I spent part of the weekend checking out the demo download of Jeskola XS-1 -- doing a compare and contrast with the DS864 Sampler that came with Project 5.
And there's no comparison. I downloaded soundfonts from the Thomas Hammer site and there were more than a few that completely blew apart in the DS864 while they held together clear and clean in XS-1. I was esp. blown away by the 303 soundfonts that were complete mud through the DS864.

So now I wait till the back to school bills are paid and see how soon I can send off for XS-1. Is Cakewalk's sampler a low end or middle of the road product -- conversely is XS-1 just that much better than most of what's out there?

So what I didn't have time to test comes around to this. Why do drums sound so much better in Fruity Loops or the demo Linplug RM-IV download than in P-5 Velocity or Cyclone? Is it the quality of the sample wav files or the quality of the sampler playing the wav files? or both
It should be a simple matter to bring some drum wav files over to P-5 from FL and set up some parallel kits and see how they sound. And vice versa. I didn't have time this weekend to try that. But after setting up numerous kits from the Pro Audio samples that came with the P-5 box set-- I thought I was hearing the same sort of muddling -- which I guess is technically aliasing. Whatever it's called it's fairly easy to hear.

I'm just getting into this but I never would have thought there was so much behind getting drums to sound decent. It looks like FL Studio set drums and to a lesser extent bass as a priority in developing their product.

Is there a product that would easily let me set up a series of wav files into a soundfont and assign to notes to build drum kits that I could then
play back through Jeskola's XS-1? Or maybe Jeskola should take this as a product request and marketing opportunity.

I don't know whether the velocity range I experienced with the Hammersound soundfonts was a product of the soundfont or the XS-1, but the dynamic range was probably an order of magnitude over what most soft synths manage. This again would seem to be so applicable to drums.

try synthedit. waveplayer has in past been problematic on some systems, works even for me at the moment. mention because playback sounds fair to me, and xs-1 doesn't have any looping functions you'd miss with se's one-shot wavplayer.

lot of quality differences amongst wav playback software.. guess you just have to beware.

You're touching on the most pathetic aspects of Project5. The only plug-in bundled that is worth anything is PSYN which is fantastic. DS864 and nPulse are border line. The rest are complete garbage that I wouldn't use even if they were free. ESPECIALLY Velocity!

DS864 sounds like quasi-garbage. For a good laugh try a pitch bend. However, it doesn't sound so bad that it is unusable. It is a half-assed plug-in but does not rival anything on the market.

Then there's Velocity. First, it doesn't support sample rates higher than 44.1 kHz. Second, it sounds like complete garbage; like all the samples are being played back through their proprietary Ass Filter (tm).

Okay I'm done venting now!

I'm not 100% sure, because I've never built a soundfont myself, but I think Extreme Sample Converter has the tools to build soundfonts as you describe. You might try downloading the free version from http://www.extranslator.com and, if that doesn't have the capability, try the demo. If you're going to be doing a lot with soundfonts, you're going to want this program anyway, even if you can't build custom soundfonts with it. It's half the price of XS-1, which you also want!

You should be able to find Vienna SoundFont Edito on either Emu's or Creative's websites. It is free. There are othe free SoundFont Editors as well, if not here, then on harmony central or something. Google gives plentyu of hits on "soundfont+editor+free".


Happy sampling,

teh gück

Guckli wrote:

You should be able to find Vienna SoundFont Edito on either Emu's or Creative's websites. It is free. There are othe free SoundFont Editors as well, if not here, then on harmony central or something. Google gives plentyu of hits on "soundfont+editor+free". Happy sampling, teh gück

Yeah,but Vienna Editor ONLY works with Creative cards.Not in the rest of my lifetime
Friends don't let friends buy Creative...
ew

You can build one in [ Zero-X BeatCreator ] too in case no one knew about this - it'll export the slices into a soundfont.

dkistner wrote:

I'm not 100% sure, because I've never built a soundfont myself, but I think Extreme Sample Converter has the tools to build soundfonts as you describe. You might try downloading the free version from http://www.extranslator.com and, if that doesn't have the capability, try the demo. If you're going to be doing a lot with soundfonts, you're going to want this program anyway, even if you can't build custom soundfonts with it. It's half the price of XS-1, which you also want!

You can do it with some combination of Chainer (even the demo version can export soundfonts), EZ-Editor (to do the seamless looping, etc), and/or EXSC or SoundFaction Alive if needed. EZ-Editor is a subset of Zero-X Seamless Looper, marketed by ImageLine.

http://www.xlutop.com/html/products.html (Chainer)
http://www.ez-editor.com
http://www.soundfaction.com/alive/

Doug

well I continued with trying things out. XS-1 really doesn't play drum wav files all that well. Not nearly as spectacular an improvement as it manages with soundfonts it seems. esp. kick drums. Maybe it was a limited sample, but it seems the way to go is a dedicated drum synth like Linplug RM-IV --its wav file playback is very crisp or until I can swing that move all the rhythm tracks to FL Studio or just use it as the workstation.

wrench45us wrote:

Is there a product that would easily let me set up a series of wav files into a soundfont and assign to notes to build drum kits that I could then play back through Jeskola's XS-1? Or maybe Jeskola should take this as a product request and marketing opportunity.

Check out FMJ-Software's Awave Studio.