Dune 2 - I'm speechless, what have they done
 

I've pretty much stopped buying soft synths, simply because I have so many of them so I have most bases covered, and when a new one comes out I typically try the demo and can't get inspired to purchase because I can't see they really bring anything new to the table.

I've been a fan of the original Dune synth ever since it came out, it has remained in my top 5 or so go-to synth plug-ins. Part of that was because of the sound, the usability and intuitive interface, and overall performance.

These guys just raised the bar on what a soft synth is with Dune 2 (not compatible with Dune 1, a complete different synth). I've been playing with this one for a couple of days and I have a feeling you're going to see it shoot to the top of KVR product rankings and stay there for a long time, and I think it just placed itself at the top of my go to synth list.

Truly amazing synth.

http://www.synapse-audio.com/dune2.html

The sound demos are EDM but the range of possible sounds on this thing is part of what sets it apart, it's extremely versatile!

If you don't already own Dune1 and decide to purchase, I recommend getting the Dune1&2 bundle because you're then getting Dune1 thrown in for a few bucks (and yes it's worth owning... not as sophisticated as Dune 2, but easier on CPU).

Nice plug for a nice plug-in. Usual kind of soft synth features, lacks a stepper ala Spire. I may give it a spin.

It has a step sequencer -- you have to change the "type" value under arp by clicking it, otherwise it is in MIDI mode (import midi pattern).

Maybe you meant not as good as the one in Spire? That's possible, I have not yet tried Spire. Nexus/Omnisphere/Synthmaster have better visualization of the pattern.

Keep in mind though you can also do things like send note volume to the MSEGs which would basically give you some really over the top control over step sequencing -- actually a lot more so than the others mentioned.

When this plug-in blew me away was when I actually sat down to sculpt sounds with it from scratch. They just got the workflow perfect IMO. It's not only the sound of the thing but how it's all laid out, how quickly you get from point A to point B. Guess it makes sense coming from a company that also makes DAW software (even if obscure one that few folks use), so they have some experience with workflow.

I need to try Spire though. I've heard Spire is mostly a dance music synth whereas Dune 2 seems to be versatile enough to go anywhere, kind of like Zebra but with much simplified usability, less control but perhaps better sound. Main reason I went with Dune 2 is that it was only an $80 upgrade for Dune 1 users, and because of how much use I've gotten from Dune 1 over the last few years. Spire I would have to pay full price.

I'll be honest though, I think this is the best sounding synth I own now. Maybe its the onboard effects or filter quality or both, but it sounds a step above all the other soft synths I have.

I cant say anything about the MSEG until I try it. The Spire stepper has wired shaping per step like you get bends and triangle shapes that you can sub divide by x2 or x3 or x4 etc and matrix that out to anything. But I can see how Dune 2 look nicely laid out, a bit Virus like.

Yes, that sounds like the MSEGs in Dune 2, you can see them early in this vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UmIZHLp2yw

the implementation of unisson is one of its strong points from version 1. it's got (yamaha's) DX style approach to FM: flexible routing, very similar to what you'd get with the choice of algorithms in the classic FM instruments, coupled with very flexible modulators like the MSEGS, and now the ZFD filters, it makes for a very good bread-and-butter instrument.

Thoughts on it versus Spire? I'm waiting to try Spire until I'm willing to buy a new soft synth (not yet, I just have too many and Dune 2 is keeping me really busy at the moment). Dune 2 is climbing it's way up the KVR charts as predicted, but Spire showed up there around the same time (despite apparently having been on the market for a while?) which is why I wonder.

well, this will not sound technical for sure. I did try Spire and I think it can sound the closest to the Virus of all the plug-ins I've tried - and there have been many. but doesn't take you as far as the Virus TI, in terms of options, but the filters (there's the infecto ones that I think are modeled after the Virus's) sound remarkably close to the real deal and the structure is kind of similar to. feature wise, it's something like Albino 3. all the things you can do with it, you can also make with Dune 2, it just sounds different.

