Have been trailling this this morning. The main use I'd have for it is to create scale and movement from single sources (mostly sound design rather than music but you never know), so some of the features would be lost on me (eg importing from a 3D cgi file, or panning in 3D space for surround). For scale, I currently use a plugin called Crowd Chamber from QuikQuak, which does an ok rough and ready multiplication effect.
The first test was to create the sound of multiple sci-fi vehicles passing from left to right from 4 static short loops from a sound effect library:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/udwrkto2oflqg ... s.mp3?dl=0
Sounds pretty good, and it was quite quick to do using their bees preset. There are workflow issues here however, that are all related to sample prep. There appears to be no way to edit the raw samples, so if you have a 20 second file you only want to use a fraction of, then you'd have to edit it first. That goes for volume shaping too - if you wanted to have a 1 second fade in, that's something you'd need to do in an external editor. These seem bizarre omssions to me, basic top / tail fade in / out should be available either on a global or a file by file basis.
Second test - creating a crowd from small number of sources. For this I started with the Big City preset, and inputting 6 terrible 1 second rough samples of me sounding disaffected about life. The raw preset clearly had far too much pitch deviation at +/- 12 semitones, but I reduced it to 2 and it sounded surprisingly good for one-me.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/so478h0g53dy0 ... g.mp3?dl=0
If I had the luxury of half a dozen different people, I think it would sound great.
For the third test, I used the same starting point to have a massed crowd - 130 of me yelling "yes" (just what the world has been waiting for), which only took a few moments to fiddle with the settings. Similarly, created from 6 raw files of me.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5rt7tjchsm605 ... s.mp3?dl=0
The diction here is very impressive, this is definitely better than Crowd Chamber which feels quite artifacty by comparison, and it would just be a matter of adding any appropriate Altiverb ambience.
I think this is probably good enough for me to tip me over the buying edge. Not a tool I'll reach for every day, but I do not infrequently face the problem of having to scale up and move audio and lack a good solution currently. There's always the chance I'll use it in more creative or unusual situations, it looks like a powerful tool. The limitations on basic sample top and tailing etc are annoying, but work-roundable.
