Apple purchased Camel Audio, a German software company that produced my favorite VST, Alchemy, as well as the infamous CamelSpace and CamelCrusher. Until now, this hasn’t impacted me at all – I knew I wouldn’t be getting any new packs or content for Alchemy, but I never thought Ableton would turn their corporate back on my favorite little VST (a little VST that cost several hundred dollars).

I recently upgraded everything to 64 bit, and I was a little disappointed in how crashy my system became, and how delicate Ableton is now. I had already had some trouble with the installs.

Max still refuses to run for me (Brandon with Ableton assures me that it’s something I’m doing wrong, or a bad download, or something not Ableton’s fault…). The Max install comes as an MSI inside a Zip. That’s two CRC checks that I’m aware of, and neither one failed, so the “bad download” theory is not going to be the answer.

Anyway, Brandon also informed me that Alchemy has reached that point where Ableton won’t support it any longer (you know, because Apple), so if I choose to run it, any problems are, well, my problem. Ableton’s usually better about these things…

So I said all that to say this: I spent a day and a half reloading all of my sound banks into Alchemy, and I remembered why I ponyed up the cash for it – it’s a great sounding synth. Apple customers, you got a gem there.

I cut a trance piece as a kind of proof of concept. It’s in the synthwave arena, I think, but most of the sounds are from Alchemy. Listen, and let me know what you think!

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAthC3FPL2A[/embedyt]