I need to try Spire at some point then, if you think it sounds better than Dune 2. I owned Albino but never thought that highly of it, nor found great use for it.

I might be getting used to not turning on my Virus TI and just loading Spire!!!
:(

If only I had a dedicated piece of hardware that ran Dune 2 and took the load off the CPU of my primary host I probably wouldn't need another synth.

Personally demoed Dune2 and own spire, along with the Virus which is going nowhere!!!

I have demoed Dune2 but it just doesn't cut it for me. That said I have an array of softsynths. Spire is heaps ahead of DUNE2 with filter and sound selection. Of course thats my personal opinion, others may think else wise. I can see and did hear the appeal of DUNE, but spire seems to deliver better for me.

But then i am someone who has collected a lot of plugins and missed my soul purpose of synths and music. Physical, tactile knobs and keys for tweaking the sounds. Hard to be spontaneous and reactive with a softsynths, ASIO spikes and so forth.
That being said the sound quality between soft and hard synths is getting forever closer!

There is an interesting Youtube video I saw showing how closely the Spire filter imitated the Virus.

But as far as the Dune2 limitations, when you looked at the demo were you able to see not only the filters in the initial list, but the filter + effect combinations, plus the fact that each of those settings as well as each envelope apply *per voice* to a sound? That's an awful lot of filter flexibility. I'm not sure how much of that is crippled in the demo, I do know that the demo patches they released do not quite showcase it well enough (at least if its the same as when I looked at the demo).

Maybe if you elaborate on what you mean by sounds and filters being better on Spire I might be able to shed light on the Dune 2 angle. I don't have Spire yet, so I am limited at looking at the manual there. Dune 2 seems to be overtaking Spire in the KVR rankings, but then again Spire has been out longer so to some extent those rankings might reflect whatever buzz there is around the latest and greatest release.

I've been playing around with the Spire demo, comparing it to Dune 2. Subjectively of course, in some tests they are roughly on equal ground, but once I start taking a single OSC and fattening it up with a little unison, getting the reverb settings and tail similar on both synths, Dune2 starts to come alive and use less CPU (on my system at least, running Cubase 7.5) than Spire.

I'm restricting myself to the plate reverb on Dune2 since that's the only type available on Spire at least in the demo, whereas Dune2 gives a much better reverb selection and better sound of the effect itself.

Spire can definitely get fat too, it's just that it starts peaking 15-20% more CPU usage. I do realize this exist only in the demo, the demo has the white noise LFO swooshing going on to restrict unauthorized use but that would not account for a 20% hit.

Comparing only the demo of Spire I have to say Dune2 wins for my particular use. Mileage may vary depending on what how you plan to use it. I don't think I can get the crazy, lush and warm multi voice sounds out of Spire I can get out of Dune2.

I feel you on the cpu thing.
Recently I upgraded my pc from a i7 950(3.07GHz) to an i7-4770K(3.50GHz)
I tell you the Spire CPU hogging is gone. On the old CPU I would get bogged down if two or three Spires were playing with 5 note chords and unison.
But now I have 7-10 instances open and the CPU never bogs down. So with those ball park instances I am now above my Virus TI voice stealing antics.

Random best things in spire apart form the speed of using it are the multi-band comp in the eq area, the HQ and BAND switches in the SAT section. The MTRX area is clean and easy to read. I can assign a global midi so every instance behaves as I expect. The 'warm' 'soft' and 'boost' in the eq are handy for placing a sound in the mix.

Obvious advantages with vsti verses Virus TI are: Timing. Timing. Speed of loading the vsti vs VC. Vsti s are generated at current sample-rate and sound cleaner when working at higher rates.

You're piquing my curiosity on what could be causing such a difference between your i7-950 and an i7-4770K.

Do you happen to own Massive? If so, can you try the test mentioned in this thread (there is a link to the youtube video showing the basic idea in post #28 )

http://www.infekted.org/virus/showth...t=33532&page=3

I realize this test does not put Spire through it's paces, but this topic is of great interest to me. My current rig is an i7 870 which is overclocked slightly to 3.1Ghz. I am unaware of what any VST or host could do to achieve 3x-5x the performance on a newer generation CPU, but then again I haven't been following the latest and greatest CPU instruction additions and so forth.

