there is no best soft synth, compressor, eq, etc... anything.

There is only different. What do you want to do?

For some questions...there are a million different answers. This happens to be one of them.

Rebirth is the best one around because it is the best emulation of an 808, a 909 and a 303 ever made and now, it's free! If you don't know what the 808, 909 or 303 are...don't bother with it.

Are you creative or just a synth slacker? Do you use the stock sounds, the stock arpeggios, stock settings or do you get into it and create your own thing? That makes a great deal of difference in deciding what is a good soft synth and what isn't.

mh, you are right, I should've specified :)
well now I try to patch: I hate stock sounds, I hate arpeggiators, I hate ALL stuff that do something supposed to be "creative" instead of me. My works may be " technically poors", but they are "truly mines".
I've tried AbSynth and Reaktor, the first seems to be good, the second... well, it is even too much powerful and so it is too much complicated: to just obtain a good sound from a sine you must sweat blood :roll:
Of course, I don't pretend to obtain great sounds in a snap, but also I want to play music and not get crazy studying manuals as an engineer :shock:
Is there a "wise and balanced" solution? :)

get a Virus TI, it's 16 softsynths in one. Ultra flexible as it can do anything you can imagine, and it sounds great.

For much less money, there are veritably hundreds of great free soft syntsh on KVR-VST, just look around. Alot of them are just as good if not better than the "not free" ones.

If you have to spend money, then some industry standard excellent synths are:

Linplug - Albino or Blue
RGC Audio - Z3ta+ or Pentagon
any of the analog emulations by Native Instruments or Arturia
Spectrasonics - Atmosphere or Trilogy
Korg - Legacy collection

most of those have demo's for you to try out.

luck

there are REALLY good free synths??? :shock:
may I ask you to tell me a couple of names? :)
btw, thanks for the advice, I've never heard about any but those of NI... so I will try the demos if they are available :)

If you want good VST info go to link removed.

thanks 8-)

uhm.. to any guy reading here I suggest to try "ZynAddSubFX Synth"; it is Open Source and VERY powerful...

there are lots of decent free vsts to name just a couple - crystal is great : http://www.greenoak.com/crystal/
And 4 front make a good piano, rhodes, bass vsti etc
http://www.opensound.com/proaudio.html

Steinberg Hypersonic is a good paid vsti as is the Korg Legacy (I prefer the Digital edition which combines the M1 and Wavestation sounds, as there are a zillion analog vstis)

the very big problem into free or Open Source musical software is the non existence of a GOOD sequencer for both linux and windows platform...
btw thanks for that link, is very cool ;)