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billf wrote:

Frodo wrote:So, what are we to do? It seems that every time someone comes up with a solution they've got us by the marbles in one way or another.

I can see at least these possibilities:

Keep your hardware sampler. I still have and use my Kurzweil k2k.



Support the vendors who support an open MachFive and/or Kontakt and/or EXS-24 set of products.

Quit buying into the rompler model. Vendors have no incentive to change as long as we continue to take it in the backside.

+1000

Spikey Horse wrote:5. Learn to sing or play an instrument

Sorry, couldn't resist!

Still I believe it's a fair point .....

Instruments? Who needs real instruments when you can use loops to construct a song in five minutes?

billf wrote:

Spikey Horse wrote:5. Learn to sing or play an instrument

Sorry, couldn't resist!

Still I believe it's a fair point .....

Instruments? Who needs real instruments when you can use loops to construct a song in five minutes?

I see you used the CORRECT verb when referring to using loops, even when you are kidding around

Others call it "composing"

FMiguelez wrote:

billf wrote:

Spikey Horse wrote:5. Learn to sing or play an instrument

Sorry, couldn't resist!

Still I believe it's a fair point .....

Instruments? Who needs real instruments when you can use loops to construct a song in five minutes?

I see you used the CORRECT verb when referring to using loops, even when you are kidding around

Others call it "composing"

Indeed. I don't mean to totally slag the use of loops. They are a valid tool. That said, someone who uses 100% canned loops better be doing something unique before it rates as a being a composition in my view.

I think the entire issue boils down to economics rather than the artistic merits of how others are using these tools, whether loops, samples, DAWs, or brick-and-mortar recording studios.

Companies of any sort place more priority on sales than anything else. The problem is that the potential lack of support effects the artistically accomplished as well as the hobbyist.

Frodo wrote:Companies of any sort place more priority on sales than anything else. The problem is that the potential lack of support effects the artistically accomplished as well as the hobbyist.

Agreed. Regardless though, we as costumers would do better if we placed more priority on longer term requirements rather that fall for the "golly gee whiz bang isn't that rompler cool" marketing spin.

billf wrote:

Frodo wrote:Companies of any sort place more priority on sales than anything else. The problem is that the potential lack of support effects the artistically accomplished as well as the hobbyist.

Agreed. Regardless though, we as costumers would do better if we placed more priority on longer term requirements rather that fall for the "golly gee whiz bang isn't that rompler cool" marketing spin.

I don't disagree, except that's that kind of market we live in, unfortunately. The patina of bells and whistles attracts dollars for the same reasons infomercials stay on the air. I'm not saying that's a happy thought at all...

It's true-- "WE" as customers would do better.... but companies appear to be less interested in customers doing better, particularly where separating us from our money is at issue. So many companies appear to be in it for themselves at the literal and figurative expense of the customer.

It makes me want to go back to collecting mics and pres and such. In the spirit of Spikey's suggestion of learning real instruments I've been pretty gung-ho with efforts to resurrect the guitar over the past 2-3 years and am enjoying it immensely. I even picked up my violin for the first time in ages. Not bad for a career pianist. Thing is, I can't "play orchestra", so that's where I'm stuck in rompler room.

blue wrote:

mhschmieder wrote:I sure am glad I didn't buy into the Giga model.

Yea, but you have to wonder about the general direction of samplers altogether. If it wasn't for the fact that Native Instruments was licensing the Kontakt engine for romplers while also developing the full version, I would wonder about the future of Kontakt too. Hopefully they can keep that going by appealing to smaller developers who don't have the resources to build their own players. But you never know. Not long ago Giga was king.

I think the emergence of proprietary players is bad for us in the long run. It amounts to more troubleshooting, more authorizing, more learning curves and fewer choices for sample manipulation. Giga pioneered hard-disk sampling and, even though I don't use it anymore, I'm sad to see it go.

Tough call. Proprietary or open? Open samples lock you into someone else's player, which may or may not get updated to keep up with your samples or with new versions of DAWs or OS's. Mach5.2 is a "Swiss-Army Knife" of samplers, which makes it handy as an alternative for orphaned samples. (Giga, for example) But it may not provide all the controllers and connections as Giga Studio itself. I don't know that for a fact; but I'd guess that.

Proprietary formats seem the best bets for performance, but the worst bet for your investment. If a company goes belly-up, there goes your investment. No chance for recycling those libraries later, unless someone thinks it's worth buying the rights, or someone reverse-engineers the player. Chancy either way.

