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AuthorTopic: Anyone tried Ethnosphere?
JmR
Posted: 7th April 2003 03:08
I would like to know opinions
AndreasE
Posted: 7th April 2003 03:33
Me too.
pough
Posted: 7th April 2003 08:24
My opinion is mixed, but mostly positive. I am working on a really big review of it, but it will take a few more days since there's lot's of stuff to cover. I guess that all I can say is that for its price it's pretty good. There are a few things that I would really like to see them change. If they make those changes, it would make the product quite a bit better.

It's not as extensive or detailed (in terms of # samples per patch) as many of us would like to see, but a lot of the sounds still sound nice, IMO. It has some instruments that I have been wanting and I few that I didn't know I wanted but still really like. It's a little bit hard for me to judge, since so many of the instruments I'm just not familiar with and I'm assuming that the natural range of many of them are very limited.

The things I'd like them to change? Fix a few errors (of course) and either externalize the loops or have proper beat slicing in them - having a percussion loop centred at middle C (with no particular tempo) isn't very useful. It's unfortunate, since I really like a lot of the loops.

I suppose that you'd like to hear them in action? I haven't produced anything with them and I hesitate to do so for the purpose of judging. I don't think I'm really good enough to do these sounds justice and I don't want people to avoid an instrument because I couldn't make it sounds good. Maybe I'll post a list of sounds and if you want to send me a MIDI file for a certain sounds I might be able to output something for you to hear. If that's legal... Wink
John Westwood
Posted: 7th April 2003 10:38
I'm in the same mindset as Pough is. It's certainly handy to have a palette like this to draw from, and alot of the samples are very good. BUT, there's alot of redundant samples, and alot of 'loops' - which may sound better than trying to orchestrate all the nuances of a certain instrument yourself, but are rather limited and useless in their scope. (Unless you re-sample them and stretch them, etc.) Lack of even the most minute ADSR function is a bit of a drag, as I really like Pedal Steel guitar - but the release is too long for my liking on this.

But like Waveform cards of yore - Ethnosphere is a easy install (just a .DLL and BIG folder is all) and all the sounds are very responsive. Having to do all those samples myself would take me years, (I suck at sampling.) Wink So, for my first 'ROMpler' - it's nice, but not 'mind blowing'.
Just neat tones to have on hand and mess up with effects. I gave it a 7.8/10 before, and I stick by that still. Wink
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