On the cpu thing, I just update when benchmarks show around double performance gain. Like here http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...770K/617vs1537.
Check the server oriented benchmarks I think they are called Geek Bench.
Their take on the i7-950 "The i7-950 is a first generation Core processor which is now three generations and four years old. The 950 was included in the group test as a reference for how fast processors were back in 2009. "

On the Massive thing I never got to like it and the pre-sets didn't appeal to me overall

Synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench or Passmark are good at providing a relative measure of certain types of CPU performance, but usually in real-world application scenarios, one typically does not see anywhere close to the same level of performance difference, because to get similar results an application would have to be written in such a way that it's doing the same thing as the synthetic benchmark (and of course most DAWs and VST execute entirely different types of instructions). Synthetic benchmarks are mostly a best-case scenario and designed to highlight even miniscule differences between processor performance, so with a roughly 50% performance increase (synthetic) in CPU performance, I'm trying to wrap my head around how that could translate to a 300-500% increase in performance when using Spire (keep in mind I'm not doubting you here, just wondering if there was something else going on with your previous configuration that could account for the difference you're seeing). I'm wondering if the Haswell architecture has some sort of multi-threading features that newer plug-ins might be able to take advantage of?

There is a benchmark tool called DAW Bench at http://www.dawbench.com/ that is designed to provide a real world measure of performance, but I have no direct experience with it. The Massive test I posted is far from perfect but it's just a quick way to get some sort of plug-in specific performance number. About Massive itself - yeah the presets aren't great but the synth itself is pretty good (and some third party sound sets are amazing).

I wasn't claiming 300%. There were other factors like the amount of plugins on other tracks etc.
But I would definitely state a good 90% more. The project I was working on had two or three frozen Spire instances that when opened on my new PC were un-frozen and I continued working with more freedom to mix an add more programming and arrangement. This is my real world experience.
A DAW full of plugins may be capable of handing out tasks to threads for CPUs to take advantage of. The new architecture in the i7-4770k has way faster bandwidth to the Memory and a zillion other improvements. I don't have to sell it to you anyway, the only thing is what suits the end user and in my case I always believe in a good upgrade. You see and smell all that new PC goodness and your productivity ceiling gets raised a great deal.

I got the 300%-500% number from when you said you could barely run 2-3 instances on the i7-950 to being able to run 7-10 instances on the i7-4770K. That's roughly a 300% increase minimum.

Again, know that I'm not challenging you on this -- I believe you, I'm just trying to understand how it might be possible. I'm all about more CPU power=better, but there are subtle differences between various processors and I'm trying to understand how the results you got with your upgrade and Spire could correspond to that.

Ah, I see how you could take that as 2-3 instances to 7-10 as 300-500% - 2 to 10 equals 500%. This is not what I meant. What I meant was more literally 2 to 3 "ish"(2.5?) instances to 7 to 10 "ish"(8.5?), so 2.5 to 8.5, that's what I am experiencing.
So now I will correct myself to mean roughly 3 instances would kill my 950 (stutter audio playback with high 1024 buffer) and 6 instances don't kill my 4770 (same audio card and buffer) and as yet although I have 13 instances of Spire loaded in my current production only 3 to 7 play at any one moment, also the CPU meter in Windows 8.1 never pops up higher than 45% - so I'm cruising in CPU nirvana.

Also I said later that it was in context of separate songs with different other tracks.

I wish there were better audio vst tests for CPUs but they seem randomly focused on Cubase, Reaper, Fruityloops or Massive etc. so not everyone can chime in and test their system against the others.

Which host do you use? Some time back, just to be sure the results I was seeing with Massive were not DAW-specific, I loaded up a trial of Ableton just for comparison purposes, even though I'm not very familiar with it.

