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AIR Music Tech Xpand 2


Larry Shelby

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24 minutes ago, Doug Rintoul said:

XPand!2 is decent for the odd mockup.

Yep. I often use it as a quick and dirty placeholder until I get more into the full development of the sound rather than spend too long messing about with the details when in composing mode. The pad layers in particular can be quite useful. 

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11 minutes ago, Doug Rintoul said:

Gotta disagree. Loom, Loom II, Vacuum and Vacuum Pro are all good. Even XPand!2 is decent for the odd mockup.

Loom II and Vacuum Pro are excellent sound machines. Both also have interesting patch "randomizing" features.

Hybrid is capable of making some great moving sounds, with it's dual layers (parts A & B), containing 3 oscillators, dual modulation envelopes,  dual filters, and a step sequencer per part.

It's really a shame that AIR chose not to update the GUI on these, because they all have very good synth engines under the hood.

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1 minute ago, paulo said:

Yep. I often use it as a quick and dirty placeholder until I get more into the full development of the sound rather than spend too long messing about with the details when in composing mode. The pad layers in particular can be quite useful. 

Yes, it has a surprising number of bread and butter instrument sounds, beyond synth noises. Quite useful as a rompler for setting up placeholder sounds.

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Right now it works on Big Sur under Rosetta 2.  Don’t know if it’ll get updated to be Apple Silicon native but the fact that it was recently updated hopefully means it hasn’t been abandoned.

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BTW, for those using Studio One, you can download a soundset for Xpand2 (as well as other AIR Music Tech instruments) from the cloud in PreSonus Exchange under Air Music Technology.  It only works for the VST--it doesn't appear to work with the AU.

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10 minutes ago, Tim Smith said:

VST3 if it's there. Apparently it isn't.

Unfortunately the legacy AIR synths haven't seen any new development in years.

The 2021 updates were "Performance enhancements for Windows 10". I suspect that was just an installer fix that for a bug that had hosed up Pace iLok on Windows 10. Plugin Boutique pulled the installers for many of the synths until that was fixed.

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14 hours ago, abacab said:

The 2021 updates were "Performance enhancements for Windows 10". I suspect that was just an installer fix

Yeah, the "performance enhancements" amounted to "allowing it to perform after installation." I dutifully downloaded the "updates" even though I never had the same issue that many were complaining about. The installed .DLL's were exactly the same size and date as the previous revisions.

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