I've skimmed through a few similar threads on other sites and the general consensus seems to be that it's an impressive showcase of Stephen Kay's programming skills but it's ultimately overly complex (seemingly on purpose too), archaic and overall too unpredictable and uncontrollable to be of any real use outside of the odd fun improv. Some people even said it's too band-in-a-box-like and that it feels like "playing other people's music". I don't really agree with that but I can see where they're coming from.

Have any of you tried it? What's your opinion on it? Is it worth using/experimenting with it? I'd like to try it out with my Motif XF but the price is a bit steep. (says the guy who just dropped nearly a grand and half for an 11 years old workstation - the irony is not lost on me)

 

When I had my Korg m3 I had it and it was pretty useful. I came up with good ideas and melodies using it. I also had it for me Yamaha motif. It was definitely worth it. But now there's so much other software that does more then that in vst . Another note the Yamaha motif was my favorite workstation of all times. I'd buy one again if it wasn't so invested in vsts.

 

Got any examples of KARMA-like VSTs?

I was knees-deep into VSTs but ever since I got my Motif XF a little over a month ago I've been using them less and less, especially Samplers. I still have a few Kontak/Gigastudio libraries I use but I'm planning on converting them (or at least part of them) to use them on the XF via flash board. And some HALion stuff that's shared with the Montage (I think). Other than that the only VSTs I still use are my go-to synth Dune 3 and Korg's MDE-X as a multi-fx plugin.

My experience with the XF about 90% of the time is booting it up, finding a sound I need for what I want to do and simply just playing/recording. The other 10% of the time I might have to turn down the effects just a tiny bit. The immediacy of the XF is seriously refreshing for me.

 

Look for the motif expansion libraries that you can load into the rom. Has much more sounds. I remember a guy from Russia giving me like twenty expansions.

 

I did, I've got all the free ones (Inspiration in a Flash, Peter Jung's Symphonic Orchestra, 10th Anniversary Pack by Wojtek Olszak, etc) plus the ones that came with the 40th Anniversary Pack (which I supplied for a release on the sister site) plus a huge pack of commercial ones some guy from YouTube sent me a few days ago. Gonna test each one before supplying them for a release. If you still have those libraries I'd like to have those too.

Only problem is that I only have a 1GB module and flashing stuff to it is sooooooooooooooooo god damn slow. I wish you could also have plain old RAM like the XS to try out sounds faster (and then write the ones I want on the Flash board)