KVR Audio

MikeCL · Post by **MikeCL** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 7:27 pm

With everything installed how large is it? 50 GB or more?

PietW. · Post by **PietW.** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 7:55 pm

MikeCL wrote:With everything installed how large is it? 50 GB or more?

STEAM-Folder 50,4 Gb.

MikeCL · Post by **MikeCL** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 7:59 pm

Thanks

Had to make sure

Oceanviewstudio · Post by **Oceanviewstudio** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 10:02 pm

MikeCL wrote:With everything installed how large is it? 50 GB or more?

including Trilian and Moog Tribute around 84 Gig

MikeCL · Post by **MikeCL** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 3:46 am

hah wow that's a huge amount

Oceanviewstudio · Post by **Oceanviewstudio** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 8:48 am

MikeCL wrote:hah wow that's a huge amount

The amount is one thing, the quality an entirely different matter. Since I used Atari and Steinberg's 24, it was by any stretch of the imagination, and that includes hardware, the very best investment I had ever made.

Numanoid · Post by **Numanoid** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 2:15 pm

Oceanviewstudio wrote:including Trilian and Moog Tribute around 84 Gig

Do Spectrasonics use any kind of FLAC/lossless-like compression on the files?

I like to save harddisk space where I can, so prefer Kontakt's NCW files to WAV for instance.

Oceanviewstudio · Post by **Oceanviewstudio** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 4:26 pm

Numanoid wrote:
Oceanviewstudio wrote:including Trilian and Moog Tribute around 84 Gig
Do Spectrasonics use any kind of FLAC/lossless-like compression on the files?

I like to save harddisk space where I can, so prefer Kontakt's NCW files to WAV for instance.

Saving HD space?

Whats 80 Gig on a 6 TB or even a 2 TB drive? Come on, HD's are a no brainer on that level!

Having said that, I have no idea about the files, it comes all down to the STEAM engine, and the files are all in a *.db format on my mac.

Numanoid · Post by **Numanoid** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 7:12 pm

Oceanviewstudio wrote:Saving HD space?

I've been using a PC with 160 GB hard drive until quite recently, one learns to save on HD space then I tell ya

JavaJ · Post by **JavaJ** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 7:45 pm

If you are concerned about your host not handling the disk space or processor/memory requirements- you really shouldn't buy it then. This is software that you build the hardware around- not the other way. If you can't afford it, you can't afford it.

o0Ampy0o · Post by **o0Ampy0o** » Thu Jul 12, 2012 2:11 am

Sometimes you have to take advantage of a good price one thing at a time even if it is out of sequence. Life is not perfect. Now that you have Omnisphere at a great price you can focus on beefing up your system if necessary. A great source for additional disk drives is OWC. You can save a lot by either adding or swapping out your current disk and making it an external storage drive.

Other World Computing

.

Oceanviewstudio · Post by **Oceanviewstudio** » Thu Jul 12, 2012 3:43 pm

Numanoid wrote:
Oceanviewstudio wrote:Saving HD space?
I've been using a PC with 160 GB hard drive until quite recently, one learns to save on HD space then I tell ya

OK, I understand!

Familiarize yourself with the SYSTEM menu, streaming, RAM etc, menue in Omnisphere, this can help a lot, albeit not minimizing your HD space.

+1 on OWC, great dealer!

maranite · Post by **maranite** » Sat Mar 10, 2018 12:16 pm

Oceanviewstudio wrote:
Numanoid wrote:
Oceanviewstudio wrote:including Trilian and Moog Tribute around 84 Gig
Do Spectrasonics use any kind of FLAC/lossless-like compression on the files?
I like to save harddisk space where I can, so prefer Kontakt's NCW files to WAV for instance.
Saving HD space?
Whats 80 Gig on a 6 TB or even a 2 TB drive? Come on, HD's are a no brainer on that level!
Having said that, I have no idea about the files, it comes all down to the STEAM engine, and the files are all in a *.db format on my mac.

Well - on my laptop's 250GB SSD, 84GB is not a no-brainer - it's a lot of space.

Spectrasonic's DB files are actually just a concatenation of all of the files that Omnisphere uses, along with an XML header that tells Omnisphere what the path, offset and length is of each file. Use a hex-editor - it's very straight forward.

The factory *.db sound sources generally contain 24-bit stereo WAV files. Spectrasonics implemented a very trivial encryption mechanism (XORing every 4 bytes) to try to prevent customer from using the WAV samples outside of Omnisphere.

I've found occasional AIFF files, as well as non-standard FLAC-compressed WAV files in the factory libraries too. This, as well as scanning Omnisphere.dll with a hex editor and finding that libFLAC is compiled into the binary, suggests that Omnisphere 2 is indeed capable of handling lossless compression formats.

In the coming weeks, I plan to experiment with FLAC compressing some of the factory sound sources to see whether Omnisphere can stream lossless encoded files, as well as which encoding/container formats it will accept.

If it does and I can figure it all out, I will release a tool that compresses the factory library into FLAC, which should bring it down to ~40GB.

noiseboyuk · Post by **noiseboyuk** » Sat Mar 10, 2018 1:04 pm

Interesting... and if it works, will there be a performance hit? There doesn't seem to be with Kontakt.

I suspect Spectrasonics will take a very dim view, but if it works seamlessly its something they should have done a long time ago, so...

maranite · Post by **maranite** » Tue Mar 13, 2018 3:10 pm

Some feedback for any lost souls coming across this thread...

Omnisphere indeed has internal support for FLAC compression, but I don't believe it is practically useful/usable. If the "why" matters, read on...

In the factory sounds-source World 01.db, there are examples of sample WAV and AIF sample files that do not contain WAV or AIFF data. Instead, these files start with magic bytes spelling "SpCA" (which we might assume means Spectrasonics Compression Algorithm).

Shortly thereafter, there's a FLAC header tag "reference libFLAC 1.2.1 20170907" which is what the libFLAC library emits when encoding content. Both the AIF and WAV files appear to be identical in this respect, which suggests that Omnisphere's Synthmaster engine completely ignores the file extension of sample files and instead inspects the contents to determine how to decode.

While I'm unable to encode my own FLAC sound sources (I haven't figured out the proprietary header that Spectrasonics are using), I have at least been able to do comparative tests between factory sound-source that use FLAC compression vs those that do not...

It would appear that Spectrasonics reserve the use of FLAC encoding for good reason... the Omnisphere engine takes significantly longer when loading FLAC compressed sound sources, which suggests that Omnisphere is incapable of decompressing on the fly.

For my use case (namely reducing the footprint of Keyscape & Trillian), this spells the end of the road. I won't be continuing this work.

Omnisphere install size?