Zebra 2 and Kore....

[machinesworking]

Hey Urs, not to rush you or anything, but I'm really interested in getting Kore, and hopefully being able to have Zerbra 2 integrated within it. Wondering if you have had any conversations with the NI folks about that?

[Urs]

Hmm, if the software part of Kore does regular hosting of plugins, you can surely use Z2 with it. If there is any extra work required to make any plug work with Kore, file a bug report at NI

Cheers,

Urs

[ew]

Hmm, if the software part of Kore does regular hosting of plugins, you can surely use Z2 with it. If there is any extra work required to make any plug work with Kore, file a bug report at NI

Cheers,

Urs

I think he was talking about the metatag aspect, Urs- having the Z2 library tagged with attributes and available in a .ksd format.

ew

[bluedad]

nothing here move along.

[Sickle]

See no Evil, hear no Evil, speak no Evil.

[Big Tick]

is ksd format documentation available somewhere ?

[Sickle]

I'd imagine NI will send out information to developers as soon as it's ready.

[ew]

is ksd format documentation available somewhere ?

I'll see what I can get and send it to you, Tick...

ew

[Urs]

I think he was talking about the metatag aspect, Urs- having the Z2 library tagged with attributes and available in a .ksd format.

Uh hu. Sorry, nope, no plans to spend work on any such thing *here*, whatever it is. I'm also not offering Logic Channel Strips or whatever host-proprietary thing comes up.

I don't see that supporting any obstacles that make releasing new patches harder is a benefit for users, except maybe for very few people who coincidently own that certain combination of things.

However, anyone is free to add whatever meta information is needed in whatever format for whatever purpose. If any company is willing to do this in order to make their products better usable with mine, I'll gladly send them usable versions of all 10+ plugs I've released recently, including roughly 3000 factory presets to meta-tag and documentation of my preset file structure. I mean, seriously, if they want to sell stuff, *they* have to work it out. Not me. Otherwise they should tell *you* that *you* will have to spend extra work on third party plugins to make use of the features they promise. Where would we end if we start working for marketing aspects of others?

Well, now that I think about it, if a company needs such thing, I can lend them one of my freelancers at a good rate. They know my stuff and the patches, it'll certainly be cheaper for them than doing it by themselves.

Cheers,

Urs

[ew]

I've been slowly but steadily converting the FilterscapeVA banks, Urs. I'll be happy to send them to you when I'm done

ew

[Urs]

I've been slowly but steadily converting the FilterscapeVA banks, Urs. I'll be happy to send them to you when I'm done

Sure! I'll happily send it to all reg'ed users!

Btw. I didn't mean to sound harsh or anything. I think that semantics in music is a good thing and it's honourable that NI eventually come up with an ambitious approach for patch management. Now, if they can convince most of *all* host makers to go the same route with an open standard - meaning it really has to prove its concept in general, just like vst - so that it's actually gonna be a widely adopted thing, yeah, that would be something. But for now it's simply not an issue.

I'm of course sceptical, because I dealt with semantics in music long ago (see my website, but it's just an abstract in German). The problem I see is, there's no truely objective way to apply meta information within the matters of music or arts in general. That's the failure I see in the approaches I've seen, including Garageband and the composition engine I wrote for Sony back in the days. When you apply a property like "cool" to anything, it's completely different between you and me. I wished it wasn't, but that's how I guess it is. Depressingly, argueing about categorization of patches is like argueing about taste. There's few cases where One Size Fits Them All and a whole lotta cases where stuff is Beyond Borders Of Imagination. Being arrogant enough, I tend to like latter and I'd say that whatever characterizes my stuff, it's beyond the things you expect from a certain drawer in the repertoir of your common language.

I think that music and sound shall be untouched by general description. You may say that "this sound is cool for bass" when you know the person you talk to very well and when you transmit on the same frequency. But saying that a certain sound is not suitable as a bass just because it wasn't meant to be a bass patch doesn't sound right to me. It shall be up to the creative mind to decide whether or not, which is a highly subjective matter. It's not like construction engineering or geology where they have a whole lotta meta tagging systems that just work perfectly.

(I use to go to cinema with some friends quite often and we disagree about the experience as many times, which is good, because if we agreed, we'd have less stuff to talk about and less beers afterwards)

The guys in the team and I try to do our best to at least categorize the Z2 patches in a certain way, by putting them into descriptive folders. But this is sooo ambivalent, it's a tough choice. It's weird enough to have a folder for pads and another one for evolving pads, even though drawing the line is, uhm, close to impossible.

I hear this so often. People step through the patches, some things don't appeal, some things inspire and some things are just right in the certain situation. Some use that certain Z1 brass sound in almost every song. However it's still a subjective choice.

Putting it short, I'm not sure if any general approach to semantically browse presets by Spotlight-alike searching makes any sense right now. Also, if I understood Kore correctly, it puts presets above plugin, meaning that if you load a preset from the browser it's basically gotta load a new plugin. Which might take 2 seconds or even a lot more, depending on the actual software. Which might be better suited for a whole bunch of easy plugins whereas (that might more likely produce generally descriptable sounds) it might be annoying when you bounce between complex beasts like Absynth, Zebra, Reaktor, Legacy Cell or TimewARP (to just name a few that simply need time to load up).

And I for one would certainly look in the category called "other" to find the inpiring things. Still, that's just what comes to my mind when I think about it, without knowing Kore, based on prior experience with similar approaches. I might be rendered erratic, and it might work out well, hence might be adopted by other Host Inc.s to the benefit of all users. Then I'd probably jump on the train as well. For now I'm sKeptik, but we'll see how it works out.

I could go on for another couple of beers about stuff, but I think it's become quite lengthy already, so I'll just go to bed. Meta tagging is a whole science on its own. Just like google ad words. It could have such a high impact on the perception of a plugin depending on the quality of the taggism, it's scary. But that's another story.

Later,

Urs

[ew]

I know what you mean, Urs- my idea of which category a patch may fit in doesn't necessarily agree with others.

Plus, there's no "kittens!" option



I'll send them on when I'm done...

ew

[Sickle]

I know what you mean, Urs- my idea of which category a patch may fit in doesn't necessarily agree with others.

The extremely relative nature of this from person to person presents a difficulty I've more or less pushed away from my thoughts regarding Kore..

Just wait till you start seeing people designating things like 'warmth'..

[machinesworking]

The patch management part of Kore is actually my least favorite part... just liking the idea of one bank of presets to port to a tower from a laptop etc.

[Sickle]

What do you mean, 'port'? Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you're misunderstanding Kore..