Good sound, flawed offering – ARP ODYSSEi Review

Overall, this is a feature-rich, great sounding app, and if that's what you're after, you'll be happy. However, there are some shortcomings that the potential buyer should be aware of. First, the manual is very weak, and barely scratches the surface. There are screen shot errors that don't match the copy, and the writing appears to be done by somebody who's not a native English speaker. Forgivable, but not exactly helpful. The oscillators are a problem; VCO1 and VCO2 do not run on the same frequency; you can fudge the fine tune on one or the other to get them to almost be the same pitch, but it makes me wonder what else is out of calibration that's less noticeable. It's sort of correctable, but one-half star down for that problem. The other issue I have a problem with is the weak MIDI implementation. Virtually every synth app I have lets you map MIDI controllers to the functions of the app. Not so, the Oddysei. It would be less problematic if the default mapping were ok, but the mod control on my Arturia modulates the Arpeggiator steps, and when it snaps back to center, the Arpeggiator bumps down to 1 step. All it takes is a bump and zammo, my arpeggiator is whacked! The only solution is to re-load the preset. I'm trying to find on which planet this might be considered musically useful, but it's not this one. This knocks the score down a point and a half. I suspect Korg licensed this from a 3rd party, because overall, it's not up to their usual standards. I hope the do a rev that addresses these issues, at which time I'll address my rating. 3 stars.
Review by DennisK33 on ARP ODYSSEi.