czyky

Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, don't try it.

CTHD is a great movie and Aether, Breeze, and especially B2 are great spatial plugins. A bit (small bit? big bit? eight bit?) of bad faith lurks behind the facade of each. If I didn't already own licenses to the 2caudio products, knowing what I now know, would I consider getting them now? If I hadn't already watched Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (twice), knowing what I now know, would I consider watching it now? Reid, if (when) you make the video, I will watch it. 2C audio, if you put out a new product, I will buy it.

Mulling over your post, I imagined/realized a parallel with our modern-day (actually, not so modern anymore) synthesizer models: FM, additive, subtractive, wavetable, etc. The keyboard instrument was such a game changer, and latter-day 18th/19th century engineers jumped in to push their models and make their fortunes. Same with synth designers of the last few decades. Down the road a decade or two (sooner?), robotic music engineers will be promoting their competing visions of how AI should make music: Copycat (learned), template (learned style), fusion, random, iconoclast, etc. Bonus points: will AI music algorithms of the future make choices about the style of synthesis that they use/prefer? Will they stick to keyboard-centric models (as many AI music simulators do today) or will they favor string/fretted or wind models or percussive models?) and, if keyboard-centric, will they ascribe to preferences for certain historic keyboard escapements, or come up with their own "Nannette Stein-Streicher Grand Action" diagrams?

Stomp Delay (and its partner plug-in Stomp Filter) are great to have around, to totally morph a ho-hum sound into something more inspiring, or to use "just a pinch" to breathe some movement into a thin lead--or turn a lead into a pad. Very cool filters--maybe almost as fun as PSP's N2O, which is a beast (and beastly to operate).

Okay, the price for each--Atlas & XO--is just about even steven (apologies to Stephen). So you could a) pick the one that is absolutely the lowest price ("Score!") or b) go the due diligence route and demo each to decide which is going to work better with your flow because ultimately price is only one of many vectors that lead to your ultimate decision. There's option c) but that smacks of preachy so we'll leave it at a & b.

Short answer, it compares well. (Better in my opinion, read on.) I looked at atlas 1.0 last year and meh. I tried 2.0 this year and wow! So I have it now. I had some questions about integrating it with my daw (S1 these days), so wrote to the founder/lead dev who informed me that all my issues were done away with in 2.1 which came out this past Monday. Plus a bunch of new features. I think the current Atlas is great, no glitches, lots of fun, "smart" random, easy to save/restore preset--both kits and sequence drag/drop integrated with daw (I _think_ cw integrates too). You can use it as a track in your daw, or set up a kit/sequence with it and then move that to your drum instrument of choice. (I mean I thought I would use Atlas to find samples for a kit and then put the kit in--in my case--Impact inside S1. I find there are enough controls over the kit samples inside Atlas that I just leave it there and get on with the other tracks.) I looked at XO a while ago and was lukewarm on that. (If you get the full XO, you get GBs of drum samples, but if you are looking at either XO or Atlas, you already HAVE GBs of samples!) I am happy with Atlas at full price. For half price, just get it. If you demoed 1.0, the 2.0 demo resets and lets you try it again. Not just drum hits. I have done some randomish things like create an Atlas library pointing to all the DimPro samples or Alchemy samples I have collected over the years. I get some wild kits! I don't have any connection with algonaut, other than trading emails and grooving on/with Atlas.

It IS a great little sonic filter. Lots of options. Some really unique filters. I octavize with it all the time. Many's the time if I get stuck with the way an arrangement is sounding (drab), I'll try spicing up one or more of the instruments (keys or acoustic guitar in my case) with some N20 settings to change things up a bit and get things moving forward.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow (hint)