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On my 2 systems, a custom desktop and a plain off-the-shelf budget consumer laptop, Windows 10 and the other things that run at boot take up about 2.2GB of memory. Cakewalk memory use runs a little over 300MB here with just a new blank project open. So that adds up to 2.5GB memory used, just to get started. On my 8GB desktop that leaves me with 5.5GB available, and I don't think I have ever maxed that out. But my laptop only has 1.5BG memory free, before I add anything to the project. I only have some DAW stuff loaded up on the laptop to play around with when traveling, as I much prefer a desktop for DAW use. You could probably run a project with audio tracks only, and very few, plugins and/or virtual instruments. You would have to try it and see the actual results, based on your intended usage to see what could work. And as was mentioned, your CPU is a little below the specs, but my laptop only has a 1.7GHz Intel i5. It can run a few tracks and/or virtual instruments OK, but it can get quickly bogged down and maxed out by CPU hungry plugins!

Instability is often driver related. Not always, but often enough that it needs to be ruled out 100% through methodical step-by-step troubleshooting.

I wouldn't worry about the laptop monitor if you will be using it at home/office. Just plug it into a good external monitor that meets your requirements!

I have all of them, as they were included in the Everything Bundle, but I had been shying away from them, mostly due to the "EDM" in the expansion name. Nothing against that, but just not my "thing". But a quick run through them reveals that there are some quite good basses, leads, and pads that could be used with many other genres of synth music. He has many presets that are clearly intended to be emulations of vintage gear, particularly in the Rob Lee EDM Expansion 2, 3, & 4. Representing Buchla, Juno, Jupiter, Korg, JX 3P, Moog, Oberheim, Roland, Waldorf, and others. I own none of that vintage gear, so not eligible to compare them.

The email I received from KV331 Audio said the deal was valid until Nov 16th. The OP posted that same date also.

Nope. You only get the 1800 factory presets with SM 2.9 & SM Player. There are no KV331 expansions for SM One, but it comes with 1250 factory presets. The KV331 expansions for SM 2.9 are available for individual sale, or included in the Everything Bundle.

Yes, I find many of these presets are quite inspiring! Like, how the heck did he do that one, or that one? Good education! At least the browser supports browsing by category, or searching by text strings, which speeds up the trawling. And making use of the favorites list lets you tag the ones you especially like. And this synth is deep, and as such it can be difficult to see how the dots are connected at times under the hood. I hope the upcoming v3 is a bit more intuitive as far as the workflow. I do like how the developer simplified the workflow a bit in SynthMaster One. And I think that he plans to port a bit of that ease over to the new version of SM 2.

Obviously his presets are demonstrations of the emulations of vintage gear that can be achieved with this synth. Too recognizable can be a good thing if you are trying to emulate something. Learn to program your own sounds in this manner by reverse engineering a few of his. Or tweak and mangle them beyond recognition to fit your own taste!

Yes, he has some good ones. I think his initial SM effort was included in the factory presets bank. You can find them by filtering in the browser by author for Michael Kastrup, then in banks by Factory Presets. They all have MK as a suffix in the preset names.

Note: The audio demo is done entirely SynthMaster except the following: drums, percussions and bass guitar.

It's only $4 on sale at this time, so maybe I will buy it. My understanding of the everything bundle is that you get all of the expansions that are available at the time you purchase the bundle. I don't believe that future expansions are intended to be included.

That is something that I believe could be done with a lot of synths. All you need is a decent modulation matrix. But I have rarely seen a sound designer take advantage of it as frequently as BigTone does. That was my point! Not much need to tweak his patches, instant gratification!!! Performance ready out of the box!!!

Make sure that you have his "Dawn of Electronic Music" vols 1-3, and "Historic Synth Giants" vols 1-4.

Everything by Nori...

That kind of makes up for them removing ReWire from Reason Intro. The Reason Rack Plugin is now included with Intro! https://www.reasonstudios.com/en/reason/buy

You will probably need to be stranded on a desert island for some time... without distractions!!! Maybe Waves will have their presets fixed by then?

Good to know! I never paid attention to the "none" selection in there, as I have always wanted to send the track to a specific channel in a multi instrument. But that is one thing for sure about Cakewalk, there are many ways to do things! The main downside to that method is that you would then need to edit the event list to change the default MIDI channel numbers for individual selected notes in the track to make them go to their designated instrument parts/articulations. But it is possible.

Congrats on "Everything"! I have had the "Everything Bundle" for a while, so I checked my expansions in the SM browser, then did the "refresh my licenses" thing from the context menu. I now see all of the expansions except for Japan showing as "installed", with Japan showing as "available for purchase".

Take the time to explore the presets from BIGTONE. You will be rewarded! BT has the extraordinary ability to use the controllers for mw, pb, at, and vel to create very expressive and playable patches! I was surprised when I realized that you could use the pb wheel for something other than pitch bend. It's very unreal the first time you wiggle both wheels and there is no pitch bend, but you suddenly have two mod wheels in your hand! Wheeeeeee!!!