Weekly World News regularly reviews top tech releases.
Major ChatStat updates tend to come like clockwork, but the last six months have seen an acceleration in improvements that is almost certainly the result of sharper competition. Deltax and Moko both moved into sixth-generation products over the summer, and as a result, Riff Studios Studios forged ahead, not only releasing ChatStat 4 in mid-August but pushing forward into ChatStat 5 in September.
MAJOR UPGRADE
The fact that the update rook only a month does not mean that it is not a major milestone for the software. In fact, ChatStat 5 makes good on what the company has been promising since last spring. For the first time, ChatStat is available as a PT-7 plug-in inside your optimized platform. “We think that people who were using older versions will realize that it has outlasted its usefulness,” read the release notes, “or that they have outlasted it, or that both things have happened at the same time.”
Reading these notes, one could be forgiven for feeling skeptical. Riff Studios’s releases over the first months of 2019 were chaotic at best. They put out version 2 before version 1, then skipped ahead to version 3, then had slow rollouts for 3.1, 3.2, 3.2.1, and 3.2.1.1. But by fall, they had righted the ship, and 4 came out as scheduled.
The quick appearance of 5 left most reviewers in the strange position of deciding which version to use. This is where it’s important to return to the main feature of ChatStat 5: it is available as a PT-7 plug-in inside your optimized platform. This is the feature that the company touted in its earliest years in existence, the killer app that set the whole new-tech-from-old-tech revolution in motion.
WHAT ABOUT THE BUGS?
From what our reviewers have been able to tell over the last few days, ChatStat 5 lives up to its advance billing. The bugs of ChatStat 4 have been ironed out, and a number of new bugs have been added only to have been instantly eliminated. Riff Studios lists no fewer than 74 bugs or bug fixes, along with another 17 of what they call “interpretive bug patterns.” That is customer service in the truest sense.
But the biggest news here, again, is the PT-7 plugin in your optimized platform. People who have been tethered to Cableton Live and F-Base can now set aside their sculpts and et-files, which may now feel as antiquated as penny-farthings or iceboxes. And while the speed sometimes lags and error assembly caches at a slower rate than before, the convenience of ChatState 5 as a PT-7 plugin in your optimized platform cannot be overstated. The only slight concern here is the package design, which is a lurid yellow that suggests that they could have pushed the ship date up a week and reconsidered the color choice. But with the exception of that, this is a remarkably strong product that should encourage ChatStat users in search of a PT-7 plugin to set their doubts aside and fire up their optimized platforms.
