Newbie q about formats

[BosseJo]

I have tried to find good info about the different sample formats but with litte success.


I would like to know things like these:

Are there any quality differences between them?
Prices, availabilty, ease of use etc.

Thanks.

[BosseJo]

Is there a site where are there people who know this stuff?

[plastique]

http://www.fmjsoft.com/fmt/awfmts.html

lists a pretty broad range of formats with a surprising lot of infos.

[Xnah]

I have tried to find good info about the different sample formats but with litte success.


I would like to know things like these:

Are there any quality differences between them?
Prices, availabilty, ease of use etc.

Thanks.

The most important difference is that some formats are tied to products. But it would help if you could mention some specific formats that you're looking into.

[BertKoor]

Technical quality is one thing (bit depth 16bits or 24bits, sample rate, lossy compression like MP3) but what matters most is the artistic quality: usability, the recording, size, loop points, seperate release-stage samples. And that's not really related to the technical format, but more to the effort the supplier has taken to create them.

In general you'll pay for good quality, but there are ofcourse loads of exceptions (very good free samples, very poor payware samples)

[BosseJo]

I have tried to find good info about the different sample formats but with litte success.


I would like to know things like these:

Are there any quality differences between them?
Prices, availabilty, ease of use etc.

Thanks.

The most important difference is that some formats are tied to products. But it would help if you could mention some specific formats that you're looking into.

Well probably all the popular ones...I bought Directwave when it was on sale for 39$. The product description http://www.flstudio.com/documents/directwave.html said it was compatible with most common formats you see on sample pages but I am not very happy with it. I downloaded Angelic Choirs (came in sfz, nki and gig) and all sorts of strange things happens in Directwave(extreme distortion, samples does not correctly etc). I bought some ARP and and Prophet samples (came in nki and exc) but all the bigger ones crashes it.

I have the Mackie sfz player that came with Tracktion 2 and the soundfonts work perfectly there. So one question could be: What's the difference between sfz and for example gig, nki, exc32 etc. I know so little about these things and perhaps the only difference between the formats is that they are different ways of storing samples? I see som many good sample sounds and it would be nice to have a good sample player, but of course I don't want to spend money on features I don't need and in order to know that I need more knowledge

Thanks for your responses.

[Bob Nova]

I have tried to find good info about the different sample formats but with litte success.


I would like to know things like these:

Are there any quality differences between them?
Prices, availabilty, ease of use etc.

Thanks.

There are big differences between them for price,quality,etc.
If you could give a little info about what you'd like the product to do for you, we can prolly make some recommendations.