I own Synapse Audio The Legend and have used for years an older version of Diva, and I can say with absolute certainty that The Legend cannot hold a candle to Diva's capabilities. I really dig The Legend but Diva sings a more complex melody.

 

Not completely sure but we might be saluting the same flag here. My point was just that these have a different sound than a NI Massive or Omnisphere, especially given the sound altering options specific to uHe. Wasn't saying everything doesn't have its place, for god's sake sometimes one might actually need to saw through a mix. Not doubting anyone's ability to melt any other synth into a mix either, but there are usually a lot of uses for the different colors in a crayon box.

 

It occurs to me that OP needs to learn to "make up his/her own mind". ;)

Take stock of your situation, consider the pros and cons......and decide. :D

I am pretty certain if I had the hots for a Diva like the OP clearly has, I'd be booking dinner. Diva at $90 is damn good, nobody disputes it? But because you are resistant, something tells me maybe you shouldn't buy it. There are maybe more pressing or proper demands on the cash?

Reading the thread prompted me to recall the last things I bought, in an amazing bargain: one dollar (pound) for each of these:

Hybrid 3

https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/1545

Vacuum Pro

https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/1558


99% off the usual price. Now that's what you call a sale! I still use the "demos" though - instead of register, enter this, do that, blah blah blah.

It is nice to have legit full versions (though they don't do anything different!)

 

Cant even find it second hand for that price. Including right now during the sale. All these opportunistic parasites are trying to sell their 60% off bundle codes for 75% of retail

I paid some guy 45 bucks for color copy which probably cost him about 27, but it was the best deal available

 

Exactly !

Uhe dev cycles are super long... with 12 employees, they can't just live/survive by selling 1 new plugin per year.
Ex, the audiority devs. They started not so long ago, with 1 or 2 plugins... today, they have at least 20 apps on their catalog. Ok, maybe it's not huge plugins that require 4 years of analysis, but still...

Mac people will hate me, but devs lose a lot of time and money, because of apple...
With a new macOS per year, devs are constantly updating their plugins... typing code... alpha... beta... by the time they release an update for macos 10.a, they must start thinking about the 10.b update.... when they release the 10.b... it's almost time to prepare for the 10.c arrival...
It must be a nightmare, to try to maintain all the apps updated and ready to work flawlessly with the new macos version.
And while devs are perpetually updating their mac plugins, well... they are not coding new ones.

For example, Uhe. Zebra, zebra hz, diva, the ubiks stuff, hive, bazille, ace, satin, presswirk, colircopy, the spring reverb, repros... that makes over 20-25 plugins that must work perfectly, the day the new macOs10.xx update is out.
Don't know if the juke mainframe they use allow a faster development for multi versions/os.. but still...

And while probably 3 or 4 guys out of 8-9 coders(sales, ads, admin, accounting, etc staff don't code..) are permanently busy upgrading all the mac versions, only 1 or 2 guys are really 100% working on, eg, zebra 3.

Maybe uhe prefer quality over quantity... and also, dissecting pieces of hardware, circuit boards, measuring components.. that must take a ton of time.

I wish some devs could tell how total % they make with mac plugins, and how % costs they represent. I wouldn't be surprised if the mac sales account for 20-25% of the overall sales, while accounting for 60 or 70% of the overall costs.

Because yes, most videos, tutorials, youtube... we can see people working on macs.. but the reality is, probably only 5 or 10% of the musiciens/producers in the world can afford to spend 1000's on those nice macs.

Yes, people would love to see many more products being released by uhe.
What if native instruments became a new plug-in alliance 2... ? Uhe could go there and say, hey guys, i have new ideas for 4 new products, but don't have the resources. .. can we borrow 4 or 5 NI employees, so they can work on it, so we can release it much faster ?

Uhe wants to stay independent. But competition must be so fuking rude. Zebra users must be desperate, eternally waiting for zebra 3 to release. If NI could help uhe...

Maybe this strange NI UHE promo is some kind of a future joint venture ? Who knows...
Maybe this is a way to test people to see if they are OK with NI-UHE working together...?
Otherwise, why not making the price reductions right at uhe website...

 

Last edited: Feb 18, 2019

Hello...From where you get Diva for 80$? it's discounted 50% at native instruments for 89.50$!

 

Urs has spoken about the reality of this a bunch on KVR. They spend a lot of time and manpower on keeping everything properly supported. and hats off to them, it's one of the many reasons I love u-he as a developer - they prioritize the integrity of the product and probably in the same stroke the reputation of the brand. They roll updates out slowly, and new plugins/paid upgrades much slower yet, but can usually be pretty confident that if one of their plugs has a bug or something is no longer compatible, you won't have to wait through multiple update cycles before it's fixed. They keep the foundational shit in check, which is really nice.

