Image-Line Sawer Virtual Synthesizer Software

Incredible little synth. It is very flexible and has a juicy sound. I had never used anything by Image Line prior to this purchase, but quickly went back to GC to buy the only other IL synth they had in stock (Toxic Biohazard) immediately after tooling around with Sawer for a while. It renders some thick basses, lush ambient moving pad, sharp leads... You name it and this little baby satiates. I had just bought Arturia's V Collection 6 and Syntronik, so I was in an extremely synthy mood, and trust, Sawer stands up to the quality of either of those libraries with ease.

First, I purchased what I thought was a hard copy only to open the box, and then DVD case to find a note card detailing download instructions...I'm not a big fan of wasting time or resources, which delivering a note card inside a plastic box inside a cardboard box full of plastic bags certainly does...I do however like hard copies of things as I have had to reinstall all my software multiple times, which includes Logic Pro X, Native Instruments Komplete 10 (evenutally upgraded to Ultimate in no small part to have it on a hard drive as opposed to 13 DVDs or whatever it is), a ton of Waves plugins, some SoftTube plugins, and more...but thankfully this isn't a huge program, as the download only took seconds... That said, I can not get the download to not to operate as the demo version...yes, I read the knowledge base article, I downloaded a new Regkey and dragged it to the correct folder (even though the instructions weren't updated for the more recent versions of OS 10...if I use the instrument, every minute or so it fades out and back in. Image-Line has no phone support, they have a forum which they say is monitored by people around the world, at all hours, we shall see how long a response takes, but I don't have high hopes up as previous to my post the most recent one was 4 days ago... As to the quality of the sounds, the jury is out as far as I'm concerned as I want to make sure that things get sorted out before I invest much time in tweaking things...I am underwhelmed as to the number of presets available as jumping off points, and can't say that I see Sawer becoming a go-to choice in situations where I want to get in the ballpark of what I'm hearing in my head quickly, whether it ever becomes something I reach for over other VI's I have I don't know, but instead of being excited by it, or even being happy with it as a one trick pony given the price, I kind of just imagine myself using the Retro Synth stock to Logic in situations where I was hoping Sawer might be an upgrade.