The Real Suspects OsTIrus 🧻🧻🧻🧻👍🏼

Virus TI hardware has come to the end of its life. The chips are used up, the company has moved on. Party over. But a quite wonderful sequel has come about – Access Music have granted freedom for an open source emulation to be made available as a virtual instrument. This means that an ‘aspirational’ synthesiser that separated the high classes from the poorer enthusiasts has come into reach for everyone. Free.

A short while ago I bought Viper which has never claimed to be a 1:1 emulation of the Virus TI. It’s a very excellent replacement – when I tested my own virus sounds they were impressively close. But running OsTIrus you begin to hear the differences – an LFO with a bit of a klunk every sweep, a couple of oscillators that aren’t phasing against other as they should. Little things that don’t change the quality of the music. But OsTIrus is exact – in my testing there is no audible difference whatsoever between the hardware and this software.

The Virus series have always been popular and owned by just about everyone who pretends to DJ on stage at those bloated EDM festivals. It’s a worthy (and hefty) machine, sold more on credibility – which make this open source version even more sweet. Part of the Virus is the huge bulk of presets built into the box, bank after bank. They’re all included here too, which is both generous and irritating. It takes a bit of time to get your own patches to the front.

You don’t get the hardware knobs, so you’re not going to hand tweak multiple knobs on the box. But quite a lot of the time I ran my Virus TI through the Total Integration feature, which presented it as a software instrument with more controls than the hardware. The interface for OsTIrus is a larger, cleaner version of that TI interface. It works exactly like you have the hardware cabled in. Except that the Virus TI was a complete pain in the arse to connect over USB. No hubs allowed, internal or external, it always needed to hog one particular port – if you were lucky to have one. This whole ‘big dongle’ factor is GONE and good bloody riddance.

The Children of the Virus

The Virus TI has inspired a whole heap of other software instruments that do much the same noise. I’ve mentioned Viper but there’s also Dune 3 and Synthmaster and so on and on. So don’t these already replace the Virus hardware? Well they kind of do, particularly Dune. But the Virus TI does have its own voice when you ignore EDM and instead try to find the delicate aspects of the synthesis. The wavetables with their particular deformations and the effects in particular are recognisable – I’ve made a good number of sounds that I would not like to have to go back and reinvent on another instrument.

If it wasn’t free and you didn’t already have a library of sounds you’ve made on a box that might at at any time become extinct … well Dune 3 is pretty good.

Like much open source the documentation is lacking. I dropped the whole unzipped folder into my VST3 folder, then scanned for a new instrument in Nuendo – it showed up. Go to the browser and there’s way too many presets you can’t get rid of. Your own sounds can be accessed by adding them as a ‘data source’, but then you need to create and copy them over into a new bank to save any changes. Takes a bit of time, but makes sense once you get it.