Yeah, Ableton. Maybe you can PM me the project file or post it for the public to try out. although you may not be able to save in trial version :(

Yeah I don't think I ever saved the project file, but it's not really needed, you just insert an instance of Massive, load that patch, play a single sustained note, rinse and repeat until you hit an upper limit (but of course you need Massive -- I assume there is a trial out there but I'm not sure if it has additional overhead).

As a side note I do recommend getting some version of NI Komplete which would have Massive included in it for free. I was recently watching a movie called "Sound City", about the famous L.A. record studio (when it closed, Dave Grohl bought the extremely rare Neve mixing board that was responsible for the sound of so many classic records, and made a documentary of it). To some extent, modern music production gets slapped around in it a bit (they bash Pro Tools mostly), but one of the musicians that comes and jams with Dave is Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. In the background you can see that he is using Native Instruments stuff (my point is that it says a lot about Komplete).

There are some new instructions added. Plus, it's not just the processor but the kind of chip they're using on mother boards now. A lot has changed, for the better.

Also, one has to realize that, for instance, some of these new instructions can make a huge difference - more so then you'd get from simple tests - if developers decide to code them in to their products, making them a huge advantage.

Modern CPUs have things like hyper threading and turbo boost, are mounted on much more efficient chips. First generation i7 compared to recent ones? You're in for a huge surprise... It's really come a long way m8!

HT and turbo have been around a while though. I bought a 4770k based system about a year ago and actually returned it because real-world performance was not that much better than the i7-965 in my primary system (the 965 came out five years ago). The 870 I mentioned that I'm using for my audio host is overclocked and is slightly slower than the 965.

Even if the new ones do have new instructions (I'm not aware of specifics around that), applications would have to be compiled to take advantage of them, making them backward incompatible with old processors (and of course they aren't). The biggest hurdle for audio is that most audio-related algorithms, except for perhaps LAME encoding and so forth, do not lend themselves well to multi-threading. So while the multi-threaded performance of some of these newer six-core processors is indeed impressive in synthetic benchmarks or in situations that strongly take advantage of multi-threading, it's hard to justify an upgrade at that point.

These numbers compare a 4770K to a 975 which performs about the same as my 965.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/c...d%5B5750%5D=on

You'll notice the truly impressive performance gains are in things like the encryption score (a usage that can utilize multiple threads nicely), you can ignore the ridiculous numbers like the PCMark 7 number (drill down into the chart and you'll see what I mean, that's a website error), etc. Something like the Photoshop score shows a significant benefit, but that's because image processing is a very parallelizable type of operation. If you start looking at everything else you start to wonder "really? a 10-20% difference represents five years of CPU progress"?

There are good reasons CPU technology has brick walled (or at least slowed greatly in terms of year over year real world performance benefits) that aren't anyone's fault, but also Intel has been focusing on adding video performance and reducing reliance on Nvidia and AMD for that which I don't think is a good use of their time and R&D resources, personally.

All of this said, I don't want anyone to think I'm doubting that the newer ones are better. But since overall synthetic benchmark results tend to show about a 40-50% increase over the last 5 years, and real world results tend to show much less than that, I'm inclined to believe that a plug-in that's getting 2x-3x gains from newer processors has something else going on in terms of multi-threading technique that I'd be curious to know more about.

OK, couldn't sleep last night so I ran my own Ableton with spire bench mark.
Quick results are..
Usable instances
4770k 27
i7-950 8
4770k better-ness 3.4
---------------
cpu use (task manager process) divided by instance
Instances 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
4770K 4.0 2.5 2.7 2.8 2.6 2.8 3.0 3.0
i7-950 8.0 6.5 7.0 6.8 7.4 7.7 7.4 8.0
better-ness 2.0 2.6 2.6 2.5 2.8 2.7 2.5 2.7

Test detalis: Spire patch BA Octava, (two oscilators 9 voices unison). Ableton Live 9.1

Do you have a midi file you're using to play them? On my i7-870 using the Spire demo, BA Octava on Cubase I'm only able to insert 25 instances before the output is no longer sent to the mixer (I'm guessing that's a Cubase thing or maybe demo limit), and of course so many of them sounds horrible but I guess subjectively I could say it's usable (peaking out on the Cubase CPU meter sometimes but no crackling or anything that would prevent use).

