CronoX 3 Lives!

<img src="http://www.osxrecording.com/images/CronoX3_Main_Tab.jpg" align=right>CronoX 3 is a sampler-synth (not a sampler!) that was developed by the brainiac Peter Linsener, who sells this and other great inventions under the guise of his company, LinPlug. The full, downloadable version retails for $139. (USD). There is a boxed version available too, and this comes with extra pre-sets. Installation of the download version went painlessly for me and although a 400 meg download might seem a tad big, its so chock full of goodies (most of the download is taken up by the pre-sets) you will be glad you took the time.

I won’t give you a shopping-list of features in this review, you can check them out for yourself over @ www.linplug.com, I’ll try to concentrate more on what you can do with all those doo-dads when using CronoX 3 as a plug-in in your favourite AU or VST compatible host. Oh, I’ll also tell you what makes CronoX 3 one of the dead-set, no-doubt-about-it, Gotta-Buy-This-Thing-Now’, soft-synth releases of 2005.

Anybody remember the Yamaha DX7?
Well, I do, (though come to think of it, I can’t seem to recall much about DX-s 1-6... maybe I’m just not old enough...)

Anyway, CronoX 3 has nothing to do with that ancient beast, but you know how some synths have a ‘sound’ that is instantly recognisable, even when its buried thigh-deep in thick, drippy, sticky reverb? The DX7 sticks in my mind because of those wheezy FM-synthesized bells it produced, but that gross form of familiarity wasn’t/isn’t limited to the old Yamaha gear. You know the thing of which I speak, I like to think of it as the ‘Cher-Outa-Tune (Do you believe in Love?) Syndrome’, wherein everybody in the industry says (the first time they hear a new trick) “Hey! How did they make that noise?” and then, when listening to ten-millionth track its used on, “Man, who ordered the extra cheese for that song? Can’t we get some air in here?”. You know the old saw, “..oh, that’s an old Prophet 5, oh, that’s the GM set from Plug-Sound Free, oh, that’s my stomach rumbling after last night’s curry... Oh man! can’t we get some air in here!?!”

Sorry, I digest. Back to CronoX 3. I promise not to stray any more from the matter at hand.

The point of all that rambling/rumbling is to establish an important fact about the newest CronoX, that being that you will not be saying in 2 years’ time “Oh man, there’s that CronoX 3 sound again!” Why you ask? Well, it can be summed up in one word: ‘Flexibility’. (Of course I’ll rumble on a lot longer than that, but still, its an important word.) What makes CronoX 3 soooooooooo flexible is:
The sound generation platform it uses; its filtering, effects, and modulation possibilities; the clever way that the developer, the very personable Peter Linsener, has made all this accessible, through a very simple to use GUI that lets you get at the heart of his mega-music-machine easily and quickly.

Easy as 1-2-3, A-B-C, baby, you-n-me, eh?

Talkin’ ‘bout CronoX’s Generation...
Let me start at the start, with CronoX’s sound generation. You get four fully mixable, modulatable ‘Generators’ with CronoX 3. They are, Oscillator (the usual suspects sine, saw, square) Time-Sampler, Wavetable (Schrader) and Loop-Sampler. Its in the sampler side of things that CronoX 3 really excels – you can use WAV files (your own, or those that come with the pre-sets). Remarkably, when using the Loop-Sampler, you can load up to 64 (yes, SIXTY-FOUR!) samples in each of the generators, adjusting volume, direction, loop length, octave and so-on and so-forth. Loop Sampling is only available with the first two Generators, but believe me, that’s enough to keep you busy for hours!

The Time-Sampler is equally flexible, though here you only get one sample to play with. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “....awwwww, I was just about to buy this thing, but you only get ONE sample to play with in the Time-Sampler? Bah! Pass me that remote, I wanna change the channel!” But I don’t want you to miss the point here, so how about a little quote from the CronoX manual:

“...what you can do with this one sample is unique. You can time-stretch it in realtime (time is available as modulation destination!). You can pitch-shift it without affecting the duration. And you can use key tracking to control the Time parameter, allowing you to create really weird sample-based sounds! Of course you can also reverse the sample, as well as use it for amplitude and frequency modulation...”

Time as a modulation destination? Whoa! I gotta stop eating curry so late at night, I think I am staring to hallucinate here!

