Arturia Analog Lab Free Download (Mac)

Analog Lab 2 houses the engines of Arturia’s entire current collection of software instruments, sixteen in all to be exact. It is available as an individual purchase for $89 USD and also comes with the Collection V bundle (list price $499 USD). It is available in all mainstream formats in both 32 and 64 bit and can be run as a standalone or in a DAW host.

Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately. This thing offers every single preset of every instrument in the Collection V lineup. That’s over 5300 presets. Even at full list price (and Arturia sales have been known to happen), this is a steal.

So what’s the downside? Why buy the full collection when Analog Lab 2 has all the sounds? It should not be a surprise that the instrument presets cannot be changed using Analog Lab. But as you’ll see, there is great latitude to tweak the sounds using front-panel macro controls. However, you, the user, do not get to choose what the macros are – more on this later.

Analog Lab 2 is a second version of an earlier incarnation (but hereafter we’ll drop the “2” for brevity when naming this current version). It was introduced in a recent major wave of enhancements to Arturia’s software instruments that included numerous improvements to that long-lived line, most notably for some users is the ability to resize the UIs. So, now we just have the full collection bundle (but also, all the single instruments are available for individual purchase).

My fellow writer Rob Mitchell has been reviewing a number of the Arturia software synths in recent issues of SoundBytes. You can read about SEM V, Jup-8 V, Solina V, Synclavier V and Matrix-12 V by clicking on the respective links. We will be providing more coverage of more of these instruments in future (I plan to do a review on the marvelous Arturia Prophet V in our Jan. issue).

The Players

Let’s start by introducing the lineup of instruments on offer in Analog Lab. All sixteen of the instruments produce sound via computational means – no sampling is involved. To begin with, we have three pianos: an acoustic piano and two electric pianos. Next we have three classic electronic organs: the B3, the Vox Continental and the Farfisa. The other ten instruments are all synths of historic significance.

Let’s start with the synths in detail. I will list the number of Analog Lab presets offered for each as we go through the list that follows.