KVR Audio

dramsenik · Post by **dramsenik** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 10:51 am

bduffy wrote:Sorry, I just don't see Sampletank in the same category as Hal, Kontakt, EXS-24...but I'm amazed at the users they get on their site, so I must be missing something...

quick answer but: with ST you have a great engine and you can work a lot with FX which are really good and different than other samplers. Libraries although smaller in ST sounds just great.
In Kontakt or the like you have to tweak more to get a good sound. They have indeed more options, routings capabilities, mapping etc. BUT less great FX.

That's for today, things may change this year with ST2.1 Kontakt 2, we will see. I have both and they don't have the same use, they are in fact complementary. I can't speak of Halion because i don't know it.

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 6:56 pm

Great, there you have it; I remember when Sampletank first came out, I thought it was the business, but once I made the leap from Soundfonts to the VST/ASIO/AKAI/Giga arena, I realised I needed the kind of features that turn you off; but I like building things from the ground up and spending an hour on the ADSR of a hi-hat, whereas my brother would hang himself first(Kontakt drives him nuts); he just wants some good samples to write with.

AS with most of this stuff, there is no "better", just depends on one's needs.

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 7:04 pm

dramsenik wrote:In Kontakt or the like you have to tweak more to get a good sound. They have indeed more options, routings capabilities, mapping etc. BUT less great FX.

I'm not sure I agree that you have to "tweak more" to get a "good sound"...doesn't that depend on the initial sound?

Anyway, yeah; K2 and S2.1 are on the way (excited!), so we'll see...pretty soon it'll be a dime's worth of difference anyway!

I get a little confused with this Sonic reality thing: is Sonic Reality a lib collection with Sampletank as the front-end, a lá Kompakt? Is Sonic Reality by IK Multimedia?

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 7:28 pm

Never mind, I figured out the Sonic Reality thing, I notice they also make refills.
I also wanted to note that the Sampletank patch: "Soft Fingered Bass" is a miraculous patch, I still use it sometimes with Sampletank Free!

dramsenik · Post by **dramsenik** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 7:56 pm

bduffy wrote:
dramsenik wrote:In Kontakt or the like you have to tweak more to get a good sound. They have indeed more options, routings capabilities, mapping etc. BUT less great FX.
I'm not sure I agree that you have to "tweak more" to get a "good sound"...doesn't that depend on the initial sound?

Yes sure...
But the library is more uniforme in ST you can load 16 patch and they will sound just well without any further processing in a mix. All instruments just sit in the right place and that with the factory library, with kontakt and 16 instruments you can just begin with a serious EQ on each one or they will fight the same spectrum.

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:32 pm

Again, it all boils down to: do you want to be able to have a "band-in-a-box" or do you want to spend a lot of time (and possibly money!) mixing instruments like you would in a studio? (Both are perfectly viable, of course!)

I've never heard the Sonic Reality stuff, I'll see if they have any demos; I'm curious now.

jones-y · Post by **jones-y** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:37 pm

dramsenik wrote: in ST you can load 16 patch and they will sound just well without any further processing in a mix.

That's because they've already been processed to smithereens.

All instruments just sit in the right place

That's a matter of taste. ST2 never really worked for me.

harmony gardens · Post by **harmony gardens** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:03 pm

Again, it all boils down to: do you want to be able to have a "band-in-a-box" or do you want to spend a lot of time (and possibly money!) mixing instruments like you would in a studio? (Both are perfectly viable, of course!)

Your compairison to Band in a Box makes me cringe a bit, but I understand what you are implying, and can accept it to a point. There is a lot of room for tweaking in Sampletank, but not quite what the others would have. Sampletank is geared more towards a "turn the key and go" approach. My music tends follow more of a performance model, than to the control of filters or modulations. I tend to use Tassman 4 for things like that, because it shines in that area.

Sampletank on the other hand works great for me, because I have a library of great sounds I can load and enjoy playing right away. I can also blend these sounds easily to make custom combinations, and there's a lot of room to put my personal touch on a sound. I can save those as a child preset, and get to them quickly, too. That's the beauty of Sampletank.

kevvvvv · Post by **kevvvvv** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:22 pm

I think the honest thing is to admit that a pro ST decision compared with a pro Kontakt / Halion decision is 80% about the money.

Anyone who's played Scarbee Electric Bass samples will never want machine gun samples again.

Likewise Pure Guitars Nylon is such a sensuous yet strong beast of an classical, and so realistic.

But building sample collections like this cost money.

The truth is that getting a pro sampler and a couple of gbs of included samples is just the beginning of a long and deeply meaningful musical relationship

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:38 pm

Your comparison to Band in a Box makes me cringe a bit

Agreed! I apologize; I didn't mean any subtle insults, just for the record.

Good points all; I agree.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 10:57 pm

When it comes to playback engines (or let me say "mostly playback" engines) it seems that SampleTank (or SonicSynth) are better suited for quick results.

I'm not sure how well they would work with 3rd party formats (I only tried the various available freebies which don't offer any conversion options), but most users seem to be quite happy with them

Admittedly, the effects, filter, LFO and whatever sections of SampleTank are pretty well laid out - so you could actually get reasonable (or even very good) results out of them quickly.

However, as soon as you are getting into sampling anything by yourself, you'll be lost.
You just can't drag, say, a complete vocal track into ST and assign keys to each syllable.
I'm doing things like that all the time.
In addition, I'm actually building quite a lot of "general purpose" patches myself.

Further, if you are into advanced modulations, those playback engines will fall behind easily.
There's no way to have the cutoff controlled by something like a step follower - while at the same time controlling the intensity of that modulator through your ModWheel... which at the same time will control the amount of a host synced volume LFO.
And so on.
Kontakt will do all that easily. No, it's not easy to set up all this, doing a great patch might as well take an hour or longer - with the source samples allready being present that is. But you can do almost anything.
The same is true for any fullblown softsampler.

Bottomline: If you only need great sounds that are playable instantly, then ST might be a great choice.
If you however need access to almost each and any parameter there is in a sampled patch, then you'd need a real sampler.
Personally, I couldn't live without a sampler any longer.

dramsenik · Post by **dramsenik** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 11:37 pm

I guess it's why i said both are complementary...

I also tend to name ST more like a romplayer.
I'm glad i own both.

Kontakt vs Sampletank XL 2