Access Virus TI line still not available

Still, Access isn't able to deliver the new TI-line which has been announced in november of 2004. Some guys of the inofficial Access Virus mailing list had immediately sold their Virus Cs after the announcement and are now waiting for the TI for almost half a year (don't laugh, it's a fact ;-).

The main new feature is the integration into the computer desktop/sequencing software. Not important for me due to the fact I'm working on a Linux box and I guess there will (with reason) never be an ALSA-driver for it.

I'm not necessarily in need the other new features which make the TI different to the Virus C.

Hypersaw? I'm no house or techno musician

More voices? The 32 voices of the C are really enough most of the time, except when playing too much with the unison mode (I simply avoid unison mode)

4 RAM banks of singles instead of 2? As long as there are still ROM banks, it's not important. A really cool feature was if all banks would be RAM

Three destinations for all of the six modulation matrix slots? That's a bugfix or consistency fix which I'd like to see in an OS upgrade for the C (Access is known for their fair upgrade policy, BTW)

Individual effects for each of the 16 Multiparts? Cool, but that's not something spectacular, it's a tribute to faster processors. And all information I saw only told that reverb and delay are individual for each multipart - are all the other effects excluded?

Embedded singles in multimode? That's really cool, but too less to upgrade my C :)

What still a lot of people will miss in the TI:

A freely assignable eight stage envelope with loop start and end point as known from the Waldorf Microwave

Three equally featured LFOs with an envelope each which can be used as a source in the modulation matrix

Three equally featured oscillators like found in the Novation Supernova. It's cool to switch the third oscillator off if it's not needed, but there's no reason why it is limited in features, e.g. the selection of waveforms differs from oscillator 1 and 2

Individual and bipolar Detune for each oscillator is a must have. That there's no detune for oscillator 1 is really sad

Adjustable and modulatable bandwidth for the bandpass and notch filters

Individual Envelopes for both filters

Individual volumes for each oscillator in the mixer, finally dropping the old two oscillator design and make the saturation simply depend on the sum of all oscillator volumes. Drop the oscillator volume knob and make the oscillator balance knob dependent on the oscillator select button

Endless rotaries instead of the knobs, which can act as switches when pressing on them. This would save a lot of buttons

All parameters should be accessible via the menus, even if there's a hardware control for it. There are simply values which are very difficult to adjust via the knobs due to the fact that a parameter has too many values

Make sending a ROM bank to be forced to the bank specified in the global settings. Currently the Virus simply ignores incoming ROM banks complaining about illegal bank number, ignoring the global setting to force it to bank A or B

According to ROM writing copying ROM banks to a RAM bank would be very useful

Improving parameter names. »Patch volume«? A patch is called a single in the Virus.Filter parameters? »Cutoff« and »Cutoff2« instead of »Flt1Cutoff« and »Flt2Cutoff«. »Filt1Reso« and »Filt2Reso« are prefixed different than all the rest of the filter parameters, which are prefixed by »Flt«. Sorry, it's a mess.

Remove the velocity settings from the global menu and move them to the filter and oscillator menus

Hierarchical menus. The flat menus require lots of clicks to find the desired parameter, especially in multi mode

The audio quality of the Virus is outstanding, but the parameter set strongly limits the capabilities of the machine and makes audio design more complicated as necessary.

But anyway, the Virus is a really great machine which allows unique and present sounds. And to be honest, the Polar simply looks very very cool.

Keep up the good work, and make the next synth again a Virus, but with real impressive new features. I guess that lots of C users will skip the TI and wait for the next generation.