The Schrader Generator gives CronoX 3 a wave-table capability and again, you have a lot of options, including speed tracking, octave setting, and a thing Peter calls ‘Polyphonic Unison’. Polyphonic Unison, although a tad CPU-hungry, gives you an interesting way (basically controlled de-tuning) to thicken up your wave-tabling efforts. Think Polynesian-style singing (as in singers from Polynesia in the South Pacific). You know that choir sound that arises from big group wailing away at semi out-of-tune, full throated singing? Well, its kinda like that. Its a rich and interesting sound, and now its available in reasonably priced soft-synth! I must admit, of all CronoX’s wonders, this one doesn’t grab me as being particularly useful, unique or special, but then again, a poor workman always blames his tools, and I have never seen anyone complain that their guitar only has six non-editable oscillators, so I guess its all in what you do with what you got, eh?

The oscillators oscillate as you would expect, except that Mr Linsener’s GUI lets you progressively (via a tres’ cool sliding ring-thing Peter calls a ‘Circular Slider’) mix and match not only the waveform you are using but the pulse width as well. This morphing and width management allows for a surprisingly wide variety of sonic possibility. Need to fatten up that groovy WAV file sample-sound you got going? Just grab an Osc and twist ‘til it sounds right. It’s easy, quick, and produces rich and thick and chock-a-lit sounds (or in fact, really tinny sounds too, if that’s what floats your boat). Again, can you spell ‘f-l-e-x-i-b-i-l-i-t-y’?

Filtration, Effects and Modulation...
<img src="http://www.osxrecording.com/images/CronoX3_Settings.jpg" align=right>
CronoX 3 has two in-line filters that can operate as ‘Standard’ (low-pass, high-pass and band-pass) or ‘Free’. Not sure about the name, ‘Free’, but the idea is great. In the Free mode, you can adjust the filter using one of those ‘Circular Sliders’ over a 360 degree range –this, like the morphing capability in the Oscillator section, allows for some creative morphing between filter-types. There is complete envelope control for the filters as well (standard ADSR, also including an ‘F’ for ‘Fade’). Cool! To my ears, the filters are flexible and can really hep warm up sounds nicely.

CronoX 3 gives you an effects chain that allows you to use up to 6 different stereo sound-mangling modules on your sound. You can’t play around with the effects chain per se, (as in change the routing order) but you can decide which effects to put into each slot (with a couple of limitations like not being able to use the same effect twice in modules 3-6). Although the effects are fairly basic, because you can modulate the bejeezers out of them in the Modulation Matrix (more on that later), it means you have an (almost) endless array of possible variations that you can use to effect your sounds. The 12 built-in effects are those you would expect to see (chorus, delays, reverb, etc.) and like the rest of this machine, their sonic quality is first-class. For example, I actually like the reverb that comes with CronoX 3 so I use it a fair bit. I usually turn off any built in synth reverbs, ‘cause they sound so bad that you wouldn’t want them even if they came free along with your breakfast cereal, but CronoX’s reverb is good enough that I wish I could use it on some of my other soft-synths.

CronoX’s Modulation section is another thing that helps to set this synth apart from the others. Here you can control ADSFR envelopes (one each for Generators 1 & 2, two for modulation, and one dedicated to the amp). They all work in a straight-forward way, with sliders to change the values and an option to select between Linear and Logarithmic movement between envelopes. The four LFO’s in the Modulation section each have 9 parameters and these LFO’s can be put into the Modulation Matrix to affect just about everything else in CronoX. The Arpeggiator is basic, but musically useful, with my favourite feature being the ‘Swing’ parameter. Swing lets you create a sort of shuffling syncopation that takes this otherwise ordinary arpeggiator from the boring 80’s type of chuggidy-chugg into something, well, a bit more human.

Lastly, the Modulation Matrix is a joy to play with, even if it does tax this reviewer’s brain a bit. You get to set up to 10 modulation routings, with 56 destinations and 30 sources to choose from (thank goodness for the clear documentation!). In a nutshell, if CronoX 3 has got it, you can modulate it. I must admit, this is the least intuitive bit for me in CronoX 3, but I still like clicking on it and changing settings, just to see what madness I can create. I would think that hard-core sound programmers would end up spending days in this little section alone.

OK, it sounds great and can make you a cup of tea, but does it look good, I mean, I have to look good ALL the time...


