Optik

Summary: Optik is an amazing, focused drum synth. For percussive, noisy sounds out of the box, it can't be beat.

The user interface is your typical PM-style one. It has more advanced controls for each sound easily available by clicking the little box near the sound's title, the controls are clear and focused (though bigger sliders would sometimes be nice), and the look is polished.

As I said above, getting normal noise sounds, filtered noise sounds, metallic noise sounds, etc. are very easy to get out of Optik. I use Battery and DR-Fusion for a bunch of other things, but for your stock white/pink/brown/metallic based sounds, Optik delivers without much fuss. The controls for filters, noise type, filter width and such are readily available and there are no "do nothing" controls.

Never needed any docs so I haven't looked.

It comes with 16 kits, all of which are quite good at giving you a starting point for creating your own.

Never had to use support, so I can't really say anything about that.

Value for money is excellent (it's free!).

Rock solid in the stability department; never once had a crash or even an unwanted blip.

The only thing I wish PM would do is develop a "Pro" version of Optik. Take the noise/percussive focus and create a synth with more features (envelope drawing capabilities, more filters, a sophisticated modulation system, more noisy waveforms, the ability to create your own custom kits with more than the default number of slots, etc.) and load it up with a ton of presets and you've got yourself a great $99 dollar noise/drum synth.Read Review