Great ! Thank you very much to everyone for your opinion and infos !
I downloaded the demo and indeed, Geist has the functions I'm looking for. I just tested to make a pattern with my own samples. However, it is the very first time I'm using it (without referring to the user's guide) and there has some logical operations that are not obvious for me: for instance, the direct manual drag and drop of the samples to the individual pad doesn't work; it's with the "Autoload" function and selecting first the pad and after, the sample in the browser that the sample is assigned...
Without being too demanding, I would like, as you mentionned, to have the explicit names of the pad of the grid that appear ;  have the browser window much larger in order to more easily select the files and samples, as well as the ability to change the pads for keys keyboards...
 

Geist is definitely a Read the Manual (RTFM) product. It is essentially a DAW unto itself, and some features are not intuitive (or even visible) unless you know they are there and what they do.
 
I made a post last year of the sampling/slicing by taking the first 5-seconds from Phil Collin's "In the Air Tonight." Geist sampled, auto-sliced, and immediately determined bpm for the clip so it was about as "easy" as it comes. Here is the post I made on that which has some detail for just this feature, but definitely RTFM for Geist.

mettelus
Geist is definitely a Read the Manual (RTFM) product. It is essentially a DAW unto itself, and some features are not intuitive (or even visible) unless you know they are there and what they do.
 
I made a post last year of the sampling/slicing by taking the first 5-seconds from Phil Collin's "In the Air Tonight." Geist sampled, auto-sliced, and immediately determined bpm for the clip so it was about as "easy" as it comes. Here is the post I made on that which has some detail for just this feature, but definitely RTFM for Geist.

+1
My son is interested in learning geist and he's very hands on and never reads manuals. Geist is a product that RTFM will save a lot of headaches.

Also, fxpansion put out a series of quickstart videos on youtube that are helpful for those who prefer a visual example approach.

Thanks a lot for every info you give !
I have some fun with building a pair of patterns with great results concerning the groove and dynamics  ! The quantize function is very efficient and maybe it's just me, but could you confirm that the Sonar quantize function is not as smooth as the Geist one ?
I had nevertheless some concerns :
- I froze Geist to get the audio track (and copy the rendered audio file to another track) : RESULT : there are kick transient missing. Any idea of the cause ?
- When I select  another virtual instrument,which, in principle, stop feeding the midi inputs of the other Vsti or midi program, Geist continues to respond to the keys of my controller ?? So if I want to play another VSTi, I still play Geist (yet unselected !)at the same time.
Thanks in advance if you could give me some ideas !

peter434
Thanks a lot for every info you give !
I have some fun with building a pair of patterns with great results concerning the groove and dynamics  ! The quantize function is very efficient and maybe it's just me, but could you confirm that the Sonar quantize function is not as smooth as the Geist one ?
I had nevertheless some concerns :
- I froze Geist to get the audio track (and copy the rendered audio file to another track) : RESULT : there are kick transient missing. Any idea of the cause ?
- When I select  another virtual instrument,which, in principle, stop feeding the midi inputs of the other Vsti or midi program, Geist continues to respond to the keys of my controller ?? So if I want to play another VSTi, I still play Geist (yet unselected !)at the same time.
Thanks in advance if you could give me some ideas !

Honestly, i never compared quantize head to head to give a fair assessment.  Good question.
 
The freeze issue i have not encountered.  Closest i have come is once i had an issue similar to your second issue and realized it wads a midi echo issue and it was actually not freezing geist but another synth that I was layering. This brings us to the likely cause of your second issue.  Go into the track panel and make sure you are not echoing midi output to geist

Thanks very much Dub ! I will check that !
But concerning the audio rendering which comes after the synth freeze process, I already encountered that with a Trillian bass sound ! there was saturation !
I'm going to open a new thread to watch if there are similar cases.

mettelus
+1 to the above. I bought Geist this time last year because of inputs from dub and sharke. Geist goes on sale for 99USD fairly regularly, and is definitely worth checking out. Be sure to run the wheels off the trial too. My favorite feature is "spitter" which allows you to pull audio samples from any track in a DAW (I.e. if it can be heard, it can be sampled/sliced as you see fit).

To me, Geist is a software version of Maschine, and I have lost interest in owning more hardware.

Thanks for mentioning the sale price that might appear from time to time. I'll watch for that as we enter Black Friday mode and see if we get lucky.

I indeed have a lot fun and instant gratification with Geist (still demo version which sucks)).I still work with excellent samples for my kits (those from Xclusive-audio that I prefer to all other samples) and it's rather quick to get very good grooves !! I think it's the best and most useful program I have in my plugin arsenal.
I just have a problem with Midi : When I select another instrument , it's always triggered by the Geist pattern playing back (whereas the Midi inputs of Geist are routed to nothing (??) )
I also took a look to Maschine  and it sounds still attractive !
Watching for the Black friday too !

Geist can generate MIDI output. If you are running X3, the "Enable MIDI Output" is enabled by default when inserting Geist in a project. By default input  on MIDI tracks in SONAR are set to Omni. This means the Geist MIDI output will be picked up by all the other MIDI tracks. To stop this, either turn off "Enable MIDI Output" when inserting the plug-in or by right-clicking on Geist in the synth rack or make sure the other MIDI track are not set to Omni.