How do you all feel about Spitfire Labs

[glokraw]

I haven't seen many poor college types lately, mostly spending borrowed money, or daddy/mommy money, very few pay-as-you-go working students earning their tuition.

Current stats indicate the problem is immense, but that only matters if you feel people are entitled to the prices they charge for the products they create or supply.

https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/

[SomethingSomeone]

I wanted to say though that song you posted sounds really nice. I like the progression. Very gentle and emotive. Pensive.

aww thank you, it means a lot to hear that

[.jon]

I use BBCSO Discovery and half a dozen Labs instruments, really like them and Spitfire as a company has a really good vibe. When I upgrade to a real orchestra, choice is obvious.

Also, having Homay Schmitz on board is a clear advantage

[adl]

I really like those free packs, they just released a new one, btw. Cassette Synth:
LABS — Cassette Synth
https://labs.spitfireaudio.com/cassette-synth

[darkinners]

Spitfire Lab has great sample libraries but their Player and Installer Center and Privacy Protection suck donkey balls.

I wish they go back to Kontakt instead of using their stupid player.
The installation center and privacy protection are beyond stupid. as simple as I bought a new and bigger SSD, if I want to move my samples to the new SSD, it won't work. I literally have to "repair" all the libraries that I own, ONE AT A TIME!!! and library like BBC Symphony Orchestra Professional has many sub-libraries/bank in it that you have to repair each ONE AT A TIME!!. What the hell? Why can't you do "repair all"
And on top of that, you only have 2 chances to repair/reinstall the libraries you own, everytime you need to reinstall you have to email Spitfire Audio to reset your counter and wait for their reply before you can reinstall/repair them.
If you have anything wrong with your sample libraries and you need to repair and troubleshoot, good luck with that. that will take you DAYS as after a couple of tries you have to email them to reset the count for you again.

[martinjuenke]

Installed, tested, deleted.
Harddisk space will be used for better content.
These freebies are not worth the time spent on them.

[seangm]

I would love to start using Labs again but I found it so buggy and painful to install and keep running I gave up. Maybe it is more stable now.

For reference:
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=564825

This. I just wasted hours trying to get their labs plugin to work but it always gives me an "Error #4" and crashes. Followed the "troubleshooting" guide which was useless. I just uninstalled the damn thing, good riddance.

[iPlogger]

I think what they offer is great (from freebies, to Originals, to full-blown orchestral packages). Unfortunately, everything I have tried sounds neat at first, but grows weary to me after a few minutes of playing. The biggest problem I have is how unplayable I find their sounds. They tend to leave a bit of silence at the beginning of the samples, making them difficult to play (at least for me). They have a control to compensate, I think it might be called "Tighten", which shifts the beginning of the sample. This helps for lower notes, but then it makes the upper notes have a different feeling. In the end, I felt there were only a small number of keys/notes I could play without having a latency issue.

I thought it was maybe a limitation of the Freebies, which I can understand and don't have a problem with that. But I have seen this same problem described on YT in some of the paid for libraries, and I won't spend my money if it has the same issue.

I would like to hear otherwise. I thought maybe it was just me, until I heard a respected sound designer mention the same exact thing.

[mixyguy2]

I haven't seen many poor college types lately, mostly spending borrowed money, or daddy/mommy money, very few pay-as-you-go working students earning their tuition.

Current stats indicate the problem is immense, but that only matters if you feel people are entitled to the prices they charge for the products they create or supply.

https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/

That article is IMO dicey at best, quoting a lot of stats which aren't verifiable and some which IMO are no more than someone pulling numbers out of their butt. Really in fairness, it's impossible to say just how bad or not bad the problem is, but I maintain that companies are losing little money overall as most people who pirate, if they couldn't, wouldn't buy it, especially with plugins as there's so much good free stuff around.

[Michael L]

it's impossible to say just how bad or not bad the problem is, but I maintain that companies are losing little money overall as most people who pirate, if they couldn't, wouldn't buy it, especially with plugins as there's so much good free stuff around.

Both of your statements are false.

