Native Instruments Dynamo VST PC

I have been producing various styles from IDM to New Age music for hypnosis CDs for a couple of years. I use an older HP and listen through cheap speakers. I sequence Dynamo as well as Pro-52 with Fruity Loops, which is a great combo I think.

It took a while to figure everthing out, but once I had a grip on the parameters my sound really became very crisp and defined. Personally, I think it was worth it to spend all that time experimenting to learn the ups and downs.

Sounds great at 44.1 but there is the tendency top crash, but I do have an older computer.

One of the best deals out there! Too bad it sucks the CPU at an alarming rate, as I would like to run multiple instances of Dynamo at once. My advice to a new user would be to constantly experiment!

I use a pc with win98se.

Yea, it's rather hard to use. Very little documentation.

Good effects and great filters. There must be more than a thousand presets but really, there are less than 10 basic sounds.
Presets sound very much the same, even from instrument to instrument(!)
I like the granular synths though.

This program has a few bugs. It crashes quite a bit. It's extremely picky about audio drivers. It's a big pain to set up. Many
system restarts. Yea, great job, I guess you guys don't like to beta test. I thought Germans were supposed to be meticulous!

I'm using the 1.0.3 PC version of this plug-in with Cubase VST 5.1 on Windows 98 with a 900 mhz hard drive and 512 mb of ram. I've been playing music about 17 years and have been using my current setup for about two years.

there is a different interface for each instrument in Dynamo. Some are easy to use, some I haven't figured out in the 8 months that I've owned it. There's no good information about any of the interfaces, so you're on your own if you can't figure it out. Also, the window that each interface resides in isn't resizeable, which makes it hard to edit the instrument and forced me to switch to a higher screen resolution in order to access the window's scrollbars. I dislike the challenge/response copy protection scheme, since I have to keep inserting the CD for verification once or twice a week. Dynamo is a memory hog and I can easily get up to 80 or 90 percent of my computer's capacity with two instances of it open. This leads to frequent crashes and general instability problems. Also, some instuments never seem to initialize and so are useless.

now for the good news. Many of the sounds Dynamo can make are very good. It's capable of FM and subtractive synthesis and does some manipulation of samples, although mine never loads new samples correctly, so I'm stuck with the presets on that. The presets are really good and often inspire me to write music around the sound of a particular preset. The sounds are most appropriate for sound design and electronica.

I guess it was worth buying, because I have nothing else that can generate the sounds that Dynamo does. At the time I bought it, Absynth wasn't available for PC but now I would consider getting Absynth instead. The areas where Dynamo shines are the FM synths and the Moog emulation synth. It is a resouce hog and crashes about every third time I use it. I wish Native Instruments would make a version that is stable and would include documentation about each interface, as well as add the ability to resize the instrument window.