IK Multimedia Xpansion Tank 2 Group Buy

[eDrummist]

Ceej,

Peter from IK is a good guy (and hilarious too, when you get to know him a little)! He'll take care of you.

[Peter - IK Multimedia]

Ceej,

Peter from IK is a good guy (and hilarious too, when you get to know him a little)! He'll take care of you.

In this case I might just be a broker... well maybe a "handler" so I guess that qualifies in taking care of someone. Hilarious? Too much pressure at the moment, I can't always summon teh funnies on demand.

[Ceej]

Oh, I know Peter's a good guy, worry not.

No, I haven't filed a support ticket, mostly because it hadn't reached the point of really interfering with anything for me; it was just an oddity and annoyance. But I'll see if I can identify a reproducible scenario and file one soon.

The other slowness I've noticed is searching; it almost seems like it does another drive scan the first time I put something in the search box. I assume that's not expected either?

I do have 28 gigs of sounds in my SampleTank folder, and I haven't even installed most of my Xpansion Tanks yet....

[Peter - IK Multimedia]

Wellll... I think the search does take quite a while with that amount of samples. However, I can find out. Even if it is just a little bother, if you could log it in, I'd really appreciate it because I noticed someone else finds it to be a problem for them. That isn't a huge statistic on its own but it may indicate something we could get in the system to fix. Or at least to make sure doesn't get into 3? I guess that's the best best now for something that's a "slight hassle" or similar. Either way, the guys in support just LOVE me (in case they are reading this, that's totally sarcastic for their benefit ).

[zedd]

I think he didn't say it was affecting project load times; it was affecting Reaper's initial startup. That's quite possible, depending on what happens when Reaper skims through its plugins when it starts.

Ahhh yes... that's most likely what he meant.

In my experience, the first project I load with SampleTank (I use Sonar) takes quite a long time. Also, the first time I load up SampleTank stand-alone it takes quite a long time. (Quite a long time == nearly a minute sometimes.) And I do have "Relist on Startup" disabled, believe me. It's clearly doing some sort of scan anyway, because my hard drive light stays constantly on during this delay. It is kind of frustrating.

I used to face this all the time, before I Relisted on Startup. I don't doubt that you have changed that setting, but it sounds like ST may be ignoring that setting for you and relisting anyway. Maybe you could test this by adding one of the Xpansion Tanks that you haven't yet added, and then *DON'T* Relist. Start up your DAW and open a project to see if it has Relisted after that long wait. I'd be very curious to know.

I get that long wait when I save a preset. At least a minute or more, the first time you save a preset in a project. Quicker after that. But this is definitely an area that MUST be addressed and improved in ST3.

[Ceej]

I used to face this all the time, before I Relisted on Startup. I don't doubt that you have changed that setting, but it sounds like ST may be ignoring that setting for you and relisting anyway. Maybe you could test this by adding one of the Xpansion Tanks that you haven't yet added, and then *DON'T* Relist. Start up your DAW and open a project to see if it has Relisted after that long wait. I'd be very curious to know.

Ahh... a worthy experiment, indeed!

I just tried it, and the answer is no. After the lengthy startup time (it's about 40 seconds, actually), the pack I added still wasn't there.

I then clicked Relist and it showed up. That process took about 1 minute 40 seconds, so it does seem that whatever it's doing on startup, it's not actually Relisting.

Peter: FYI I registered support ticket #212617 about slow startup and #350456 about slow searching.

[bk]

Youngwoerth - a question for you since you rated the Piano Collection 2 set in the top group. How do the "Acoustic Grand", "Granduation Day", and "Dyno My Road" patches compare to the others in that set?

Are they big improvements over the others, or would you be pretty much just as happy with the set even if those three sounds weren't included?


(Reason for asking: those are the three new parent samples that were added to make the new Piano Collection 2 set. Anyone owning the original Piano Collection already has everything else except for those. So could you give us a mini-review and share your opinion of those sounds? Thanks!)

I'm not Youngwoerth, but I'll give you my opinion anyway...
I was somewhat disappointed by the sounds in the Piano collection until I tried the "Acoustic Grand Piano" and "Graduation Day" patches. I don't personally care for the Dyno My Road patches. There's no velocity switching, in fact, there's no velocity control AT ALL on some of the Dyno patches, plus, the split points are very noticeable, and there is a disconcerting click in the upper octave.
So, I definitely wouldn't buy it for the Dyno patch, but I feel the others are definitely worth it.
As always ymmv!

[szurcio]

So I can no longer get this promotion (8 for 1) through the IK online store? (I have some jampoints left in my account).

