The new version, which is compatible with the entire Virus TI range including the Virus TI Snow, features:

• Atomizer (a realtime glitch- and looper effect)
• a third USB buss to transfer more discreet audio channels in between the synth and the computer
• support for multiple devices.

It also adds Virus Control Center, a MacOS/Windows application which can backup and restore the memory content of the entire synth and overwrite the ROM banks with new sounds.

A detailed list of refinements and bug fixes can be found on the download page.

There’s a lot of synth discussion throughout the interview, but a couple things caught my eye:

Do you remember your first exposure to electronic music

Yes, at school someone had brought in Switched on Bach and I thought it was cool. I come from a technical family, my father was an inventor, and although I was only 12 at the time, or something, I thought this was definitely a step forward in the development of instruments.

Do you remember the first synthesizer you ever owned?

Yes! An EMS VCS3.

Awesome. The Putney!

The Putney! Without an instruction manual or keyboard, so I really learned the hard way. I think it took me a year to get the first noise out of it, and of course it was the sound of someone squeezing a gerbil a little bit passionately.

via trashaudio

The new OS version includes a new control centre application for Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Using the stand alone application users can overwrite the ROM patches of their Viruses with their own sounds and perform complete memory backups for safety reasons and archiving.

OS 2.7 furthermore increases the amount of audio streams from the TI into the Virus Control plug-in by 50% and adds input side chaining capabilities. This way, users can send audio from the host sequencer into the Virus’ sound engine all digitally, process it with the TI’s filters and FX and finally loop it back into the sequencer.

The new operating system also increases the amount of ROM sounds to 26 banks with 128 patches each (that’s, including the RAM banks, a total of nearly 4000 onboard sound patches). Among the new patches are patches by Dean Coleman, Stuart Price (Madonna), Numb and many others.

OS 2.7 is available to every Virus TI user free of charge and can be downloaded in Spring 2008.

Version 2.0 for the Virus TI adds Graintable, Formant-based oscillators and enhanced Wavetable synthesis. The new operating system introduces Section Locking for the Virus Control plug-in, searchable patch categories, 25 additional Wavetables and 256 additional signature ROM sounds, an improved user interface, a patch complexity indicator as well as loads of other refinements.

The Graintable oscillators applies techniques as those used in granular sampling and pitch-shifting algorithms to synthesizer Wavetables. The formant-based oscillators work in a similar fashion, only with one crucial difference: the formants remain fixed as you play. This effectively turns the oscillator into a filterbank on steroids comprising up to 256 resonant bandpass filter poles, whereby the cutoff of each virtual pole is determined by the harmonics in the current Wavetable index.

The existing Wavetable oscillators were also updated. OS2.0 allows PWM-style modulation and the degree of interpolation between the individual waves can be altered. As a result a Wavetable can morph from smooth to coarse to stepped (which makes it sound similar to a wave sequence).
Virus Control also underwent major improvements. There is Section Locking, a new technology by Access Music GmbH, enabling the TI to lock specific aspects of a sound from changing. For instance locking everything but the arpeggiator. Now when browsing through the library the sound character will remain unchanged, but the arpeggiator pattern will alter depending on the settings of the selected new patch.
2 banks of signature patches have been added to the TI’s ROM. Brooklyn based breaks and electro wizard Matt Stolley spent most of 2006 working on “10 dirty years” – certainly the darkest collection of Virus sounds so far. Matt Picone also supplied a performance bank.

OS2 is available as free download for all existing Virus TI user.