Acoustica Releases Free Nightlife Synthesizer VST Plugin

Acoustica has announced the release of Nightlife, a freeware 32-bit virtual analog synthesizer VSTi plugin for Windows based hosts.

The plugin is released by Acoustica (the company behind the Mixcraft digital audio workstation that is also featured in our best free DAWs article), but judging by the plugin’s design and available features it seems like it was developed by Noizefield, a team of SynthMaker developers who brought us freeware synths like 4 Tune and VACS last year.

Nightlife was designed to be a powerful virtual synthesizer for electronic dance music production, combining a powerful oscillator section with tons of modulation sources. The plugin’s coolest feature is definitely its oscillator section, packing not one, not two, but three oscillators with fully editable waveforms. You can use your mouse to draw any waveform shape you can think of, or choose one of the included preset waveforms (and yes, even the preset waveforms can be edited). The oscillators also support frequency modulation, ring modulation and oscillator sync, so there’s plenty of stuff to play around with here.

See also: Acoustica Mixcraft 7 REVIEW

In addition to the excellent oscillator section, Nightlife comes with two multi-mode filters (with cutoff, resonance and keyfollow parameters), a really cool vowel filter module, four ADSR envelopes, three LFOs and four step sequencers. For a synth with so many modulation sources, it is no surprise that Nightlife also features a very handy modulation matrix, suitable for putting all of those modulation options under control. A set of built-in effects is included as well, which is useful if you prefer having FX such as phaser, chorus or delay saved with your patch, instead of using external plugins.

Last but not least, Nightlife is shipped with a collection of 140 factory presets, which is a huge plus for users who don’t like tweaking their synths from scratch. It is also announced that additional sound banks for this synthesizer will be released in near future.

On the negative side of things, Nightlife was developed using SynthMaker, meaning that it will only work in 32-bit host applications on Windows (although you can use jBridge to use your 32-bit plugins in 64-bit applications). More importantly, the CPU usage is incredibly high and this will probably be a deal breaker for many users. On our test machine powered by an i3 dual core processor, the CPU usage was above 30% in 32-bit MuLab most of the time (running nothing else except for a single instance of Nightlife).

In addition, the plugin is distributed as an installer, as opposed to a ZIP/RAR archive which is always our preferred download option. Finally, you will need to create a user account at Acoustica’s website in order to download your free copy of the Nightlife synthesizer. The registration process is completely free, though, albeit with obligatory email verification.

Video Demo

Check out the Nightlife demo video:

Download

Nightlife is available for free download via Acoustica (9.16 MB download size, EXE installer, 32-bit VSTi plugin format for Windows).