[kiezum]

There's no velocity switching, in fact, there's no velocity control AT ALL on some of the Dyno patches, plus, the split points are very noticeable, and there is a disconcerting click in the upper octave.
So, I definitely wouldn't buy it for the Dyno patch, but I feel the others are definitely worth it.
As always ymmv!

Yes, in all xpansion packs there are tuning, pop, click, splitpoint, volume, attack, decay and velocity problems. These packs were probably made in a hurry. My advice: don't buy one pack for 39euro (excl tax). They're not worth it! But 8 for the price of one is a different story.

Sampletank 2.5 seems to be unstable. It sometimes crashes my computer. But most of the time I have to wait minutes. When I load a project with a sampletank in it, it will take a lot of minutes (sometimes 5 minutes). Loading sampletank takes minutes. Searching takes minutes. It destroys a the workflow. (Relist in prefs is turned off btw)

[samsam]

^^ Well, clearly there's something wrong with how ST performs on your system but it doesn't seem to be universally bad, fine on my system anyway. Launching ST within Live takes a few seconds, searching is almost instant and opening a Live project with ST in takes the same amount of time it usually takes for a project. That's with 9 extensions installed.

Not trying to make light of your problems and I'm certainly no fanboy, just maybe there's something going on in your system that could be cured...

[Mattiiiii]

So I can no longer get this promotion (8 for 1) through the IK online store? (I have some jampoints left in my account).

No, only through Esoundz, and only for two more days or so.
_____
Esoundz login: MattH

[kiezum]

^^ Well, clearly there's something wrong with how ST performs on your system but it doesn't seem to be universally bad, fine on my system anyway.

The Eastwest, Vienna, Native Instruments VSTI's work fine. The strange thing is that Sonik Synth 2 works great (that's probably an different version of Sampletank).

[Scotty]

I have the slow search issue as well. With Retank libraries, Sonic Synth, Tron and imported Akai sample disks... (at least 20 of my akai cds) so I have a lot of sampletank content.

I typically search for things like "shaker", "triangle" , "djembe" and it can take several minutes for Sampletank to narrow the hit list. Remember that as a repository of samples it should be able to help you get what you need in a hurry. Fixing slow searches is my number one fix-it request. Otherwise the engine is fantastic. I still feel this way after having installed my Komplete 6 update over two nights. Sampletank still has a prominant place in my system. The ease of use and quick intuitive sound sculpting capabilities are terrific. It is the same reason why I prefer Amplitube 3 over Guitar Rig 4. I can get in and out and get great results without putting on my engineer hat.

^^ Well, clearly there's something wrong with how ST performs on your system but it doesn't seem to be universally bad, fine on my system anyway. Launching ST within Live takes a few seconds, searching is almost instant and opening a Live project with ST in takes the same amount of time it usually takes for a project. That's with 9 extensions installed.

Not trying to make light of your problems and I'm certainly no fanboy, just maybe there's something going on in your system that could be cured...

[samsam]

^^ Several minutes for search results would indeed suck and make it unusable, but honestly, that's really not the case on my system, search finishes in under a second.

Dunno, maybe you have soooo much stuff installed that it slows it down but even so, taking minutes for search results is clearly not the way it should be. You tried troubleshooting with the help of IK? Maybe they can come up with something...

(FWIW I'm on OS X 10.5.8, 4gig RAM, ST running very smoothly and quickly)

[Analyst69]

The various comments about ST performance are interesting.

My experience to date has been great, running on two and a half year old 2.4Ghz Dual Core laptop with 3GB of RAM (Windows 7). After seeing the comments, I decided to do some timings and got the following results:

Load ST standalone = 2 seconds
Load ST VST (in Reaper) = 2 seconds
Search (Djembe)= 1 second (almost instant, but it takes a moment to look from the screen back to the watch).
Search (B3)= 1 second (as above).

When loading projects with multiple plug-ins (usually Sampletank, 3 instances of Amplitube3 and Kontakt with Infinite Player Drum libraries), I find the slow one is Kontakt loading the drum samples.

This is all on my daily use laptop, which I use for a variety of purposes other than music, however, I am very selective about software I install (read OCD:) ) and am always careful to maintain a clean, well-performing system (okay,I am a nerd).

On a similar or better spec machine, I could only guess that the likely causes of slowdown would be either processes or services running on the machine that are hogging resources (software updaters, anti-virus and peripheral applications such as software for syncing mobile phones are common culprits), or, slow hard drives (including using external USB drives, which I have found makes load time intolerable for Kontakt libraries...I didn't bother trying this with SampleTank).

If the above can be ruled out as causes, then I guess IK Support might have some other suggestions. Hopefully the above timings help people to understand what they should be able to expect and anything too different would probably suggest a problem.

Cheers