Yeah. At first I was wary of some sort of Splice/training-on-your-sounds BS but this ‘AI’ seems to be good old fashioned machine learning (as in an iterative feedback algorithm that doesn’t necessarily use a transformer architecture or aspire to generative output). The ‘map’ in the screenshot is made by comparing the parameters on a bunch of different patches and positioning them in a 2 dimensional space using a K-means clustering algorithm or something very similar followed by a force-directed network layout. I used to employ these techniques to make activity maps of social media communities on Twitter and other platforms. This is actually more useful than not.
I’ve had the privilege to see an online preview of this a couple of months ago with Brian present as well. It’s indeed basically the Absynth we all know and love with some modern amenities.
And yeah the browser is basically ‘just a data cloud’ (don’t want to undersell it because it seemed pretty useful) where sounds are grouped based on their parameters.
I guess a lot of people will be eligible for the £89 upgrade which makes it quite reasonable, but I wonder how many will wait for the next version of Komplete that includes it (I know I will as an Ultimate user). Looking forwad to playing with the demo!
My production muck about started after the M1 chips in Apple Silicon, so I’m aware of Absynth but never used a previous version it.
Someone at NI does seem to have grapsed that ramping down successful products isn’t helping them. We’ve seen the reintroduction (for better or worse) of Trash, Absynth. Maybe they’ll rethink the approach to Reaktor if this works, or even go for another sequel with iZotope with Iris 3.
Looking at this, I’ve been surprised no-one implemented the XO browser for tonal sounds, and the ability to morph a patch looks cool.
I’ll do that. I have complete 11 and will wait until they add absynth 6. Anyway, on PC I use v5 a lot. And I really don’t see any pros to upgrade right now.
Absynth 5 is the best piece of musical software I have. And I don’t know how it works. Once I made a course to learn it and can’t finish it.
Sometimes it’s better don’t understand how something work and be free to experiment. And absynth is the best for that.
I will also wait until I upgrade Komplete, but I do see a lot of pro’s (MPE being the main one as I have an Osmose). The new fx and filter sound pretty interesting and modulation and browser is improved but I would probably have upgraded just for the new GUI…
