SmPro Vmachine and Chip Plugins

I got Chipsounds working reasonably well, but on Mac I have to warn you, using their software editor is pain in the ass. It runs on top of Wine or something like that, so registering Chipsounds was kinda hard.

Otherwise, its easy to setup the midichannels that it receives etc.

I have more experience with other plugins. Biggest cons are that you have to make presets on the computer and without some Midi controller (I have Akai LPD8) with it, you cant tweak sounds live. Of course you can send CC thru midi but I have been too lazy to configurate those to MPC. E-Phonics Lo-Fi is included and preinstalled, also lots of cool virtual analog synths that have bleepy buzzing sounds. I've had it just over a month for now so Im no expert with it yet.

Loading presets/patches of one instrument is fast, you can switch them even during song (I would do this when the instrument doesnt get any data sent in), switching to different bank with different VSTs take something like 1-2 seconds. But you can put 4 different VSTs to one bank. For example I have Drumatic on first channel, Mellotron vst on 2nd and then couple of VA-synths. And if I can change patches to every one of those, I rarely have the need to change banks.

Sadly I've mostly been experimenting with the ones installed + Chipsounds for now so I cant say too much about other plugins. Every VST needs its own wizard file for installing it, havent looked yet on how complicated doing those would be. Overall the performance is pretty good, some pads and chords can cause glitches (pretty hi-freq buzzing sound) if they have lots of delay on them etc. But for more chip-kind of stuff I think the box is pretty good. If you have any particular plugin that is free and is featured on the list of supported ones, I can try it out.

Heres the link:
http://www.smproaudio.com/index.php/en/ … e-database

You can also download their free software there to test out different configs on your computer! Of course it doesnt tell anything about the performance, but gives you good idea about the software, which is the biggest minus for me.

Yeah, I stumbled to this pretty randomly too and couldnt resist the urge to order it.

It works as a nice addition to my otherwise monosynth / sample-setup. But its certainly not for perfectionists!

V-Machine has two usb and one midi input, so you can hookup usb midicontroller there or send cc thru midi to whatever you have configured there. You can do it with the buttons on the box but it is superslow, since you can browse the parameters only left / right, and something like Chipsounds have quite few of them:)