During his Miami Vice days, Jan Hammer remarked to Keyboard magazine in September of 1985, "I'm not going to touch another Jupiter until they put the random arpeggiator back in. That's one of the most amazing tools of the last decade".
Well, it's back; the Jupiter-8V's arpeggiator includes parameters for up, down, up and down and random, and over one to four octaves. In fact, it's a better version than the arpeggiator that the Jupiter-8 was originally equipped with, as its tempo can be controlled two ways: manually, or synced to the tempo of a track, when the unit is employed as a VST-compatible synthesizer in a digital audio workstation (DAW) program.
Who's A Good Candidate For Jupiter?
Apparently, a number of Arturia's software synths are notorious for their high CPU loads, and unfortunately, the Jupiter-8V is no exception, frequently generating a 20 percent CPU load on Cakewalk Sonar's RAM usage meter. (My test PC, built by Sweetwater, is a dual core Intel with two gigs of RAM, incidentally.) Many DAW programs have built-in "Freeze" functions for MIDI synth tracks to reduce CPU loads; the Jupiter-8V is a good candidate for this feature.
So who is a good candidate for the Jupiter-8V itself? This isn't a product I'd recommend to beginners — Propellerhead's Reason remains probably the easiest and most versatile software synth right out of the box. And Zero-G's Nostalgia contains a much broader cross-section of vintage synthesizers, though it lacks an arpeggiator. But if you owned one of the original Jupiter-8s and want to experience the joys of its analog sounds without the temperamental qualities of a 25-year old piece of hardware, or enjoy recreating the sounds of the early 1980s, then this is the instrument for you.
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