I fell for the Computer Music mag's latest temptation. There was a free synth included from Xils labs called Xils 3 cm. I was a bit over enthusiastic about it expecting great sounding presets, but I was let down. Funny sounds yes, great sounds nope. Still the mag staff make a whole feature of the synth. Perhaps with a lot of tweaking it could sound good. But why on earth the sound developers don't make good sounding presets to begin with? Also less funny was that my old laptop failed to read the included dvd. Luckily there was mentioned a place called the vault where it was possible to download the same stuff that was on the dvd.

Generally, I've only heard very disappointing news on these freebies that have a CM after it. There seems to be issues with that particular version.
Xils makes some really good synths and I still have a very old Audio Midi deal I got sometime back, but I never really installed it in my new DAW. I do remember the pads were really good/phat sounds, but it was CPU intensive on my old machine.
 
At least kakku, you didn't pay for this.

Actually I got at least one nice synth as mag freebie this way. The Dune cm has a couple of good presets. Somebody who knows how to work the synths probably benefits from this Xils synth too. I paid 12.30 euros for the mag (though I ofc bought it because of the synth)so it was a reasonable price I guess.

I love my XILS 4. I have not see the CM product but I assume it could be a version of XILS 3 CE. Maybe with a reduce preset set?

Like the EMS synths they are based on they have a lot of peculiarities. You can do some really weird routing and come up with very unusual sounds. They do work as a conventional keyboard driven synth better than the originals but their forte is in complex modulation effects.

They also make interesting effects processors. The full versions have enveloped followers and pitch to voltage converters so in addition to the synth to process your audio, you can use the audio to control your synth. Brian Eno used EMS synths to process sax and guitar in Roxy Music.

Disappointed in a freebie?
 
That's almost as bad as being paid to take a product and then complain about it.

I think it's super, super important for a *instrument* to have lots and lots of presets.
 
 
 
Listening to lots and lots of presets makes it so much easier to to recognize which 3 actually sound good.

Actually I would be super satisfied if in a synth there was just 3 really good presets.

@Glyn: Yes it would seem it has a lot fewer presets than a full xils 3 has. I am actually testing the synth again and for some reason it sounds a bit better now.

Of course the original VCS 3 and Synth A had no presets not even a basic starting patch. That did not stop Pink Floyd and Roxy Music from doing some remarkable things with them.

IMO most of the CM studio software is good stuff. Especially U-He Zebra CM and Dune CM.
I think most (all?) of the XilsLab synths are software versions of hardware. So criticising them one should compare them loosely to the hardware. According to the specs Xils 3 emulates Synthi VCS 3 modular synthesizer and the 256 Analog Sequencer. So it's the  "same" synth used on, for example, "Won't get Fooled again" by the Who. A legendary instrument, so maybe that's why it was given so much attention. An emulation of 70's hardware surely sounds different than any modern instrument.