Factory - Modular Synthesizer 4+

Dumbstruck

I am a man of many words. But Factory has just shut my pie hole.

I was dumbstruck in the first hour I spent getting lost in this Ap. The Synthesizer Aps we have today are amazing. Its hard keeping up with the flood of totally great synthesizers now piling up in the iOS world. At last count I have 27 and I love most of them - each for different reasons.

But Factory sits atop them all! Sugar Bytes has achieved something great here: a feature-rich, complex instrument that is uniquely versatile and yet still highly accessible and easy to work with. I found myself jamming live with great ease even with very complex patches and also quickly and interactively creating rapidly evolving musical material ...all within a single patch. This goes way beyond creating push-button presets to select as needed.

You can an actually /PLAY/ this synthesizer. Its a lot like playing with a modular system except the interface is simpler. In fact it's not hard at all.

For the future, I would like to see a better scaled-pads type of on-screen keyboard, such as on AniMoog. You can chose preset scales in Factory, but it leaves the chromatic keyboard on the screen and just nulls out the keys that do not fit in the scale you choose. Sugar Bytes should even consider creating user-defined key-pad tunings so that Factory can get deeper into more abstract musical territory.

I really want to give it 5 stars....but

This synth, is great, really great...probably one of my all time favs for creating patches. You can make sounds with this that you just can’t make with other synths, especially using the 4 track sequencer to drive synth parameters. That alone opens soooo many possibilities, plus the ability to morph between patches. And unlocking it lets you use it as an audio unit ( note to other developers, you’re wasting your time if you aren’t making your synth or fx app an audio unit, you’re missing out on sales. Personally I’ve stopped investing money in non audio unit apps for the most part ) Anyway, Factory is easily worthy of 5 stars except for one thing. When you make a song using it in a Daw, the patch doesn’t load correctly for some presets and you have to reload the preset again, so if you’re using a lot of instances, it make it not worth using it to me. I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a fix, but you shouldn’t feel hesitant about using an app, you shouldn’t have to worry about things like presets loading correctly. I would easily give it 5 stars , but right now it kind of a big deal for me not being able to open a song and just listen to it.

Developer Response ,

We've eventually reported the bug to apple and they confirmed that it's a problem on their end.
So there currently is nothing we can do about it from our side but we are full of hope the next iOS update will eventually fix it. Let's keep our fingers crossed that Apple acts quickly.

Overwhelmed

I can’t put it down. Lot’s of presets to get started but after they
Get in the way. With a bit of work it’s design is to understand and generates one can find no where else. Sometimes it’s a stop the madness moment and at other times did I really come up with that moment. Definitely the place to start with sound design if you are serious and maybe the place to end. No, there are others but this is right up there with the best.