Rob Papen seems to be the kind of guy who is able to program
inspirational synth sounds in the way that the rest of us breathe ?
regularly and without any apparent conscious effort. Even if you
haven't heard of this Dutch sound designer by name, you'll have heard
his handiwork in soundsets for Access, Alesis, Emu and Waldorf. In
2002, Papen approached Peter Linsener of Linplug with the idea of
building a virtual instrument worthy of bearing both their signatures.
The result was Albino, a soft synth with four oscillators, two
filters, comprehensive modulation routing, and effects. That might
sound just like a lot of other 'generic' soft synths on the market,
but Albino 's trump card was its 1400 high-quality sounds designed by
Papen himself. These presets alone were well worth the cost of the
program, and for anyone wanting to try their own hand at sound
sculpture, they also showcased the exceptional range of tones and
textures that Albino was capable of producing.
Version 2 duly followed, adding a powerful arpeggiator and new digital
waveforms, and beefing up the effects. The latest version, Albino 3,
carries the flag forward a further stage. Probably the biggest news
for existing users is that each preset can be made up of four
individual sound layers. This literally quadruples the creative
possibilities when programming individual sounds (80 oscillators per
note, anyone?). But it also makes up for the fact that Albino is not a
multitimbral instrument, so if you want to run several sounds at once
you have to run several instances of it. Or rather, attempt to run
several instances, as Albino continues to have a large appetite for
CPU resources. Linplug reckon that a well-specified Mac or PC digital
recording setup should be able to handle about 120 digital or 75
virtual analogue oscillators' worth of sounds. In real terms, on a
dual-processor Power Mac G5 running Pro Tools LE, I can't
realistically run more than three instances of it.
Other significant Albino 3 changes occur in the filters department,
where the previous Silk and Cream varieties are joined by a rather
less than polite Scream variation (very tasty when the resonance is
cranked up) plus a Comb filter. The effects have been expanded with a
wah-wah, a great Lo-Fi effect, a more flexible reverb and a revised
compressor. And Oscillator 1 can now be used as an audio input, so you
can use the synth to process external audio. Albino 3 comes complete
with 2100 new Rob Papen presets, ranging from out-and-out hardcore
trance boneshakers to subtle shimmery arpeggios which fall like
digital meteor showers. It's almost impossible not to feel inspired to
create new music every time you load one of them up, which is surely
the test of any sound designer's mettle.
But Albino isn't just about playing back other people's efforts.
Experimentation is made easy by the user-friendly single-screen
interface, and the synth's transparent architecture. It's actually
quite difficult to come up with something duff even if you don't know
what you're doing ? which can't be said for all soft synths. Albino 's
main strength is its ability to produce sounds and textures that can
find a place in all kinds of music, not just the obvious electronica
suspects. If you haven't sampled the Albino magic before, you really
owe it to yourself to check out the demo. For current owners, it's
definitely worth keeping pace with developments by upgrading,
particularly at the very reasonable price of 39 Euros. Incidentally,
Mr Papen is giving away a few extra presets on his web site,
[www.robpapen.com][1]. And further commercial presets from Linplug
include soundsets from British synth pioneer Ian Boddy and the
recently released 'Yemski in Motion', comprising 350 evolving textures
and soundscapes designed for film scores and ambient music. Nicholas
Rowland
�132.95 including VAT; upgrade from v2 39 Euros.
<
https://www.soundonsound.com/>
2nd download: the rar extracted and re-zipped for convenience. It is
for OS X 10.5 PPC it seems, no Tiger.
3rd Download contains Albino v 3.10 Demo. It works on PPC machines.
"The demo version of the instrument is fully functional. You can do
anything with the demo version that you can do with the full version.
You can even save your presets. Demo version also include a full range
of presets which demonstrate the instrument's capabilities. The only
restriction that applies to demo versions is that they emit a noise
about once every minute. The full version of LinPlug instruments do
not emit this noise."
Compatibility
Architecture: PPC PPC (Carbonized) x86 (Intel:Mac)
OS X 10.5 PPC
[1]:
http://www.robpapen.com (www.robpapen.com)
