Product Reviews by KVR Members

A quick review of Playbeat which I purchased yesterday at the discounted limited time price.

Windows 10 using Sonar and the standalone version.

In the DAW, I found that occasionally the buttons would stop responding to clicks. It is easy enough to get responses back by closing the VST window and then reopening. This causes the buttons to start responding again.

The only big disappointment for me is that saving a preset seems to only save the pattern for the four channels and not the samples that you have selected to build your performance. I built a few very nice pattern / sample combinations and saved the presets. On loading the presets the sample boxes are blank, the correct patterns are there for the beats. I assume this is how it works by design, but I would suspect many users would not want to have to remember and reselect the samples they used to create the preset.

However, Playbeat is a great deal of fun and amazingly easy to use. For those working on a project, it is a no brainer to record your backing parts in the DAW to an audio track.

At the intro price this is a sweet VST and standalone application.

See The Revision to this review Below:

The only reason I am giving Harvest only two stars is because it only works with Abelton Live and FL. It would not be a problem, but the restriction appears in a small area so that I did not see this when I purchased it. Therefore, I can't use it since I use Sonar and Studio One as my DAWs. Many times when there are restrictions like this, it is made much more apparent.

I did install it and check it out, but it does not output to my synths in Sonar ... very disappointing. However it does look like a nice product. Just a warning read the specs carefully.

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN REVISED ....

I have changed my rating to 5 stars for the following reasons:

1) From the review, I was contacted by one of the developers who understood the problem I ran into with not noticing the restrictions. It was great to have such a quick response. As they specify on their site, I could get a full refund, but I choose not to. I was told they were releasing an update shortly that would expand the support for other DAWs and that was enough for me. Also, it is great to have such a personal response and courteous exchange.

2) Sure enough today, there is a free update that has support for Studio One. I was happy to test it out. I had some confusion about how to get it to work with Studio One, but in about 15 minutes I figured it out. Watch the videos Harvest has produced. By watching I could easily understand how this works.

I'm very happy with this VST. I have other similar plugins, but just as in the case of Harvest they are all different and unique. The price really can't be beat.

I tried it with Sonar. It seemed to work, but I managed to crash Sonar. After my learning experience with Studio One, I went back to Sonar and got it to work with Sonar also.

The only minor problem I had was after stopping a generation I noted that the receiving VST (in my case Omnisphere) did not get a "note off" MIDI message. However, I just cut it off manually so not a biggie.

Great job and great customer support.