Ableton Forum

Hi there - this thing has great reviews just wondered what it's like in practise?

I really like the idea of adding your own wavs and morphing them - anyone made any truly unique sounds with it?

I've listened to some demo songs on their website and they all sound pretty ambient and spacey - is it as good at say leads?

Thanks for your time

Release

I love Cameleon5000. It makes truly distinctive sounds and lets you make remarkably complex sounds in several ways. It's great for pads but has good strong lead sounds too. All depends on what you feed it.

It works a lot differently from the way most sample-based instruments do. Here's the deal.

You feed Cameleon a .wav sample. It doesn't store the sample, though. It analyzes the sample and saves a time series of coefficients that let it reproduce that sound's harmonic content (along with a similar analysis of its noise content and coloration). You can play this back through a resynthesizer that reassembles the sound as it was recorded -- or you can alter how much of each harmonic is present, change the character of the sound over time, etc.

That's just for one sound! Here's the morph bit.

Cameleon gives you a joystick-like square where you assign one analyzed sample to each corner, then move a dot around to choose how much of each of the four sounds to mix in. The closer the dot is to a corner, the more of that sound. You can put the dot in one place, drag it around in real time, or assign automated morphing timelines that make the sound evolve according to a pattern you choose (or create).

Not enough yet?

Instead of one dot, you can split it into three dots, one that tells Cameleon how much of each sample to take the harmonic content from, one for the noise spectrum, and one for the overall volume curve -- and position each of these individually. You can do some very strange things this way.

For added fun, you can import bitmapped graphics files and convert them into sounds. Takes some practice but I can now design sounds right in Photoshop. :-)

Download the demo, experiment with it. It's complicated but you don't have to learn it all at once. The full version gets you a huge library of presets, so you don't have to load and analyze your own samples unless you want to.

[edit] Cameleon can take some serious CPU, but it runs okay on my 1.7GHz Vaio. Your laptop should handle it with no troubles.

Best of luck!

Meffy

So, it's a bit of a beast then - might have to invest!
There's so much new stuff to go at these days and as always not enough time.

Thanks for the reply Meffy!

Recently i've been messing with the (free) limelite solo from Native Instruments - this is a serious piece of kit - it's a kind of drum machine but so much more too. Theres a couple of issues with it mind - 1) It doesn't seem to export perfect loops & 2) Can't seem to re-load pre-saved configs, which is a real shame - I came up with a few great sounding grooves within minutes and can't get them to load back up. Have you seen it?
PS Got my free copy from computer music mag - Issue 79

cheers

Release

I have been using Cameleon 5000 for about 6 months and while I was initially enthusiast about its possibilities, I can't say that I still am. Its serious CPU requirements limits its usefulness in almost all situations. Even when I used it on a PB 1.5Ghz with 1GB RAM, it still maxed the processor many times.
There is also a glitch with it that hasn't been resolved after months of discussing it on forums and email. If you have an instance of Cameleon running in a track on Live (or any DAW), and there are tracks already playing back in your composition, if you change to another patch in Cameleon, the audio from the DAW will noticeably cut off for a second. This obviously makes for a problem if you're playing a live set in front of an audience. Camel Audio suggested using multiple instances of Cameleon in the DAW, and switching to the track you want with the particular instance on it, instead of changing patches in Cameleon. This is not a practical work around, since it takes a tremendous amount of CPU power to have multiple instances of Cameleon running at the same time.

After being alerted to this problem many times in the past, Camel Audio still hasn't found a solution. Maybe doing some clever manipulation of a buffer to compensate for the problem during a program change? They don't seem interested in fixing this.

I am also experiencing a MIDI related problem with their standalone version of Cameleon. Cameleon doesn't respond to my Edirol PCR-80 keyboard controller, any other softsynth works fine with this in standalone mode. I contacted Camel Audio about this and I never heard back from them. For the $200 I spent on their program, I would expect better customer support than this. I get the feeling that I'm dealing with two guys in a garage, rather than a professional music software company. It's like I'm bothering them, or something.

I couldn't recommend buying Cameleon. There are many other interesting softsynths you can get for $200 from companies who support their products much better.