KVR Audio

cyanogen · Post by **cyanogen** » Fri Jun 10, 2005 2:26 am

Has anyone bought any sample CDs from this company:

http://www.sampling-cds.com/

The prices seem reasonable, and some of the mp3s sound pretty good, especially the electric piano. I noticed one of the choices is "Halion/wave format". Does that mean it would work as a series of .wav files in a program like EnergyXT, for example?

Gregjazz · Post by **Gregjazz** » Fri Jun 10, 2005 6:28 am

Yeah, these sounds are pretty cool! The drums, electric pianos, and the 5-string electric bass especially! Those drums are top-notch!

Though I'm not really keen on their Cello, and their slap bass has problems -- in the demo song it sounds like every note is slapped, and no pops in there...

cyanogen · Post by **cyanogen** » Fri Jun 10, 2005 7:31 am

What's frustrating is that some of the mp3s have the person holding one note for a few seconds, playing another and holding that, etc. I'd rather hear it in a musical context. However, I was able to tell that the concert guitar sounds good in the high registers. And they even have a Chapman stick sample set!

Yossarian · Post by **Yossarian** » Fri Jun 10, 2005 7:32 am

I have a number of Realsamples libraries and they’re good value. Not too keen on the violin but the basses and guitars are nice. The developer has a thing for velocity layers (the violin has 32!) which (IMO) takes up a lot of HD space without adding much to the sound.

Glad I saw this thread, gave me a reason to visit the Realsamples site – I see he’s added a few libraries.

/Yoss

cyanogen · Post by **cyanogen** » Fri Jun 10, 2005 7:34 am

Yeah, I just happened to read about it on Harmony Central today. Otherwise I wouldn't have known...

Yossarian · Post by **Yossarian** » Fri Jun 10, 2005 9:33 am

One thing to note about the Realsamples libraries is that they’re rather limited when it comes to different articulations. I would have preferred some more articulations instead of those heaps of velocity layers, but that’s just me. At these prices they’re hard to fault.

/Yoss

Lobber of Loin · Post by **Lobber of Loin** » Sun Aug 27, 2006 1:53 am

I just received a copy of their harpsichord dvd-rom. Apparently it's of the Flemish variety, built in 1640 by an Andreas Rucker. The samples sound very nice indeed, the only criticism being that some of them have a strange, slightly discomforting resonance, feeling similar to when our ears calibrate to different altitudes/air pressures, but much milder in effect. Could be my headphones (Sennheiser HD-580.)

Using Reason 2.5, it is very resource-intensive (I've got an Athlon XP 2700+, 1gb 333mhz DDR, 160gb 7200rpm 8mb buffer HD.) Got the whole thing copied to the hard disk and it still takes a few minutes to load. Opening saved projects which include the patch is impossible--program crashes every time. There are a pair of sample-sets: one for keystrokes and one for releases. So far I haven't figured a way to use both in tandem--that is, to trigger the release samples by depressing the keys on my midi controller. I suspect it may be impossible to accomplish this with said software. The libraries are perhaps geared more for sequencing, rather than live performance.

All that said, there are obvious challenges to overcome here, but these libraries sound beautiful and hence warrant effort.

Realsamples website