Coming soon: Icarus 1.2

[Markus Krause]

I will check this out.

- What mouse do you use? Is it from Apple or another company?
- Is "scroll direction natural" enabled or disabled? http://taylorjasko.com/how-to-disable-inverted-scrolling-on-mac-os-x-lion/

[Soarer]

Hi Markus

- What mouse do you use? Is it from Apple or another company?

I use a Logitech Ultrathin Touch Mouse but it is exactly the same when I'm using my built-in trackpad.
Note that the trackpad on the New Macbook Pro's is much larger than previous ones. Still the mouse should work fine.

- Is "scroll direction natural" enabled or disabled?

"Scroll direction natural" IS enabled yes.
Disabling it wouldn't make sense at all since the scroll direction everywhere else on my Mac would be reversed.

[jcmos]

OMG! I am so not regretful of buying this VST, for me the best!.  Thank you so much to the Tone2 team for developing such an amazing VSTi Icarus. Just to let you know is so hard to find companies with similar support as Tone2. The follow up level is up to the sky. This is what makes a company successful, listening to its customers!!!! that's the secret and Tone2 is doing it so well!!!!   WELL DONE!!!!
Just a quick question, so from the next update we will be able to load samples as a sampler, right? I want to have real sounds that sounds, for example,. like a piano.

[Markus Krause]

@Soarer: 'scroll direction natural' is currently still not supported. You're the first users who requests this. I will take a look at it.

@jcmos:
Yes. It will be possible to load and play samples without the resyntheisis.
Please note: Importing sounds like a piano is already possible with the current and the older version. Watch this video here:
https://www.tone2.com/icarus-resynthesis.html

[jcmos]

One of the updates is the sound enhancement. How can be possible if the sound is already good? Are we expecting fat sounds with more body?
A guy told me today that a hardware synthesizer will always be much be better than a VSTi.
Do you know what I answered to that? a soft synth is not really software, is the combination of hardware and software (no kidding). If we are talking about a hardware host with an i7-7700k CPU, just it, contains more processing power than thousands of synthesizers put together!!!. You pay $2500 for a good PC plus the vst software. It is similar price to those who pay for an external keyboard synthesizer. So bottom line we are talking about the same thing, there is not such a thing as a soft synth.
Markus, how do you do it guys? how do you work together? the IT guys are not sound engineers and the sound engineers are not IT guys, or are they?

[Markus Krause]

- Enhanced sound of Reverb Medium, Reverb Big, Reverb Plate, Reverb Glass, Reverb Infinite, Reverb Trance: Less detuned sound, smoother tail and more punchy early reflections
- There are also several new effects available

If you open a hardware synth you will just find the usual computer components. Hardware synths still did sound better than software synths in the year 2005. Now we got 2017 and much more powerful multicore CPUs in our computers. The softsynth developers also have learned and gained experience. Many of them are working on a very professional level.

I started developing software synthesizers at the age of 13 on DOS and soundblaster cards. There was not much software available in these days and we musicians had to build the stuff for ourselves. Later i studied electronic engineering, phonetics and software engineering. Since 2001 i am developing VST plugins on a commercial level. Now i am soon getting 40
Troels did start as a hobby musician and did study audio engineering and game design.

[TB4C]

I am really excited for this release!!
Regards!

[Soarer]

I had the impression that hardware digital synths are sounding better since they have a dedicated hardware digital chip for the oscillator so is that completely wrong?
I surely prefer the convenience and ease of using software but many times I have wondered if I was missing out on something soundwise. That's happening much less since I got Icarus though.

[jcmos]

There are some youtube videos comparing vst sound to one from a hardware synth. If you can detect the difference, you are a genious!

[Markus Krause]

No matter what kind of processor you use: All digital components sound exactly the same. That's the nature of digital signal processing. Processors differ only in their instruction set and speed.
 
In digital hardware synthesizers and vst plugins the quality of the sound does only depend on three factors:
- The skill of the programmer
- The speed of the processor
- The quality of the DA converter (soundcard)

Two years ago I purchased Ingo's Access Virus TI, which was used as inspiration for Icarus. If you do scientific measurements and show the spectrum of both synths, you can see that sound quality of the TI is worse than Icarus. The frequency response is not linear (dropoff and ripple around 13khz) , the hypersaws have more amplitude peaks and there is more digital dirt in general. Furhermore the filter resonance of the analog filter is not behaving as expected at high cutoffs. I did notice that the programmers had to do tradeoffs between sound quality and CPU speed in many places. The sum of all these tradeoffs is audible.
I do not want to bash the Virus, which is a great synth with character in my eys. I just want to show that the assumtion 'hardware always sounds better that software' is a myth and not longer true in these days.

[Soarer]

I am so glad to read this Markus! I actually find it really inspiring and it helps me discard these erroneous concepts and move on in the DSP world with confidence. It is probably the crispy character of the TI that is still tricking me. However, I always knew that one day software would become as good as or surpass hardware.

[pix]

Let me chime in and say that icarus does indeed sound special to my ears. I've been a virus user and fan for many years and icarus has a very similar character, especially noticeable if you load TI wavetables into it.

I think the virus fx are better than icarus though but maybe that will change in next update.

Still I think the core engine and filters sound fantastic and better than any digital hardware synth I've ever played.

[jcmos]

I will have to agree with Markus on this. "Soft" synths are taking over as technology in this context gets better.
There will be a point where there will not be as many tradeoffs as now as CPUs get faster and faster.
I heard some reviews out there that Icarus is amazing and the only weak point was the FX which is already being taken care of.
My advise?
Get a good hardware host (ie: i7-7700k + Mobo with Tunderbolt support + Focusrite Clarett) and use Icarus!
on Studio One 3. You cannot get it wrong!


               

[Markus Krause]

v1.2 is currently under heavy development.
I added more new features than originally planed.

- You will now also be able to do excessive waveshaping between oscillators.

- Furthermore the giant menus have been reworked (sorry about this mess). Everything is now sorted to submenus.

- I've also added a couple of new effects

[Soarer]

Sounds like we will have incredible sound design possibilities with the new update!
Keep the good news coming Markus!