I can see spectrum is at the head of the pack here, though there are other similar packages out before spectrasonics atmosphere, nothing has been offered on such a scale. With specialised offerings from stein and the rest, it looks like the sample library may be dead soon, and indead the sampler (not including the die hards who want to do it themselves with their own samples and sounds).

I mean what do you want a sampler for ? Do analogue and mangle it ? lots of choice with analogue vstis and reaktor. Construct your own sounds, well this actually takes a lot of work to achieve a quality result that is worthy of the effort.

I can see a lot more of this happening, content locked to specific sound engines or customised engines then packaged. Kontact may well be the final last word of samplers ever I feel.

I'm not talking crap, i know that everybody is lazy. 90% of workstations returned to korg and yamaha still have all the factory presets loaded. Spectrum pointed out that Enigma based an entire CD based on one of his sample CDs.

Sample content will be like games. Many games are based on either the Unreal or Quake 3 engines at present, with some tweaking. There will be a few engines knocking around that content developers will goto, and tweak based on the sound content, and repackage. If your a developer now, will your engine be the one used ? I dunno what engine Atmosphere is using, but think it was on another product too.

As a sound developer these days you have a choice. Either you pick one format and tie your content to it's engine or you continue to make sample libraries or do both. To continue to do both is a lot of work though. We're maybe the last fools to continue to do both as Spectrasonics and several others have made the switch to content tied to their customized engines of choice. Incidentally, Atmosphere is a customized version of the UVI engine that comes from Univers Sons and is used in their PlugSound modules. Eric is quick to point out that there are custom modifications to it that are suited for the types of sounds it has and the other customization is a much better looking GUI (IMO) than the PlugSound modules. I don't know what engine Yellow Tools is using (maybe their own design) but it seems they've only announced this type of product lately and perhaps have abandoned traditional library development.

You are right about the presets being the most important thing to 90% of the musicians that are using these instruments to make professional recordings for tv, film and albums etc. So, in a way, it doesn't necessarily matter if it is a library or an instrument as long as it has good sounds that work right. But, on the other hand, even if one isn't a serious "tweaker" you might still want to organize your "library" of sounds into a sampler. At some point it might get annoying having to go to a whole other instrument plug-in just to get to certain sounds and then another one to get to something else. I mean, everyone here does that to a certain degree but that has limits. I like the flexibility of samplers still for just having that customization of whatever you need in one place of your choice. But, certainly both virtual instruments and some samplers are good to have in your set up even if you don't tweak much.

As a user, I really still like the idea of samplers, and I don't plan on getting rid of mine soon....they are just way too useful and versatile both for creative applications and as a kind of "swiss army knife" that is essential to be able to read the many good libraries and sounds that are out there. Virtual Instruments are great for the many reasons that we all know well here at KvR.

As a developer, we (Spectrasonics) decided to completely switch to virtual instruments because of the type of instruments that we wanted to create are much more than a simple "player", and that direction would allow us to design our own interface and be involved in the development of the engine and get features customized that are essential to realize the ideas that we have. It allowed us a way to create something beyond a sample library, which is something that has always interested us, especially because of my work developing hardware with Roland.

The main reason that we aren't going to make both virtual instruments AND new sample libraries is because we want to stay a small company to keep the quality level really high, and the commitment of time and resources to create high-level instruments like Atmosphere, Stylus and Trilogy takes pretty much all of our power. Its a very big job to work on the software, interface and sounds side....(but of course it's fun too!) Since we wanted to make instruments that went beyond the capabilities of what is currently on the virtual instrument market, we couldn't also continue to make libraries at the same high level that we have always done...so it was an either or choice. So it made sense to make a clean break. (Especially since we have so many ideas for new things!)

We do find it quite strange how the vast majority of users tend to think in "either/or" terms. Sample libraries will always be a very valid concept for music. There's no reason that instruments and sample libraries can't coexist with each other very nicely for a long time.

Both are cool!

spectrum
(aka EP from Spectrasonics)

I am a huge believer in sample librarys and I don't believe they will dissapear at all. Being able to stretch and shrink the samples along with some other weird effects will keep samples as a part of my tecknique.


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