Customer Reviews

Spectrasonics Atmosphere Dream Synth Virtual Instrument

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I would recemmend this product for anyone who's looking to use vintage synth sounds in a modern, plug-in world. The developers of this product have assembed a massive collection of samples from a variety of legendary synths (and some modern softsynths), tweaked them to give them their own unique flare (instead of just sampling stock sounds from old gear), and give the user further control by adding an interface which allows the user to layer and mix sounds (two at once), and tweak certain parameters so that you can easily play with the sounds without being overwhelmed by a hundred knobs or getting lost in a world of sub-menus, looking for a certain parameter to change. Everything's on one screen.

The tradeoff is that you don't have the level of deep control over a patch that you would with a competitive product like Absynth. Also, most of the sample liabrary has a distinct vintage feel to it, so depending on the type of music you make, a lot of the patches may or may not be useful to you. When listening to all of the patches as I scrolled through and auditioned them one by one, they really reminded me of music from the '70s and 80's, and I'm into more modern stuff, so I wasn't getting a lot of the intial inspiration that I got from playing the Absynth pre-sets. There are banks of sounds that do have a more modern feel to them, but I would say they were in the minority. There is also no stand alone version of this product. You can only operate it as a plug-in from your host recording software.

I haven't devled too much into tweaking the samples yet, but with the options they give you, it should be very easy to get the sounds I'm looking for with a few turns of the knobs. When playing with Absynth, sometimes it feels like there is too much control for me and too many options, so tweaking a patch involves typing in parameter values and changing screens a lot and really feels more like work than making music. I didn't get that feeling with Atmosphere. With all of the virtual knobs right in front of you, which I can map to my midi controller, you can tweak and play at the same time and hear an immediate result without having to stop playing. It's more friendly for on-the-fly synth programming.

Authorization took less than 1 minute for me. When I ran the product for the first time, it promted me to authorize it first by copying the challenge number it was giving me and going to the website URL provided. At the website, I pasted the challenge number in one column, and typed my serial number provided in the manual in another column. I pressed OK, and it gave me an authorization number. I copied the authorization number and went back to the authorization prompt in Atmosphere and pasted it in. I clicked OK, and I was done. I own several plug-ins from different manufacturers, and some of their authorization processes involve several convoluted steps and may incorporate the use of USB dongles or other nonsense to run the programs, but this was the easiest and most painless product authorization I've done.

If you consider buying this item you might want to know, that you can NOT just install it on your PC and use it. You need a program such as Cubase in order for Atmosphere to run.
I sended an e-mail to the company and asked, and Atmosphere is just a plug-in, be aware that you probably have to invest in other (rather expensive) programs as well.
(The rating is for the service from the company)

This item totaly sucked. First you have to pay the over prise. After you install the item you have to get it authorized in order for you to use it. This is the part which suckes about the item. You only have 48 hours to get your item authorized after installation. Which by the way is impossible to do. The website you have to go to (which they give you in the package) is totaly useless. You practicaly have to figure out how to authorize it yourself. If you do not know a lot about computers, and i mean a lot you will not be able to authorize the item by yourself. I took computer progarming in college and that didnt help me with trying to figure out how to authorize this item. My 48 hours were up, so now i have a overly price item sitting on my desk being used as a paper weight. You cannot return this item what so ever trust me i have tried. I always thought once you buy and item that gives you the authority to use it. But not in this case. You have to ask permission to use this item, and only given 48 hours to do so. If you wish to take the chance and give it a world go right ahead. But i would buy something that cost a lot less then this item.