Very interesting Hybrid Instrument from Arturia. And it’s free.
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Just downloaded it; looks interesting. Might complement BBC SO.
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Thanks…enjoying it. Big Arturia fan.
Overview Video from Arturia: Tutorials | Augmented STRINGS Intro - Walkthrough (Part. 1) - YouTube
It looks a little heavy (even after turning off animations) for my laptop. How about others?
Yes, interesting and some great sounds. I need to check it thoroughly.
It is true. The instrument is great, with very good sounds, but my PC crashes with some presets. The same goes for me with some very good (and heavy) Pigments presets. It’s like a never ending story. The programmers know that computers are more powerful every day, and they make their programs taking the old ones to those crashes.
My trick with instruments like this: I put only one instance of the Vsti, program and test the chord progression that I want to apply from the Scaler. When I’m happy with the progression and sound, I drag the progression into the Vsti, freeze the track, and render it. Then I put the Vsti back on another track and start over. The other track is already audio and uses very few resources.
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Thanks for the tips (for poor musicians…) I wish I could buy a computer better than the ones userd by those plugin developers.
Augmented strings are very CPU intensive, for sure. But maybe someday I’ll have a computer that will be newer then made in 2013.
Yes. My computer is about that age (or a bit older; I think I bought it about 10 years ago, ) and even though I’ve been upgrading it (another hard drive, and another block of memory) it’s still an i5… But I’m sure the day i have a better one, i’ll still use the process of freezing tracks from time to time because it drastically reduces CPU consumption. Also, when the computer is heavily loaded with processes, the sound is interrupted and makes strange noises. Rendering to audio is best left for last and applying the effects to the audio.
Anyway, I played a €1.5 lottery for today. I suppose that with a little optimism, on Monday I will be able to buy a powerful computer 
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When I first started getting interested in computer based music, the software was about midi sequencers; machines and software of the day were just not capable of handling audio. Then as CPU power moved up, that sound barrier was broken
Now audio is no issue, and VST’s have become the barrier.
With audio the amount of CPU / bus “welly” (a technical term 
) is, for any given sampling rate, fixed. Hence, once the audio processing barrier had been overcome, the limiting step was track count, in the BV days (" before VST")
And here we are a few short years later, when Omnisphere has 400Mb samples (100 times bigger than all of the RAM in my JD800 synth). Soft synths and effects are being written to consume dramatically more resources since my old soft Korg Wavestation replacement, thus rendering our once shiny and whizzy boxes to wheezing and stuttering wrecks.
The only bright side to this is once we are forced to junk our old faithful boxes, the replacements are (in inflation and ‘bang for buck’ measure) ludicrously cheap.
Remember more or less yesterday when SSD’s where eye wateringly expensive ? Now look
Read that again; a 1Tb M2 device which reads at 3.5 Gb per second (&^~~~@@ !!!) for less than £100.
So when you do retire the old box, within a day you will sit there with a smile on your face marvelling at the performance - at least until the next granular, AI based, virtual modelling, surround sound, 16 layer VST comes out 
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