Rigid Audio

To say Rigid Audio's Sodium is an exercise in sheer frustration is the understatement of the year. The pluses are it clocks in at a mere 250MB, and this is a Kontakt library! A lot of the sounds aren't bad, either. The problem is the sequencer. It's like pulling teeth. You can't just sequence all 32 steps and have them play like that. Nope. You've gotta press 'A' then 'B' to accomplish that, and then it STILL doesn't play all 32 steps back to back or in a loop. Also, you can't just import a difference drum sound in a slot. You have to use whatever the kits give you. This means you can't audition each individual sound. You have to take the kit as is, no variation possible whatsoever. Lame! Audiomodern's Playbeat is what Sodium needs to aspire towards as that can import wave files. Both machines do allow you to flam and pan each drum step in their respective lanes with Sodium giving you more options like multi-effects and reverb. And Sodium's odd drum trigger layout on your keyboard leaves much to be desired. Still, that's where it does have Playbeat beat. With Playbeat, you can't press a key to trigger the sequence. I use a virtual input in Cubase with my Presonus interface to accomplish that. It's a little convoluted and time consuming, but it is what it is. No VSTI's perfect.

Bought this on an offer with RIgid Audio, have to say am very impressed, their best Kontakt instrument yet and they've got some great ones, I think what makes this is the modulation possibilities and the sheer variety of morphing electronic sounds, definitely great if you like making music of a slightly stranger bent, also has an electronic folk feel to the sounds too..

Nice percussion tool, easy UI and good sounds and at the present offer price ($6) its a no-brainer to purchase. I would have given it 5 stars but as there is no manual/documentation some of its usability is hidden and even after playing around with it I am unsure what some of the keys and clickable icons do. Come on Rigid Audio gives us some documentation.

I'm new to Rigid Audio's work and I sensed this was one of the rare and unusual cases when a lone developer (in this case seeming to be focused on Kontakt Script Processing [KSP] turns out to have a great ear for putting together aptly named sonic material representing an unusual variety of moods and genres. Similar to "Plugin Guru", Dennis Lenz out of Berlin has both the ability to place material conveniently together, and program the %^$*) out of the interface. His sound palettes make excellent sense in several styles.

There's over 9 gigs of zipped sound content (close to 12 on unzip). The site continues to have ridiculous pricing (the sale price the other day was less than $30), and here price has a bit to do with my rating. Even at 3 or 4 times that price I think Hypernode would merits a full 5-out-of-5 stars, both because of the sounds and because of the creative interfacing and feature capability... I did not find a manual or sufficient tutorial videos to be able to understand all the features or uses (even some buttons remain mysterious), and there's been a delay getting a response to some support questions; so I'm settling for 4-out-of-5. That said I haven't fully explored the features of the package (tested the demo and purchased last night). But there is enough here to both jam and record into a DAW in lockstep (or swing, although the swing positions are in 10% increments, would be nice to see a little more resolution in case, say, one is matching to another product like BFD3 for example - but after all this is all within Kontakt).

I'll continue to try & learn the interface and possibly add to this, but I thought it was worth jumping in with a quick review.

Note that the full version of kontakt is required to access full functionality. But a 5 multi demo is available for free download. If you are not impressed with the demos it may not be a fit for you; but ambient & chill lovers should find the included samples useful enough for the discounted price at the very least. (NOTE: The demo blurb indicates that a free version of kontakt is sufficient, but this may mislead a buyer into thinking it applies to the full version and full use of the product - it is not...).

Fantastic programming on this one. Jamming with it harkens, for me, to what is possible with MIDI quantize as incorporated into Vsts like Omnisphere and Stylus by Spectrasonics (and elsewhere of course.) I haven't seen another Kontakt instrument by a single developer with more modularity and control, period.

This is probably the best from RA so far. Had a free upgrade to v1.1. And there will not be enough days to get through all the sounds.

Really going to be used a lot as so many useful sounds. One small blip is the dark lettering that is hard to read on the buttons until lit. Maybe make these lighter.

At the current price. Its a no-brainer.