Nothing but trouble..

[MBTC]

Well the Ti2 Desktop arrived today, and I have a feeling it will soon be packaged up and back on it's way back where it belongs.

I don't think there is anything wrong with my unit, I just think I greatly underestimated some things:

1. The latency in FL9. There is like a half-second delay between anything I was previously dependent on and anything Virus related. Meaning half a second from a note played on the midi controller to the time I hear the sound on the virus. WIth latency like this I really doubt I could use the Virus in my very timing-oriented music. Then there is lag just in playing back the sounds from the daw, like the clocks arent in sync almost. I dinked around with adding delay compensation to tracks with plugins and "almost" got the timing right, but I still had problems finding the magic numbers in milliseconds, and the process was so cumbersome that I simply cannot imagine making music this way. I was using the Virus USB ASIO, btw.

2. Virus control.. its cumbersome to find and edit patches -- the user interface feels like it's bringing this Core i7 to it's knees. I did do research on how I need to do multi-timbrality, but even that is primitive and once again another technical distraction from the creative process.

3. Being able to only send all of the Virus output to only 3 separate mixer tracks is extremely limiting. So much so that I'm not sure it justifies a $2k synth.

4. I first went for the OS4 installer before doing anything else. No real problems per se, but I had remembered reading about folks with issues with the OS4 beta, and my confidence in Access Music's "beta" software was now in a pile on the rug. So I embarked on re-installing the last official release (3.4 I think). That was a multi-hour nightmare in itself. Turns out the problems I had in OS4 were still present in OS3 so it was another waste of time and exercise in futility.

The software quality seems incredibly poor, the system as a whole seems as tempermental as a schizoprenic pubescent girl, and this synth is starting to remind me of those expensive German cars like BMW and Mercedes that I regularly see broken down on the side of the road.

I have one of those that sets LFO3 when you turn the knob with LFO1 selected (LOL) and when I download the hotfix, it says it cannot detect the thing (even though my DAW can). The process for rebooting the unit of course does not work. And, they warn me I will be voiding my warranty if I inadvertently install the hotfix when I don't need it.

I've been writing software myself for 30 years, and I am no stranger to software bugs and their cause. This however, is completely out of control. I can understand it's challenging to achieve interoperability with all DAWs, and maybe the latency issue is an FL thing and doesnt apply to other hosts? But overall for such a piece of niche hardware, the quality of this is just plain horrific.

Its a sad day for me because I've wanted one of these for somewhere around 7 years now.

If there's anything anyone can tell me that will salvage my relationship with this synth, guide me toward what I'm doing wrong, or otherwise talk me out of packing it up and shipping it back within my 30 day window (after spending a bit more time on working out the bugs of course), then I will gladly listen. The sounds I've heard while navigating the abundance of (difficult to navigate) sounds are definately great sounding, and have the qualities I wanted in this synth. I just can't get past what the last 8 hours have been like -- as a music making amateur I just cannot fathom putting that much time into just configuration crap, it would completely remove my inspiration for song creation.

Thanks - MBTC