But that's just dinking around playing notes by hand so I thought a MIDI file might be a better point of reference if you have it to share.

Also with 25 instances generating the demo white noise swoosh it makes it hard to claim it sounds usable.

Firstly, it is a stress test like the one you mentioned with Massive. It is the same patch playing a held note,, you turn down the volume of the track to like almost nothing and then duplicate it.
"Usable instances" refers to the one patch over and over. "Usable" relates to how many instances will be duplicated until live peeks over 100% usually you hear crackling around 90% to 95%.
just make the same note on the same patch (BA Octava, to be a comparrison to my results) playing at the same time in cubase and see if you can get to 25.
I used an F below middle C held for two bars with a tempo of 77. loop that 2 bars and copy that midi into every Spire track.
To measure I used windows task manager process view and put update speed on low. After turning on each instance I wrote down the cpu usage in windows task manager for the process of the DAW and the cpu usage in Ableton Live top right corner.

What is this NERD FEST? Couldn't make it to Comic-con? Make some music you sad git's :p

@berni: Contributing something of value again I see, don't you have some self-promoting to do or something? Run along now and don't get under the grown ups feet while they're busy :)

@grs:
I'll give that a try a little later. I basically did the same thing by enabling monitor on all 25 instrument tracks (which plays them simultaneously, and then you can just hold a note down), so I think I will hit the wall at 25 again but will report back. Cubase CPU meter is a little different than Ableton et al in that you have peak load and average load (peak is like maximum which doesn't really tell you a whole lot other than you're hitting the ceiling occasionally, average is more like the meter in other DAWs that really impacts what you hear). I'm probably at about 60% average which is way higher than I would run in practice without freezing tracks, but then again a good fat unison poly lead with fx and a long release from some synths can eat up maybe 25-30% by itself at times.

Also meant to ask, are you comparing both PCs using the same external audio interface or do they have distinct sound cards?

@MBTC this actually made me laugh! :cool:

On another note, you're right about most plug-ins not profiting much from new instructions on the CPUs, but that's not as linear as you say: for instance, Diva has multi-thread support now, but that doesn't mean that any CPU can handle it. Same thing for most host software (daw), they can increase their performance if some instructions are found, but will perform as good as it can without them.

I do agree, however, that we're not seeing major increases in performance for quite a while now. I feel a good way to get better performance (and less money XD) is to get something like UAD dsp cards and plug-ins. One can manage insanely huge track counts that way without much stress to the system. That and hardware synths (expert sleepers can deliver sample accurate timing for analogue synths), the Virus ti (working properly) also helps a lot to dispense with cpu-heavy plug-ins (isn't that why it costs so much?). All of this and an SSD disk can boost performance much more then with a CPU+motherboard/chip change I think.

@Tweak: yes, I'm always interested in DSP related options. I'd love to see them come out with a PCI card that could run dedicated instances of Dune2. It seems once any device is placed outside the case, you just have one more cable component to introduce potential lag (USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire etc) even if in theory they shouldn't.

@grs: Well I never noticed it but it seems as though Cubase limits me to 24 instrument tracks. That's more than I would need in a project (which explains why I haven't hit the limit) but it seems odd for their flagship product (this is not Cubase LE or one of the baby editions). I guess to really push it I would have to use a much more resource intensive patch.

My 870 is handling the 24 instances of Spire with BA Octaver fine enough (one note held down for 2 bars looped), with total usage in the 50-65% range depending on what I set as my buffer size on the Saffire audio interface software. My CPU usage in task manager pretty much reflects the visual bar in Cubase, 50-65% or so. The part I'm confused about is how you were able to see what each instance of Spire was using using Task Manager (or is that an Ableton thing?) Maybe I'm misunderstanding what numbers you were looking at?