Right now and for over a year now my favorite synth is probably VPS Avenger. It doesn't sound as good as u-he but it does freaking everything (and adding features every few months), its pretty intuitive, and I know it like the back of my hand. But it's not nearly as stable as my u-he stuff. Random crashes when you open/close the UI during a certain process or during playback or whatever. Annoying. That shit never happens to me with Zebra or Diva.

 

U-he is a good developer. Those products deserve every bit of the discounted price. I paid much more for all my u-he stuff, and I have zero regrets. If you won't buy it at this price, chances are you were never going to buy it at any price.

 

The Legend's appeal is that it sounds closer to the original Minimoog Model D than Diva, if you are looking for authentic emulation. Diva goes well beyond Legend's abilities as a synth and if i had to choose one of the two it would be Diva. If i had to buy one soft synth though, it would be Omnisphere (actually i own both Omni and Diva, U-he's "spyware" protection has always being a pain in the butt, more for the legit user than the pirate). Version 2.5xx with the hardware integration just blows everything away, at least for the professional musician/producer/keyboard players.
As for the "90 plugins", i use about 15 compressors, 10 reverbs, 6-7 delays, 11-12 limiters, 20 eqs, 5 transient designers, 6 filters, 5 modulators and about another 50 discrete effects both time based and dynamics. And when i say i use them i mean i use them all. Different sound situations require different tools. There is no "do it all" plugin. Each mix is different. When i bought Waves full 20 years ago i thought i was done with fx plugs. I soon found that just like with hardware, each and every different virtual "machine" in the same type of effect behaves/responds very differently. Some algorithms are really clever, some are just programming scams lol.
So, kids and some amateur enthusiasts may cram their comps with softies and never learn to use them properly. This is not the case with people who make music seriously or for a living.
Y'all be well

 

that got me curious, whats that about, and how bad is it?

 

im about to pull the trigger on this, someone hold me back

 

Yeah I'd like to know what you mean as well. From what I understand the protection that U-He uses is the best possible one for the end user and it doesn't act as spyware at all, there is no phoning home and all you have to do is enter a serial, no dongles or drivers or challenge/response and so on. Honestly it seems like the perfect copy protection to me, being annoying only to pirates but completely negligible for the legit customer. The way he handles it definitely has made me want to buy his stuff, even though I'll pass on this offer right now because I'd like to start with another synth other than Diva.

 

Yes,what I call a spyware protection is Tone2.

 

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=472847&p=7292768#p7292768

 

I am poor, but I jumped. I can't really afford this now - but I definitely couldn't do it otherwise, so it's a now-or-never sort of thing.
A lot of my activity has moved to Linux, but I keep coming back to MacOS because I just have so many more toys there, even though I know I don't need them. So another thing that decided this for me is having some more high-end commercial plugs that are Linux-native. If I could have picked ANY six U-He plugs, the selection would have been a bit different. But I have no doubt that these will be fun to explore. Although I will be eating lots of beans and rice for the next few weeks.

BTW - U-He's Zoyd and original More Feedback Machine were my first ever OSX/AU plugins

 

I love Diva, its my most used synth alongside Hive. I own all u-he's synths and CC and Twang both great FX, amazing customer support although not the fastest developer . IMHO If you have any doubts about this bundle especially if you have a KK keyboard, just buy it, its an amazing deal from one of the best Devs. around and it really benifits form its NKS implementaion.

 

Can I just say that I don't exactly dig the affect whenever something cool joins the NI brand? It happened when Heavyocity bundled their libs with NI also and I just feel like once that happens its like the underground loses some of it's edge when it crosses into the mainstream...

 

LOL dude as a rap fan, fuckin tell me about it. 50 Cent used to be way more than a meme. I'm not worried about this u-he/NI deal but it definitely takes one of my favorite "cool" developers and puts them in the same room as a company I find so uninspiring that I've never even considered buying one of their products.

 

I can't speak for your experiences w/ DIVA or w/e. For me Legend is the (far) better option in every way that counts. I would say that Urs "chats breeze about Lego what an awesome guy" Heckmann is also the same Urs who vehemently supported Tone2 when their spyware program was caught out for having software synths buried deep in the code. Much of his frothy, unthinking support is still there online if anyone cared to search. A lot isn't. It is a short step (it may even be the same thing) from this to advocating this. Neither is acceptable if a software dev is to be trusted with your productions. Urs and his ilk cannot be.

I don't know that I'd ever go so far as to call Native Instruments "cool", but I can tell that you appreciate Reaktor, as does every thinking producer.

It certainly has more presets?

 

Last edited: Feb 16, 2019