Collective 1.0.1 pianos - mixed first impressions

[lzap]

My first impressions, the biggest is J Wolfe Piano patch (weird name for "to-go" piano) which is around 450MB compressed (assuming loseless this is about 900MB). It is very bright, hard to believe this is grand piano, there is no info. It is 6 layers I think, little bit too heavy on keys, the default preset has just reverb on it, there are several other presets as well and also "eco" versions.

Wait, I just realized that J Wolfe Piano is one octave higher than it should be, this is also why it sound "too bright". I mean, the sampled instrument is bright, but plus one octave higher which I did not realized immediately. After fixing this with transpose, it's better, rocky, playable but I miss bass part a lot (EQ did help just a bit). If this is supposed to be "the piano" in collective, it's maybe too bright for me.

Also I noticed that in low velocities it does not play well, for 6 layers this is way too heavy. There is no way to get mellow sound from this instrument at all, it basically plays mf when I do pp. The velocity problem with transpose bug - not so good for "the piano" of the collection.

Stage Grand multisample is very nice (about 50 MB compressed), there are several very nice presets based on that (e.g. Jazz Grand my overall favourite, intimate or Lennon's "Imagine" piano). Some patches has a clicky sound on hammer (sine oscillator) which I also enjoyed. Sounds really nice for 100 MB piano (my assumption about the size in memory), good work here (Dave Polich) and I like this one more than the JW from above.

Studio Electric Grand is sampled Yamaha CP-80 (50 MB compressed) and it sounds really nice, velocities are well handled and overall nice patch. There are several e-pianos (FM, Fender, Wurlizer...) and they sound nice indeed, no surprise there. And Harpsichord is there.

Grand Piano B is also bright, qulality of this one is rather bad, good enough for processing or "eco" piano versions when there is no CPU time left. It is very similar to the main "J Wolfe Piano", perhaps just an "eco" copy of samples.

Initially I did not like Yamaha Grand multisample at all, I noticed velocity gap between pp and p but it was likely a load bug or a patch that I could not find anymore later on. It is 24 MB compressed data and 3 velocities and it sounds nice and dark, so it nicely completes with one bright and one smooth jazzy.

Overall all pianos are either too bright or too mellow, no "all-rounder" found yet but I just need to spend some time here. To be honest, amount of patches is impressive even in the piano/keys area. I found the UI little bit clunky, I would love to be able to browse all patches for particular sample collection, which is not possible to do. Also "Concert Grand Piano" did not load on my Linux system, no info was there so perhaps the file was corrupted or something. The sampler sometimes dropped the preset and I needed to reload completely - maybe this was caused by the nag screen or white noise thing (hate it). But did not crash a single time, well done.

I was testing trial version of Waveform with Collective trial 1.0.1, the white noise was driving me crazy, so I could not focus completely on my review. I am not yet completly sold with this, I will hold on a bit on upgrading, but will definitely upgrade later (if not now).

Few more facts about the library. It's 2.2 GB of compressed multisamples, the format is unknown but since they announced 5 GB at NAM 2017, it is likely loseless format (either audio like flac or just deflate or something). It's around 570 instrument files, can't tell if this is all that shows up in the UI as there is no counter (I want couter).

There are some file listings or conversion results left in the directories, it looks like many multisamples were converted from SF2, so apparently Tracktion have a converter (hopefully they will release it to public or integrate this in the app). Maybe the multisample backend is SF2 based, don't know. I wish it was SFZ, which is much more capable format.

The good

- the very first capable "all-in-one" sampler on Linux
- nice synth only patches and layered patches
- I like the possibilities with oscilators and LFOs
- nice selection of various sounds
- compressed library (compact)
- yay sampler for Linux (thanks for this)

The bad

- the UI needs a lot of tweeking
- no multi-sample editing (announced, not yet done)
- does not search in descriptions
- more info in description about sampling and source material
- slower loading
- show patch count in result list
- show used memory
- patch naming is a bit messy (some cleanup would be nice)

Wishlist:

- clean rough edges (it was maybe rushed to the market)
- faster loading (key feature for "all-rounder" sampler)
- import SFZ or SF2
- sample streaming (very unlikely but who knows)

[aMUSEd]

Does Collective come as a separate plugin?

[lzap]

It is VST on Linux, but I did not try it in other DAW than Waveform.

[fwsuperhero]

Yeah, it is separate plugin. It is loaded in a second in a linux reaper, little slower opening has renoise and the slowest is waveform. it is great sampler, different beast than redux, more rompler / synth oriented.