I know the creators of two DAWs and many sample libraries whose income suddenly dropped a lot due to piracy, so they had to stop developing until they could solve the problem.

[noiseboyuk]

I think what they offer is great (from freebies, to Originals, to full-blown orchestral packages). Unfortunately, everything I have tried sounds neat at first, but grows weary to me after a few minutes of playing. The biggest problem I have is how unplayable I find their sounds. They tend to leave a bit of silence at the beginning of the samples, making them difficult to play (at least for me). They have a control to compensate, I think it might be called "Tighten", which shifts the beginning of the sample. This helps for lower notes, but then it makes the upper notes have a different feeling. In the end, I felt there were only a small number of keys/notes I could play without having a latency issue.

I thought it was maybe a limitation of the Freebies, which I can understand and don't have a problem with that. But I have seen this same problem described on YT in some of the paid for libraries, and I won't spend my money if it has the same issue.

I would like to hear otherwise. I thought maybe it was just me, until I heard a respected sound designer mention the same exact thing.

I'm overall quite Spitfire agnostic. They have waves of fans who adore everything they do, and indeed many (most?) professionals have them as a top-tier developer. Then they have their detractors who are averse to the hype in particular, and the never ending claims along the lines of "your life will be worthless unless you own THIS new library". I'm closer to the latter than the former but this post struck me as quite bizarre.

You seem to be talking about something very specific and then turning it into something general. It's nonsense that they tend to leave silence at the start of samples as a broad statement. You're talking about short articulations in orchestral libraries specifically (especially strings), and the control you have to set the amount of leading edge. Their philosophy is that it's important to capture that leading edge, but the necessary trade off is that it makes playing the samples that bit looser (and they offer a control to trim that edge, making it tighter but a bit less realistic). That's fine to criticize their implementation of that, but it sounds a bit silly to say it applies as a generalisation across their entire range of every kind of instrument and articulation.

The overlap into reality might be in their overall poor QC processes. They are a big company, and I just wish they'd swap out a couple of marketing jobs for QC ones. These days with the excellent noise reduction tools we all have, there is no excuse for leaving egregious clicks, bangs, scrapes, car crashes and gunshots in samples. I'm not talking about subtleties in the long ambient decay either, I'm talking leading edge attack parts of a note that spread out over several semitones and sound Every Single Time. I might even let that go in an old product, but not when they charge me a hundred bucks to update it and find they've done absolutely nothing. (Still not over it, can you tell)?

[Danilo Villanova]

Very useful sounds in Labs but, yeah, installer is atrocious. I just know that I gotta install and immediately repair anything I install from them. I use them every day and hope to buy Albion One.

[Mr Arkadin]

The only issue i have with LABS these days is that I always have to install the library twice. After first install the app doesn't see the new library. Instsll again and all is fine.

To noisyboyuk, thanks for the considered response rather than the somewhat hyperbolic comment you were quoting. As a user of Chamber Strings I love this library the most, so I'm intrigued as to what you don't like. Maybe I'm not bothered by what bothers you, or maybe it's certain articulations that are the problem?

[noiseboyuk]

As a user of Chamber Strings I love this library the most, so I'm intrigued as to what you don't like. Maybe I'm not bothered by what bothers you, or maybe it's certain articulations that are the problem?

This is an example from 2019 using the main legato patch. Here it is out of the box - note the really harsh glitch on the attack of the first few notes (which share the same busted sample) and the horrible glitch in the sustain of the last:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/atnxdf4ugikym ... x.wav?dl=0

This was the work of 2 minutes in RX to fix it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j2yiitasjdlzk ... e.wav?dl=0

Now I can render everything to audio to fix the glitches, but obvs that's a major pita. I went to support with this as an example, but it led nowhere, sadly.

[noiseboyuk]

In the interests of balance, added to the post above, here a short test of Sable (now Spitfire Chamber Strings) in a more positive light, combined with some LASS first chairs for a bit more definition.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/me4pilzs47dau ... e.wav?dl=0

It's a gorgeous library that I'll never abandon despite my frustrations with it.