I like everything about the GUI, (well, except for a couple of things, see below) and I find it very easy to navigate around. It uses a tabbed interface, with most of the basic things you need all on the ‘Main’ tab. You can click through this tab to get into greater detail for the Generators, Filters, etc., It is a very responsive GUI, without sticking or weird value jumping, and all the sliders work as you would expect them to – smoothly and with good control. I have heard it said that it bears a striking resemblance to a GUI of a well-known synth made by one of those large multi-nationals, but hey, even if he stole (shhhhh......) the whole thing, I don’t care, ‘cause it works for me. In addition to the circle-thingies I mentioned earlier, Mr Linsener has included a thing he calls the ‘X-Y Editor’. I love this idea. You can take filter balance and generator volume and using a kind of track-pad approach, manipulate their values very directly –just by grabbing the intersecting lines and moving them around. Words don’t do it justice, grab the demo and play with it. This little editor idea is intuitive and provides great instant aural feedback (the good kind of feedback, not screechy!) and clear visual indication of what you are doing to your sound.

My gripes with the GUI aren’t major, but maybe I should tell you about them anyway. I don’t like that you can’t type values directly into parameter settings, but to be fair, you can hold down the ALT key when using a control to make it increment by the minimum step value. The file-browser is a bit limited (its essentially just two lists, Banks and Patches). You can’t add any notes to your patches either (hey, its hard for a guy who can remember the DX7 to be able to remember what he did in a particular patch, so I need to make notes, OK?). When you go to save-as, it defaults to ‘Untitled.’ which means if you are tweaking a pre-set and you just want to save a new variant, you have to type in the whole name again instead of just slightly changing it. None of these are show-stoppers though.

And finally, I have never been a big fan of yellow, or fake wood-grain, and ugh! retch!, CronoX 3 has them both. And when you are recovering from last night’s curry... and you fire up CronoX 3 and your stomach is burbling away... well, let’s not go into that, OK? Maybe some day we will get user-changeable skins for all our soft-synths, ala’ Ohmforce’s ‘Symptohm’, then again, I don’t know if I could face one of their GUI’s after too much curry either...

You want fries with that synth?
CronoX 3 is good, it does all this and more, plus it is one of the few 5.1 surround-sound capable soft-synths out there. Absynth 3 being another, but I find CronoX’s little 5.1 mixer (located at the bottom of the Main tab, toggles with the built-in keyboard GUI) to be infinitely more useful than Absynth’s 5.1 mixing capabilities. Although you can’t mix everything around in 5.1 space (you can only place two of the Generators and some effects, etc.), it lets you do a lot more than most synths. For example, you can take a Generator, place it in one channel of your 5.1 mix, and then throw the effect output across the mix into another channel –and that is only the beginning!

CronoX 3 also has Easy Controller Setup (ECS). ECS lets you assign MIDI to all/any of CronoX’s controls with just a couple of clicks. Its quick and easy, and because its simple I find I do more MIDI-controlling with this synth than with others I use. I would think that live performers would be able to extract a lot of use from this feature, because it allows you to have really fine, continuous control over just about everything CronoX 3 has to offer.

Registration is easy and painless. There are no dongles, no three-thousand character long product codes, and Linplug has a web-site that actually works. There is also small but healthy community over @ KVR.com that supports CronoX users. And last of all, here is something that is important to me, even if its not important to others. Peter Linsener is a human, an artisan, and through his words and actions, he shows a genuineness that is hard to fault. Here is a Peter-quote from a recent interview:

“I mean, nearly everybody is moaning how bad the world is, how bad people are, and that we need more respect and understanding for each other. I try to put my beliefs in to action through LinPlug, treating people fairly, providing them with a fair value for what they give me, and by showing respect to my customers.”

I can live with that, but I don’t know if I could live without CronoX 3.

The Verdict (5 star system)
GUI/Interface... 4/5 (It works great but, ooooh, YELLOW! That curry is repeating on me again...)
Stability... 5/5 (It is the most stable piece of software I have, TRUE!)
Manual/Tutorial... 4/5 (There aren’t any tutorials, but the manual is clear and well-written and does offers tips.)
Sound... 5/5 (Isn’t what this is all about?)
Value For Money... 5/5 (Its too cheap, way too cheap.)
X Factor... 5/5 (Time as a modulation destination? Please! Take me there!)

Review set-up:
OS X 10.3.9
Full (Download) version
Host, Digital Performer 4.12 (as an Audio Unit plug)

By-line
BK is a guy who makes dangerous modern art, he has no stake in LinPlug, he’s just a fan.