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You have access to all operator's for advanced programing. The Expert page is of course the entrance to the deepest editing possible in FM8. (screen shot?) Even a complete novice can combine sounds here to create immense new sounds of their own. Well, Native Instruments has helped greatly in that respect by adding something called the Easy page. Some people can be intimidated by the immense number of options available to tweak a software synth. As well the new FM8 is backwards compatible with all the old FM7 patches.
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Native Instruments has built upon the great foundation laid by the original FM7, yet kept all the original FM7 feature available. Simply click the tool, login and your brought to your page with everything you have registered. And with the tool they provide, you can keep track of updates and everything right online. But it is painless and greatly appreciated by those with several instruments needing to be tracked. If your studio PC is online, it is a simple one click process. I have griped for years about some of the hoops we had to jump through to register some software.
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I must give a huge thank you to Native Instruments for their excellent registration tool. Available formats are VSTi, DXi, and RTAS for windows and AU for Macintosh. This synth does not require the huge array of samples required by some software today, so it is an easy install from CD. They have added features one could only have dreamed of back in the DX7 days, and greatly improved the usability for even the novice to software synth programs. The original FM7 was a giant step ahead for FM synthesis, and now FM8 has taken it even further. I was more then interested to see how a software version would be implemented. Having owned several of the hardware synths this is based on, the Yamaha DX7 released in 1983 and later its big brother the TX802. When I was asked to review the update for Native Instruments FM7 to FM8 I definitely jumped at the chance. NI recently upgraded their FM Synthesizer, and HRC's resident synthesis aficionado, Paul "Noize2u" LaBarre takes a peek at it.
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