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Microtonic (µTonic)
Reviewed By Fette Töle [all]
February 13th, 2004
Version reviewed: 1 on Windows
GUI: I love the sound editing area and I hate the step sequencer area. As already mentioned by another reviewer, 16 steps is not enough. Moreover, I would prefer to have a more fine-grained access to step velocities than just normal and accented beat. The worst thing, however, is that you can only see a pattern for one channel at a time. When I'm programming beats I need to see the whole picture, so this limited one-channel-only view renders the µtronic step sequencer more or less useless for me. Also, the pattern chaining mode seems a little bit awkward to me. On the positive side, there is a lots of commands which ease the management of drum kits and patterns a lot.
Sound: Just great. It cuts though everything without being painful.
Features: All you need from an electronic drum module. Can be both nasty and very clean. Great versatility with a very modest amount of parameters.
Documentation: Very good manual which covers everything you need to know in a clear and simple language. I just don't like that it comes as html, I had preferred a pdf document.
Presets: myriads, both patches and patterns
Customer support: My questions were answered within two days at max, unfortunately without being able to solve my problem (see below). As a positive side remark: there was a very nice free Xmas package with additional patches.
VFM: although 70 bucks is at my upper limit for a specialized plug, I consider the VFM very good.
Stability: never ever had a crash, although I sometimes treated it not too good (changing whole drum kits while it was playing etc.). A big nuisance, however, is that when you record midi notes through the midi output of the plug, these notes are mostly out of sync. The developer is aware of the problem (which seems only to occur in Cubase SX) but wasn't able to fix it so far. Also, µtronic sometimes seems to ignore the start/stop commands via midi notes.Read Review
Sound: Just great. It cuts though everything without being painful.
Features: All you need from an electronic drum module. Can be both nasty and very clean. Great versatility with a very modest amount of parameters.
Documentation: Very good manual which covers everything you need to know in a clear and simple language. I just don't like that it comes as html, I had preferred a pdf document.
Presets: myriads, both patches and patterns
Customer support: My questions were answered within two days at max, unfortunately without being able to solve my problem (see below). As a positive side remark: there was a very nice free Xmas package with additional patches.
VFM: although 70 bucks is at my upper limit for a specialized plug, I consider the VFM very good.
Stability: never ever had a crash, although I sometimes treated it not too good (changing whole drum kits while it was playing etc.). A big nuisance, however, is that when you record midi notes through the midi output of the plug, these notes are mostly out of sync. The developer is aware of the problem (which seems only to occur in Cubase SX) but wasn't able to fix it so far. Also, µtronic sometimes seems to ignore the start/stop commands via midi notes.Read Review
