When you need to resort to selective reading, it says a lot.

 

You’re right missed the whole part I should have been in bed a long time ago

 

Leave the 76 out of this!! One of my favorite synths, and im not even kidding. Ive circuit bent at least ten of these or other siblings in the casio SA series. Insane sounds come out of that thing.

 

People who can afford anything they want stop concerning themselves with usefulness or quality. They buy for pomp, excess or raw hedonism, or, as you say: buy junk on purpose. Artists in particular are infamous for their self-destructive, highly irrational spending habits on junk.

"Poor" people rationalise buying specific gear because they want to ape their heroes. It's my gear, not my lack of learning or putting in effort.

Jimi Hendrix needs a guitar fitting his style and needs, but is limited by affordability and geographic availability. Ends up with cheap/free Fender Strats as a compromise.

Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar hero is Jimi Hendrix. SRV buys Strat to ape JH.

John Mayer wants to ape SRV. Works a year to finally be able to afford his hero's Strat.

The many many guitarists who now want to ape JM go in with an almost unbreakable Strat-bias.

(Or whatever brand & model he's currently endorsing - PRS I think.)

Quality wasn't the main metric for Hendrix and quality isn't the main metric for people when they buy Fender now.

Brands buy artists and they've gotten much better at it the past ~25 or so years. So the next time someone buys a Kiesel because Stephen Carpenter plays or played one, they need to keep in mind that Stephen, like most modern guitar heroes, will bend with the wind and endorse whatever brand writes the biggest cheques.

---

Back to the Virus and Surge XT.

Looking at the list of artists using the Virus TI, one could rationalise that since almost all of these are 20th century artists who haven't made much of a splash in the 21st century, that it's really just an outdated synth "of its time" that has long been superseded by much more powerful solutions.

One could.

In reality, SXT and V are both capable synths for very different audiences.

I don't think SXT is a good match for OP. IMO (and I'm not blaming them, it's only natural), they went in with a strong bias for the V and were looking to have other people rationalise their decision - whether they themselves realise it or not.

 

Last edited: Nov 17, 2025 at 3:59 PM

Once could also argue that Vember Surge ended up as an equally dead product until those with feelings of nostalgia about it revived it. Quite obviously, with the number of users of OsTIrus, it's very hard to support that it is any of the things which certain user above had to say.

Obviously the market did not feel it was worth what they were charging for it as paid software. Most Windows users starting using it cracked.

If you cannot understand why so many synthesizer enthusiasts who have been such for decades and have dozens of synthesizers available to them for use, there is a very simple reason why. You've never used one. It's pretty amazing all the negative things people can have to say about things like this, when the only real basis for such claims is "I don't have one, never used one, never even seen one".

It permeates every uninformed snark little comment from the "i've used the emulation" wave of users who love all these free things and imagine themselves playing a physical device. Only to see them complain about users cranking out junk via Suno.

 

Surge is back, XTended and open source!

Thanks to the generosity of @Kurasu (owner of Vember Audio), Surge has been open sourced and lives on GitHub.
This page you're reading right now. Yup! This one right here. It's a part of the surge-synthesizer GitHub project.

 

Or devil's advocate it with Surge XT...

I sort of forget the precise process, but I found myself wanting some kind of synth with some fizz and ended up downloading and installing Vacuum Pro, of all synths. The GUI, like Air's Loom 2 was too small and there seemed no way to scale it up-- what the hell is with Air anyway?-- but then I realized that I already have OsTIrus. Both it and SXT were just sitting there, lying around. It didn't hurt that both were FLOSS.

So I listened to some videos and looked up TI's specs and noticed that it was billed in part as virtual analogue. The videos also sounded great. Surge XT, on the other hand, seemed to offer videos that largely boiled down to tutorials and bread-and-butter sounds. Even Roger Linn's video I linked to in one of my comments in this thread seems to be using SXT for just that; bread-and-butter sounds, like watered-down emulations of real instruments. I already have Chromaphone, Swam and this resynthesized orchestral free synth lying around, but if I was going to classify myself of any kind of 'fanboy', it would probably be for additive, both synths, Harmor and Alchemy, in high regard, 'stolen' and locked into DAWs, which still angers me when I think about it. Possibly even the one who did the protoype for Reaktor was bought out by NI.

But additive seems to need a fizzy companion like virtual analogue and/or granular or whatever (Mok Waverazor, even, but the process/GUI again looks daunting)

As an aside, wavetable synths don't do much for me. There's something kind of plasticky or static about them or something. I even argued about it on Vital's website. If you've visited, you may already know who.

Ever heard of Steampipe, BTW? It's a Reaktor synth perhaps, but I hear it's pretty good/unique in its own way too. Reaktor has a fantastic free collection of synths in its library of course, but the setup seems kind of problematic in a closed-source as well as in a matryoshka kind of way, like the Parsec and Reason Rack matryoshka, within my DAW within my OS within my laptop. It's also not FLOSS, unlike the relatively-new Pure:data-wrapper, Plugdata, which is already looking/sounding great.

I think Szabo's Viper was alluded to in this thread, but it's $89. At the same time, however, if OsTIrus isn't going to evolve with its binary, then that might open an opportunity for Szabo to evolve it through Viper. Maybe he already has. But at $90 and proprietary, I'm fine with OsTIrus.

 

Last edited: Nov 17, 2025 at 10:15 PM

yeah I remember it. It was cool used physical modelling synthesis (Karpus Strong) and Surge has a String oscillator based on the same principle