The Sound Board

eDNA has had a v2 update and a rename to Earth, which is seemingly focused on a reorganisation of presets and NKS support:



It's currently on offer for £99, reduced from £149.

There's some specific instructions for those who have the original library here:



I do own the original and I'm on the fence about updating, even though it is free. There are three reasons - 1, while the patch re-organisation definitely looks like a sensible improvement, it is still very basic - mildly staggering that they didn't see fit to have a proper patch browser in the instrument with a few basic tags. 2, I haven't used it in many projects, but updating will break these - likely not in a permanent way, but an irritant nonetheless, and 3, given I don't use NKS I'm not sure its worth the bother.

eDNA, the original, was one of my purchases that steered me away from Kontakt-based synths. It just feels cluttered and clumsy. It is possible to overcome much of this, but this release feels like a major missed opportunity here. Much of the content sounds really nice, but I still doubt I will turn to it often. It shares much sonic space with Omnisphere, and the latter does it far, far better imo.

I figured - what the hell, I've used it so rarely, what have I got to lose?

Followed the update instructions. The good news - it works! Well, all the legacy instruments need re-pointing, but the new stuff is there ok. The bad news - its actually fails to meet my very low expectations. The one area that I thought really worked with the original was the Synthetic Orchestra. Now it has its own category - great, I thought, should be quicker to find rather than remembering which obscure subfolder its in. But what I failed to realise is that they actually removed the most useful labelling in the file name - brass, strings etc. Or for pads - gone are basic descriptions like "Ethereal", "Simple". So now its just a list of random patch names, hundreds of the things in big long lines, all jumbled together. Admittedly they're not 213 characters long now stretching across 2 screens, but by removing about the only useful info that there was near the front of the file name, I'm not sure that's a step forward.

I already had it pegged as a wasted opportunity, but sheesh. Update successfully uninstalled, back to the old version.

Thanks for following up, Guy. It's always unfortunate to see anyone taking a step backward.

Interesting to note, Guy. Of all places, I saw an advert for this on facebook and looked into it. Now having bought Time Macro, I've really sworn not to buy anything more until Alex finishes his Cinematic series, but listening to some of the demos - especially Homay's - I got really tempted. However, I already own a good deal of offerings from Output (like Analog Strings), which seems to inhabit the exact same territory, as well as more purely electronic synths like Arturia's V Collection. In a rare moment of lucidity, I decided to fire up these up again and within about 15 minutes (no less thanks to the very handy preset browser present in Arturia's creations) had recreated everything I'd heard in the demo and walkthrough. It may only be £99, but seeing between all of that and the fact I still don't actually own Omnisphere, seems a much wiser decision to save my money towards getting Omni one day.