I'm not much interested in using the multi mode myself. Unless we're talking about preview purposes, of course. For recording the audio I'd rather have all the voices available for each patch. And surely wouldn't mind if they cut that feature all together if only things would work in a very reliable way. I think the integration has obvious benefits: being able to automate parameters is an obvious one, saving the patches used inside the projects another. Editing on the screen is useful for synthesizer with complex structures and many options like the Virus ti. Don't really miss it for my C - and if I did there's some options out there, so that's not really the bonus here. The other factor is the one you pointed out yourself: having a great sounding synthesizer that doesn't hit the main cpu that shares the best of both worlds: it behaves as an instrument and it's still easily configurable inside the software environment we use to make music with. So we're talking high end quality that spares our main cpu and we're talking functionality and convenience.
Unless Novation has some wild genius that managed to make at first attempt what Access has been struggling with for so long without success (which I find hard to believe), I'd say it's shocking that other developers haven't implemented this on their own products.
About the other thing I talked about. It would be possible to have a card similar to Universal Audio but open to third party developers, right? That would be amazing. Maybe a good incentive for developers to implement more demanding code without worrying about hitting our main cpu to hard - like it's happened with Diva. Noticed that their first update was mainly focused on that, adding the capacity to use more then one cpu core I think (but not sure). This is a big factor when it comes to software, right? I have no doubt that if this wasn't the case, software would easily compete with just about anything when it comes to quality. I've seen some texts about current DSP theory (again, not nearly as versed as you are in such matters), so I have a general idea of where we stand today. I mentioned Discovery DSP pro and failed to mention they've just implemented "zero feedback latency filters" on their last update - which brings it closer to the level of more recent offers out there. There's a lot of them doing that: Diva, Monark - even though this one is a Reaktor instrument, if you take the time to dig through it, they've locked access to the filter (sad, very sad but true) -; Madrona Labs's Aalto, Sonic Academy's ANA synth, Waves Audio's Element, Lush 101, etc. All of these have modern DSP (demanding) code into them and all of them present better representations of self oscillating filters that we wouldn't even dream about a few years ago. Funny how the good old Moog inspired filters on the Virus (from C onwards I think) still hold it compared to even these new offers. But not by much I'd say.
Which one of these you guys like best? (interesting subject, no?)
very cool thread btw