expansion card), to acomidate my needs. Now everything can be done in the virtual desk top of the SFP. - no more routing Midi patch-bays back into themselves-. I got the STS 4000 sampler plugin so I could sync live sampled toms and cymbals with my drum machine and you can't even tell I use a drum machine for my own music. I did look into buying Giga-Studio dfor my sampler. just before they came out with the STS4000. I was suprized to find out that GigaStudio's office is just about 4 blocks from my house. So I just went down there and got the lowdown on there product right from the guy who invented it. I would have bought it if I knew creamware was going to eventually support drivers for it, but I opted to buy pulsars new sampler instead to avoid complications. I haven't ever even loaded a single synth in pulsar so far. I think its great with all you can do with pulsar these days, but I have mainly just used it as my Mixer.
I am mainly a guitarist's although I play all of the instruments for my own music. Mostly hard rock. Though I've been getting into alot of techno in the last several years. I Bought a Korg Z1 keyboard recently and have been playing around with it. Planning start a new techno album with live bass and 'satriani' type guitar phrasing.
Later, Patrick from Austin
A couple of years or so later they came out with the first Pulsar card and 'Anton'- the tech at the canadian office- talked me into buying one and it worked great. After I bought a few plugins for it I consequently needed more DSP power so I bought a Pulsar SRB(pulsar expansion card), to acomidate my needs. Now everything can be done in the virtual desk top of the SFP. - no more routing Midi patch-bays back into themselves-. I got the STS 4000 sampler plugin so I could sync live sampled toms and cymbals with my drum machine and you can't even tell I use a drum machine for my own music. I did look into buying Giga-Studio dfor my sampler. just before they came out with the STS4000. I was suprized to find out that GigaStudio's office is just about 4 blocks from my house. So I just went down there and got the lowdown on there product right from the guy who invented it. I would have bought it if I knew creamware was going to eventually support drivers for it, but I opted to buy pulsars new sampler instead to avoid complications. I haven't ever even loaded a single synth in pulsar so far. I think its great with all you can do with pulsar these days, but I have mainly just used it as my Mixer.
I am mainly a guitarist's although I play all of the instruments for my own music. Mostly hard rock. Though I've been getting into alot of techno in the last several years. I Bought a Korg Z1 keyboard recently and have been playing around with it. Planning start a new techno album with live bass and 'satriani' type guitar phrasing.
Later, Patrick from Austin
I went with the Pulsar 1 followed by the SRB and later the Luna II (for ULLI). At first I was very unhappy because my computer bombed all the time but later as I got better computers, more DSP chips and the Creamware platform improved as did Windows and Cubase, I at last was able to use my computer without it bombing every 10 minutes, however recently I bought the Sonic Timeworks Ambient/Reverse reverb and now I am back to square one with my computer bombing! Doh!!!! After a lot of experimentation I decided to use the new reverb only during mixdown with no VSTi instruments and nothing too complicated in the SFP. This is one reason hardware is better than software.