Originally Posted by LaserLobes ➡️

Just a few observations about Mariana and the new Moog (InMusic) after owning Mariana for the past 5ish months or whatever, and a bonus harrowing tale of customer support.

First. I love the sound of Mariana. To me, it sounds killer the way it breaks up and is nasty. The filter sounds cool. I don't care if it sounds like anything else or what people think it should sound like. I just really like the sound.

But. I hate the GUI. The GUI was obviously made for iPad and they just kept it the same for all systems. There is a synth page and a separate control page (modulation). Having them separate sucks. But wait. There's more. There are actually 2 synths or voices or whatever, each with two pages. And then a mixer page with weirdly restrictive effects and no master filter. Each synth side has it's own filter. If you want to filter sweep the whole synth, you have to use Cytomic's The Drop (still the best filters after all of these years) or something else. I'm not great at maths but that's like 5 pages. And the pages take up a lot of screen real estate but you can shrink them down but you can't read anything very easily. It is just really weird and difficult to enjoy. So, I basically just use one of the synths and ignore the other. Too many pages. But you can't turn one of the synth sides off to save CPU. Which seams like a criminal omission. Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Is there like a button?

Speaking of CPU. I would say it is not great. On my M1 MacBook Air w/ 16gb ram running Ventura, I just loaded 1 instance of Mariana version 1.1.0 into an empty Live 11 project at 48kHz sample rate with 1024 buffer. 15% CPU according to Live. This was the same when I loaded it into an actual working project as well, not just an empty one. I checked 96kHz and it was 27%.

But wait, they just optimized it and have released version 1.2.0. So I spent 5 minutes trying to log into the website but it's the wrong website even though it has Mariana marketed on it. You gotta find the OTHER moogmusic website login. Side note: I've been using the internet for some time now and I feel like I have to learn how to use the internet all over again for the first time to be able to use moog's website. Whoever designed this is... not nice or not competent or maybe psychotic. Maybe it's the same person who designed the GUI. Anyway. I got the download (hint: it's not on the moogmusic website under downloads --> mariana. No. You have to log in. No, not that login. The other one). Anyway ... again. I got the download. 17% at 48kHz and 32% at 96kHz. Super!

BONUS STORY: I emailed MoogMusic (InMusic) the other day with a completely reasonable question that I couldn't find an answer to in the manual. I let them know that I couldn't find the answer to this completely reasonable question in the manual, and I then proceeded to ask my completely reasonable question. It took about 3 days to get a response. They were all like: "You're issue is VERY important to us. We look forward to providing the best possible service to your important bla bla corporate speak whatever... Please click the link provided below for information regarding your important issue..." So I clicked the link. The link was a link to the user manual. Incredible. I'll spare you the grisly details of the correspondence over the next several days, but rest assured that my question was never actually answered. I never felt supported. The next stage was "It's proprietary (go away)" followed by "Oh yes, it's proprietary but what you responded with in your last message is the right answer (please go away now)" [paraphrased]. Now, I know that I'm crazy (right?), but I swear to you, my brothers and sisters, that I was completely sane during this correspondence. Total control.

So, in closing, I've learned some important lessons that I'd like to share.

1. Avoid, if possible, companies that have been taken over by private equity (or whatever InMoogMusic is). I probably won't every buy anything from Moog again unless it's on reverb.
2. Avoid, if possible, software instruments and effects that have been designed initially for iPad. Yuk.
3. I still really like the way Mariana sounds and I'm still going to keep using it despite all of my ranting and raving. $50 on sale.

You've been warned. Ok good talk. Be nice to each other.