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Titan Review Sound & Recording December-09
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 |
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The last 40 years of synthesizer history were wearily digitalized by the Best Service team into a vast 5.500 multi samples. Not only were old analog bolides such as the Oberheim OBX or Roland Jupiter-8 incorporated, but also classic workstations and even virtual synths. So you can see it has a vast variety. A powerful streaming and surround compatible sample player allows varied editing of the sounds. TITAN is available as plug-in and stand alone instrument for Mac as well as Windows platforms (XP/ VISTA). The well equipped effect section contains good sounding standard fx such as delay, flanger, phaser, 4 filter delay, band parametric EQ, various filters, bit crusher, compressor, limiter etc. and a high quality convolution reverb with 400 impulse-responses called „Origami“.
Unusual for a sample player is the possibility to import your own sounds. This is made easier by the auto mapping function. For more creativity an arpeggiator, that can import MIDI files and a 64-step sequencer were added. Both come with a shuffle function and can be rerouted to external synths. The sound designers at TITAN really did a great job. One realizes that the material was designed by musicians for musicians. The sound quality is very high and in the selection they made sure not to offer bombastic fx monsters but rather practical synth sounds that work well in the mix. Another pleasant feature is that many synths were sampled with the original filter and effect settings in order to preserve the authenticity.
A very admirable fact is the super-short (in average 1 sec) loading times of the partially relatively extensive multi-samples. This makes browsing/ zapping through the sounds truly fun.
ENGINE
During the development of the player with the nice name „Engine“ Best Service cooperated with the company Yellow Tools. Engine is the equivalent to the high end sample player INDEPENDENCE 2.5 from Yellow Tools, with slight modification by Best Service.
Conclusion
A synth library in this style with this content is unprecedented. TITAN offers a mass of excellent classic synth sounds and will probably soon become a type of studio standard. The engine player is extremely powerful and versatile. The price is fair considering the available content.
| << | Titan Review - Music Tech Magazine 12-2009 |
Tutorial Videos
PLAY version 1.2.0 (and above) includes a new Advanced Streaming Engine (ASE) developed by EASTWEST that offers huge performance gains over previous sampler streaming engines. In this video, Nick Phoenix shows how the PLAY ASE engine provides the power to run large arrangements and orchestrations, and you will see the voice count exceed 400 stereo voices.