KVR Audio

SAW75 · Post by **SAW75** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 4:27 pm

EvilDragon wrote:they are really extremeyl courteous over the phone.

That's not been my experience. You are a fan, I'm not... wishing there were alternatives.

Is that OK with you? Seems like a reasonable thought to discuss.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 4:29 pm

SAW75 wrote:
EvilDragon wrote:they are really extremeyl courteous over the phone.

That's not been my experience. You are a fan, I'm not... wishing there were alternatives.

Is that OK with you? Seems like a reasonable thought to discuss.

It is reasonable to discuss indeed, but I'm going to call bullshit when some things are not correctly stated (or in case of different experience, I am going to state mine, of course).

SAW75 · Post by **SAW75** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 4:33 pm

EvilDragon wrote: Anyways, there are alternatives, as mentioned. They just don't have that much 3rd party content. The reasons were already stated before.

Third party content is what this thread is about. I'm learning a little about alternatives in that regard. Seems the Aria engine offers the best alternative for set designers.

Does anyone know if you have to pay licensing as a developer to use the Aria engine?

I guess Kontakt is free unless you want to license the Player version?

murnau · Post by **murnau** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 4:36 pm

called the NI support in berllin last year because of technical reasons i couldn't log into my account. the guy from NI was very helpful. the whole call was nearly one hour because he tried different things to make it work. (at the end it was something for a real expert because the error was to complex). can't say a bad word about the support.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 4:36 pm

SAW75 wrote:Does anyone know if you have to pay licensing as a developer to use the Aria engine?

Plogue guys should know. But I think if you want to release your own SFZ library for Aria with the GUI and stuff, you can do so at no charge. Now, Garritan using Aria engine might be a special case here... Well, Plogue guys should know

SAW75 wrote:I guess Kontakt is free unless you want to license the Player version?

Correct. That's how most 3rd party Kontakt content is - that's why they need the full version of Kontakt instead of the free Player version.

Zombie Queen · Post by **Zombie Queen** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 5:08 pm

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with Kontakt. In older days I was finding it somewhat repulsing, I liked Vsampler or DirectWaver better, but the deeper I dig, I found that, it's just way more efficient and powerful. Scripting makes a lot of difference, as much as it's made in sometimes infuriating ways, it works and it works fast. I guess there's no on-par, dongless alternative. I can't agree it's bloated, it just comes with a lot of (useful) stuff. Now Aria, I think, is bloated, it installed when I was trying out some different Plogue product, Chipcrusher, I think. What seemed a simple effect, installed the whole Aria engine and some additional MS runtime libraries, I felt like running away screaming, took me a while to clean it all. I think, if you don't need scripting, bells and whistles, sfz grows as a nice standard, you can edit patches in notepad, sfz sampler is free and it's supported by various synths, like Alchemy or Rapture.
I also stick to K4 for time being, they lost me when dropping XP support.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 5:32 pm

XP is dead anyways. Time to move on.

Zombie Queen · Post by **Zombie Queen** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 5:54 pm

Maybe yours, my XP is doing quite fine.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 5:56 pm

By "dead" I meant driver updates, Microsoft's support, and performance on all the newest hardware is lacking compared to W7/8.

BBFG# · Post by **BBFG#** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 6:10 pm

Yes, XP is dead, It is the nature of OS evolution.

I don't find Aria bloated though, and didn't have any of those things mention by someone trying to load on top of it. The problem with Aria is the limits of what is available to it. Perhaps it has to load more to deal with an older OS though?

As I get more third party sounds and stop wasting time with the factory content in Kontakt, I like it more and more. My two gripes about it is in not having a GUI layout closer to Aria though. That is, having the instruments I have loaded on a single page I can see without having to scroll down. and having the mixer controls larger and more detailed. Maybe there's a way to actually do that and I haven't found it yet, but it has been visually easier to just load separate instances in the DAW for me, which is a waste in its own way.

I don't think Kontakt is 'the only way', but it is a decent way that has its place with the others. They each have their 'pros and cons' and Kontakt has a lot more available for it than the others. The problem is in wading through all the choices to find the ones that resonate with me.

My search continues for the better Hurdy Gurdy and better basses than the Scarbee sets. (Their 'body' is great, but their attacks keep me searching elsewhere).
And yeah, everything seems to be geared in finding complete replacements to STank2XL. Aria has it's place as just an engine for the Garritan stuff.
I really hope Native starts working on improving the Kontakt GUI though.

osiris · Post by **osiris** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 6:16 pm

Oh yeah, move to Win 7 at least. It's tops. I hate Vista, but 7 I think you will also see CPU improvement.
(Because you're probably running a lot of stuff in MS Emulator mode and don't even realize it)

BBFG# · Post by **BBFG#** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 6:23 pm

On OSs... My computers with XP work fine, the ones with Vista work good, the ones with Seven are great, and the one with Eight is better. Although my biggest complaint for it right now is I haven't found a way to kill 'The Store' embedded into it. (What a waste of drive space for a music production only system).

If fine is fine, okay, but given the choice, I would rather have great.
How come no one talks about windows 3.1 anymore?
Because it is as extinct. And XP is headed that way.

Eventually, all my XP computers will be Linux.

SAW75 · Post by **SAW75** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 6:44 pm

Really? Now we are talking about operating systems?

Let's talk about Berlin too. I'm sure the guys at NI Berlin are awesome. I've heard that Berlin is one of the nicest places in the world to live as a creative person nowadays. Culture, art, reasonably affordable. It's no doubt that NI Berlin support is much nicer than here in America.

But I don't deal with Berlin support living in the USA. Tough luck for me I suppose.

So, I think Pizza really tastes great.

BBFG# · Post by **BBFG#** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 6:48 pm

Really depends on the pizza...

SAW75 · Post by **SAW75** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 6:49 pm

While we're at it I'll just smack myself for not putting this in the Sampler subforum.

I was hoping to get some feedback from content developers on this and was REALLY hoping other options were being explored...

I guess Kontakt is the only way...