I should note in terms of audio quality, all of this sounds like hell but because of muddiness caused by duplicating the same patch too many times (not the type of crackling that comes when the CPU is strained). It does pop a little at the beginning of the first bar, but I think this is because of the phases of the OSCs all kicking off at once.

The other interesting thing is that the demo of Spire is swooshing the white noise for all of these instances at varying intervals, which has to be creating a certain amount of overhead in itself. You can see the monitor for the noise varying on all the different tracks which is weird to observe.

I used a division of the cpu by the instance as a figurative value.
So if you go backwards from 25, when do you not get the pop? and is the master mix not overloading?
Also my i7-950 is in another room without my Fireface so I will have to re-test to get the same buffer and card comparison. But the numbers seem right at the moment, maybe one more instance.

Well I discovered that the popping I was describing was mostly because of the copy protection white noise. So, to eliminate that and get all 24 instances into the same swoosh/silent cycle I saved and reloaded the project fresh, that way I can wait for the swoosh to subside before testing. Eliminates the pop entirely.

When you say is the master mix overloading, are you talking about the volume level on the stereo out master track (probably called something else in Ableton)? I brought the volume down because of course that would be a mess and clipping otherwise.

What is your overall CPU like on each machine when you run these tests? I'm at about 62% with a buffer size of 192 (I could reduce it down quite a bit with larger buffer size).

Also not sure if I mentioned but this is supposed to be a 2.93Ghz processor, I have it clocked to 3.1GHz, in my tests I was getting about a 10 cpu boost in DAW with that and it still runs cool (air cooled) so I just left it there.

Also just to be sure I understand your CPU calculations, you're saying 8 instances on the 4770k was about 24% total CPU, and about 64% on the 950, is that correct?

I think the only useful data to get from this sort of test is the amount of instances you can handle on a whole system.
I got what I needed in my own case to have a system I could do twice as much work on.
My old system had a different motherboard, windows 7, read emails, graphics and video editing apps etc. So all these per instance division are not real world reflections on that CPU's ability to make Soft Synth.
My new system is windows 8.1, SSD and music Apps only. So unless I put an SSD in my old system and do a fresh install I can't promise these figures to anyone.

Can it only use sine waves for Fm ? It has nice wavetables..would be great to be able to use them for FM

Long answer first...

You have two "oscillator stacks" total (actually 3 but the third stack is more of a single sub osc than a stack, that doesn't have to be a sub osc, it can be a white noise or many other things but it does not have other complex features like FM, only the first two stacks do).

So, in each of those stacks you can have up to 32 voices (think about hypersaw detuning on the Virus and you get the idea). Those voices have a bunch of different options for changing how they detune (linear/Gaussian/random etc). If you set an osc stack type to FM, you now have a classic 3-operator FM panel for that stack (A-B-C) (and can change the algorithm, like A feedback into itself or A+B modulate C directly with B feeding back into itself, feedback adjustable on either of course).

So, figure in Unison possibility, (32 voices * 2 stacks * 8 unison * 3 operators) and you have 1536, or if you can live with only 768 operators on a single stack, you can use the other two stacks to use wavetables or virtual analog at the same time. (Actually this gives the illusion that you only have the granularity of 768 vs. 1536, but it's not like that at all, each of the 8 unison voices has its own stacks, own filter settings, etc so it can be as granular as you want).

I'm typing all that mostly to try to illustrate how it makes manipulation of so many FM operators so useful and easy to get great sounds. You're really only controlling 3 operators for any given stack and voice at one time, but that's still like controlling up to 24 separate sets of operator parameters if you need that kind of complexity. It also let's you work with multiple voices as if they are the same one if you want. That's part of the beauty of Dune 2 I think, other than just the sound. The way they workflow is designed. It's just so fast to work with.

Short answer next ...

Each of the A-B-C operators are fundamentally sine waves, but you end up with a range of sounds that's as good (better in many cases) than other FM synths and it's dead easy to get there. And a modulated sine isn't really a sine anymore :)