One of the biggest factors in convincing musicians that soft synths have come of age is the arrival in force of big‑name VST Instruments. Osmosis makes light work of converting Akai‑ and Roland‑format CD‑ROMs for Unity DS1 owners. This month, therefore, I thought I'd bring you up to date with all of these issues - how easy or difficult it is to use soft synths or soft samplers, how their sound quality and timing compares to the hardware equivalent and, if you do decide to make the switch, whether you can carry on using existing sample libraries. Many musicians, however, still view the approach with distrust, pointing to the possibility of long‑term unreliability, system conflicts causing occasional pops and clicks, and questioning aspects such as sound quality when compared to equivalent hardware. These facts would all seem to make the 'software studio' a more realistic goal. Moreover, soundcard drivers have provided us with lower and lower latency figures, making virtual instruments feel a lot more immediate to play in real time, and the increasing availability of VST Instruments has eliminated many of the problems that musicians were experiencing when attempting to run several stand‑alone software applications side‑by‑side without conflicts. This in itself makes the possibility of running all your synths and samplers as software applications more feasible. First of all, PC processors have got much faster: the fastest model available at that time was a 550MHz Pentium III, costing just over £500, whereas you can now get a 750MHz one for under £400. It's now just over a year since I last approached the subject of cramming a complete studio into a PC ( SOS October '99), but a lot has happened in that time. Many of these issues need no longer cause difficulty, however, as Martin Walker explains. Software and hardware developments have made the 'studio in your PC' concept increasingly attractive, but many prospective users are put off by concerns about sound quality, timing, and the difficulty of adapting existing sample libraries. Now that classics like the Minimoog, Prophet Five, and PPG Wave 2.3 are immortalised in VST Instrument form, is there any need to own the originals?
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