CineSamples Musio: Lifetime License

[noiseboyuk]

CineSamples started Musio last year as a subscription service offering lite versions of their extensive catalog. Not that interesting. It is much more interesting now.

1. They offer a lifetime license, a one-off payment of RRP $999, intro offer til April 17th of $499. This will include their entire catalog, and everything new added to it in the coming months and years. Nothing else to pay, ever.
2. They are massively expanding the range of instruments over the next few months (including brand new libraries like CineStrings Pro).
3. They are getting the player up to standard including mic mixers and keyswitches over the same time scale.

Here's what's coming:
https://youtu.be/j0BoYousECg

https://musio.com/coming-soon/

You can install on multiple computers. It will work offline on downloaded instruments for a month before it has to check in again.

Right now it's a bit of a punt. Have they over-reached? Can they deliver? They have a good reputation, I've been a happy customer for well over a decade, the quality is excellent. I have no interest in subscription services, but this is no longer subscription as we know it. I strongly like that I can have full mic mixes on my main desktop machine, and lighter single mixes on a laptop.

There's a free 14 day trial - https://musio.com/pricing/

[Echoes in the Attic]

Amazing deal. I already have their whole cinesymphony collection though so not much more I'd want except Tina Guo. Any deals if you already own stuff? Probably not given how cheap the intro is.

[noiseboyuk]

Any deals if you already own stuff? Probably not given how cheap the intro is.

Nothing at this stage, but I agree its so cheap anyway it would be a bit much to expect it.

It's hard to see how they could survive financially if it carries on at this level. Pure speculation, but this might be a cash-grab now before they've fully built it. By August if it fulfills its promise it will be quite something - at that point they might keep the pricing nearer the RRP level but maybe offer some discounts to customers with a lot of their libraries. The $499 maybe prices-in an element of leap-of-faith. It is still early days for the platform. It's pretty basic right now and has crashed a couple of times.

[Echoes in the Attic]

I guess there are pros and cons of moving out of kontakt/komplete kontrol.

I don't like the once per month check though. Just let me authorize and be done with it. License checks could just happen when you go to download updates or new stuff.

[vanerio]

I guess there are pros and cons of moving out of kontakt/komplete kontrol.

I don't like the once per month check though. Just let me authorize and be done with it. License checks could just happen when you go to download updates or new stuff.

Same here, I don´t understand that monthly check, specially if you are not under their subscription model.

[noiseboyuk]

Musio is very online-focused. The philosophy here is that you have a huge bank of sounds that you can browse, and then download whatever you need. Of course for things you will use routinely you will download them and keep them. But for something you're not sure you'll use much or at all, there's no point it in taking up hard drive space - just grab it if you ever need it. I quite like this as a paradigm.

If you are strictly an offline-only person for music, this isn't going to work for you. I'm always online anyway, except occasionally on the mobile, so the monthly check-in thing honestly doesn't bother me. And if the internet happens to be down on an occasion, it will still work with everything I already downloaded.

[Ah_Dziz]

Does that mean they dumped kontakt?

[noiseboyuk]

Does that mean they dumped kontakt?

No.

[Ah_Dziz]

Well that's good. I have a pile of their stuff and I don't want another weird spitfire situation. Hell I'd pay a grand for everything they ever do of it's all normal kontakt stuff. Cine winds and Cine Perc are my go-to libraries. I also dig their two "runs" libraries a lot.

[vanerio]

Does anyone know if the patches contain all the same samples as their kontakt version or are they a reduced/simplified version?

[gaggle of hermits]

at the moment it's just one mic mix and you don't have keyswitch or velocity control over the articulations. they said they are doing an update to bring in keyswitching (but it looks as though they won't offer the same control as in the kontakt libraries) and additional microphones. the shorts are named differently and i'm not sure if they match the kontakt versions 1:1, so it's no easy to work out whether the core sample sets match up. aside from the lack of microphone positions they seem to be broadly the same but i think they've said the full versions will continue to be kontakt-based.

[vanerio]

The thing is, they don't seem to want to let you know exactly what the similarities and differences are between Musio and Kontakt. It would be very easy with a simple comparison table. 500$ may seem a low price for them, but it is a big outlay for a normal person, and knowing perfectly the product you buy seems to me something wise and a right as a consumer.

[noiseboyuk]

The free trial is good for getting a sense of the compromises (plus their coming soon stuff).

For the ordinary orchestral / acoustic libraries I think the translation works well, or will when the keyswitching and multi-mic options come on stream. I won't miss Kontakt there at all. Other libraries however make little sense, for example the Collision Impact Designer is just a bunch of static samples. Without the engine that turns it all into stings, it's kinda pointless. Then the synth and drum machine libraries are just filler really, very vanilla.

But even without those bolt-ons, their main series, plus all the new releases like CineStrings Pro and then more besides, is an amazing deal at $499. The fact you can have it across multiple machines and you can determine the resources footprint make it a pretty compelling offer.

[vanerio]

I've already tried the trial, but I don't know if the limitations are something the company wants or something they will try to complete in the future.
They have said that they will try to get as close to 1:1 as possible, but what does that include?
As far as we know: mic positions, articulations, but ... number of samples, round robin, other parameters?
I think the buyer should have a better idea than he can know before he buys.
What are the real compromises? if the price difference is so great, there must be an obvious reason that is not being stated.

[noiseboyuk]

I've already tried the trial, but I don't know if the limitations are something the company wants or something they will try to complete in the future.
They have said that they will try to get as close to 1:1 as possible, but what does that include?
As far as we know: mic positions, articulations, but ... number of samples, round robin, other parameters?
I think the buyer should have a better idea than he can know before he buys.
What are the real compromises? if the price difference is so great, there must be an obvious reason that is not being stated.

It would be handy if they could tell us things like this, but in the absence of solid info I ran a few tests.

I have CinePerc Core. There is a 3x snare patch of 4.1gb. Each snare is available individually in Musio, I picked Piccolo at 321mb - the other 2 were 386 and 232. This has 1 mic position to the main library having 6, so crude maths brings Kontakt down to 683mb, vs Musio's 939 (maybe some of the Kontakt mic positions are shorter, esp the close).

Analysing the waveforms, I'm pretty sure this Musio patch is 4x rr, which is the same as Kontakt's. Hard to be sure, but I think it's the same number of velocity layers (12).

I've no idea about bit depth (if samples are normalised, 16 bit would be just fine), but I'd guess from the numbers this is still 24 bit.

Okay this is just one patch chosen at random, but overall this doesn't look like it's skimping, save for the obvious reduction in mic positions. Perhaps more importantly, it plays and sounds just fine to me, as an owner of the full library.