Product Reviews by KVR Members

Cumulus is available from the physical DVD version of Computer Music Magazine.

It's a granular sampler, run by a sequencer. The sequencer has 8 playable scenes, you can play one scene at a time. Each scene is a location within the sample, plus 12 parameters such as pitch, speed, size and jitter.

I really like the user interface, there's a different color for each scene, and you can easily see how the sequence proceeds through the scenes.

Fragmental is a good free multi-FX for FSU exploration. There are 6 FXs, and you can easily re-route them in real-time to serial, parallel or a mix of serial and parallel. The 3 most interesting FXs are spectral: Transpose, Exaggerate and Accumulate.

DtBlkFx is a superb spectral processor, and it's free! It has about 30 different algorithms. You can process as many as 8 algorithms in a series, but usually 1 algorithm is enough.

It reminds me of Native Instrument's discontinued Spectral Delay.

The UI shows a nice sonogram of both the original input and DtBlkFx's output. There is a Delay between the input and the output, this value defaults to 1 beat, but you can reduce that so it's almost instantaneous.

The documentation appears well done. I just goofed with parameters until I figured it out.

The UI is somewhat unusual regarding how to adjust coarse and fine values, but it's actually convenient when you get used to it.

The last update appears to be in 2008.

ArgotLunar is a superb granular effect. And it's free! It's one of my favorite FSU plugins for drum mangling.

My only complaint is that the presets don't automatically load. I don't know why.