Possible to find small sampleset tht rivals Morif/Fantom?

[hollowsun]

THE BEST is HYPERSONIC.. NOW! with HS2 coming out this month, Buying hardware Synths, is a Joke!

If you are not employed by Steinberg, you should be!

HS 2.0 comes with 1.7GB of awesome samples and even better system performance.

It looks and sounds great, no denial there but 1.7Gb??? Bloatware compared with the hardware manufacturers being referred to here!

Korg, Roland and Yamaha could probably condense that to around 100Mb with no adverse audible effects!!!!

Also....

Not sure I'd trust my laptop and HS2 live on-stage in front of a baying crowd like I would my Triton and/or S5000!!!


Steve

[hollowsun]

Yeah, when I started sampling I sampled everything at 44khz, and downsampled each note that didn't sound significantly worse at a lower rate. So on the lower notes of a keyboard, you could easily save 25%-50%. And surprisingly, 50-75% of entire samplesets could be downsampled to 32khz with almost no difference.

But now I just don't bother. Honestly it takes too long, and looping by hand takes so long already! And no one is quibbling over a few mb.

That is where I take issue. Clawing back those Mb and kHz can help enormously in overall performance... and it's accumulative - fewer glitches, fewer problems, less storage, less need to 'render' the instance to an audio track, more instances ... and so on

Still I think it would have been fun to work on those old hardware samplers, optimizing and working to get the best out of your 4mb or whatever

Antiquated tho these practices may be, they still have a place today.

There just isn't any incentive to do that now.

Really?


Steve

[Jeremy_NSL]

That is where I take issue. Clawing back those Mb and kHz can help enormously in overall performance... and it's accumulative - fewer glitches, fewer problems, less storage, less need to 'render' the instance to an audio track, more instances ... and so on

Well, I suppose for very large samplesets requiring streaming and all the rest, thats true. But I'm talking the difference between say, 25mb and maybe 10-15mb. It requires alot of effort to save those 15mb, but in the end most users won't even notice 15mb of RAM used.

There just isn't any incentive to do that now.

Really?

I don't see any. By optimizing that much you lose time - which you have to make up in sales. I'm afraid I just don't see the market upside for these highly optimized libraries on PC. When I released some samples using a variety of samplerates (low notes at 11khz, gradually up to 44khz), I actually got complaints they weren't all 44khz!

With Korg and whatnot, they have huge incentive to optimize: each MB they save on samples nets them huge amounts of cash savings on the physical ram they outfit Tritons, Motifs, etc with. So its worth the extra man-hours for them to go crazy optimizing 1gb into 64mb or whatever

[tee boy]

The samples Im making at the moment arent optimized in anyway (other than by creating the good loops). However, if I were to ever work on a ROM synth type library, I would be most intrigued to see how small I could make the patches.

I agree, there is totally a place for this today - we may be able to run multi gig libraries, but never more than one. Where as, I can run Ravity about 10 times without any problems (and some of those patches sound great, I love the string section).

Here's a thought - anyone ever considered the possibility that developers up the size intentionally as a form of copy protection?

[Jeremy_NSL]

Here's a thought - anyone ever considered the possibility that developers up the size intentionally as a form of copy protection?

Personally, I don't think thats the case. But I'm sure copy protection is a welcome side effect of large libraries.

I think size is frequently upped intentionally for no reason though. I am unconvinced anything over 44khz is useful whatsoever (especially 48khz), and 24/32-bit seems only useful for heavy compression. But releasing a 24/96 library
-sounds good on paper
-pads out a dvd very well, giving the appearance of more content
-gives musicians a warm, fuzzy feeling

So they will continue to be released...

[MacQ]

It's also worth bearing in mind that there's FAR more involved in creating the really good sounds than just the size of the samples themselves. The sound designers for all of the hardware synthesizer manufacturers (as those who've done it can attest) are using every trick up their sleeves to make dynamic sounds out of lifeless loops. Random pan, filters, clever envelopes, and LOTS of insert and send effects ... all of these things are as critical if not moreso than the size of the sample RAM.

That's why trying to sample your modules is so difficult. Sure, you can take all of that stuff off of the patches, but then you're left with boring samples. No, I think that the synthesizer aspect of the romplers is more important ... and something that should be of greater focus to many of these developers.

~MacQ

[hollowsun]

I am unconvinced anything over 44khz is useful whatsoever (especially 48khz), and 24/32-bit seems only useful for heavy compression.

Yes and yes!

But releasing a 24/96 library
-sounds good on paper
-pads out a dvd very well, giving the appearance of more content
-gives musicians a warm, fuzzy feeling

Yes, yes and yes!


Steve

[hollowsun]

It's also worth bearing in mind that there's FAR more involved in creating the really good sounds than just the size of the samples themselves. The sound designers for all of the hardware synthesizer manufacturers (as those who've done it can attest) are using every trick up their sleeves to make dynamic sounds out of lifeless loops. Random pan, filters, clever envelopes, and LOTS of insert and send effects ... all of these things are as critical if not moreso than the size of the sample RAM.

Absolutely. Lots of layering too in many cases.

No, I think that the synthesizer aspect of the romplers is more important ... and something that should be of greater focus to many of these developers.

Yep!

Gosh! There seems to be a disturbing amount of consensus round here


Steve