But I have a feeling there may be something else involved in Giga's decision: we're seeing a paradigm shift in virtual instruments, away from traditional samples and toward sample-based modelers. Those use much smaller samples and more programming to create very realistic sounds and performance controls. Examples include the recent Trumpet by Tommasini, Steinway Piano by Garritan, WIVI orchestral instruments by Wallander, Stradivari Solo Violin and Gofriller Cello by Garritan (Tommasini, actually). These threaten to bring down the big boys like East-West and Vienna unless they're also shifting to the new paradigm. Proprietary players are pretty much the necessity for some of these, though the Garritan violin and cello are hosted by Kontakt2 Player.

There are advantages and disadvantages to any combination of the above, but one has to consider the utility of samples like the original old Miroslav Vitous library, which has been functional in just about every player ever made. Sounds awful, but with a little Altiverb, it sounds a lot like an orchestra. Anyway, GigaStudio folks shouldn't feel too bad. There will always be samplers that play the Giga format. It's just that there are so many ways to lose your money in this racket.

Shooshie

PS: I just realized that most of the instruments I named as "new paradigm" are really not modeled, but just intensively controlled samples of the old paradigm. WIVI is definitely new-paradigm, and the best of the lot, in my opinion.


Shooshie

Shooshie wrote:Tough call. Proprietary or open? Open samples lock you into someone else's player…

Open samples don't lock you in at all. If the player they were designed for falls you still have access to the samples. The laborious process of re-programming samples to another format has been softened with products like Redmatica's AutoSampler.

I would guess most developers would unlock the samples of defunct products, but in the case of Play, where the new player supplants an older one, we're stuck unless we move over to Play.

Shooshie wrote:Proprietary formats seem the best bets for performance.

I guess it depends on what you'd call proprietary. All the examples you listed are based on the K2 engine, an engine whose roots go deeper than the advent of Kontakt-based romplers. It's hard to say how much Kontakt's development -especially its revolutionary scripting language- has been fueled by 3rd party licensing, but I see no reason to believe it wouldn't have gotten where it is had developers kept to its originally open format and not gone with copy-protected files. I think it's telling that all the scripting going on under the hood of VI's like the Gofriller Cello is available to all in Kontakt and not just the Kontakt player. The scripts and the samples might be proprietary, but the language and the engine are not.

Yeah, I was spacing out there with a commotion in the house when I wrote that open samples lock you into proprietary hardware. DUH! Not exactly what I meant to say, but by the time I got that message finished, everyone else had just about said it all, anyway. I went back and grabbed the quote from you guys, but didn't do a very good job of editing. Sorry 'bout dat.


Shoosh

blue wrote:I guess it depends on what you'd call proprietary. All the examples you listed are based on the K2 engine, an engine whose roots go deeper than the advent of Kontakt-based romplers. It's hard to say how much Kontakt's development -especially its revolutionary scripting language- has been fueled by 3rd party licensing, but I see no reason to believe it wouldn't have gotten where it is had developers kept to its originally open format and not gone with copy-protected files. I think it's telling that all the scripting going on under the hood of VI's like the Gofriller Cello is available to all in Kontakt and not just the Kontakt player. The scripts and the samples might be proprietary, but the language and the engine are not.

I don't know much about the Kontakt2 player engine. Just what ARE its roots? I'm quite new to Kontakt, having bought 4 Garritan libraries last December. This is a thread where I should be listening more than talking. I stayed with hardware samplers up until about 2005, when I first ventured out into Ivory, Akoustik Piano, MOTU SI, and Mach Five. I'd be interested in knowing about the other lines -- Vienna, East-West, Kontakt-based stuff, etc. and the engines that played them. Did any of those evolve from hardware engines? UVI?


Shooshie

Frodo wrote:It makes me want to go back to collecting mics and pres and such. In the spirit of Spikey's suggestion of learning real instruments I've been pretty gung-ho with efforts to resurrect the guitar over the past 2-3 years and am enjoying it immensely. I even picked up my violin for the first time in ages. Not bad for a career pianist. Thing is, I can't "play orchestra", so that's where I'm stuck in rompler room.

Same here. I'm playing my guitars more, which is good. I'm with you on the orchestra part, that requires some sort of library. But maybe I can live with MachFive and my Kurz on that front.

blue wrote:

Shooshie wrote:Tough call. Proprietary or open? Open samples lock you into someone else's player…

Open samples don't lock you in at all. If the player they were designed for falls you still have access to the samples. The laborious process of re-programming samples to another format has been softened with products like Redmatica's AutoSampler.

And if you're lucky, the preset file format is also in a format that's human-readable or otherwise at least somewhat easily interpreted outside developers, like MachFive's XML-based presets. Even if M5 was discontinued, doesn't seem like it'd be too hard for another developer to figure out how to read those preset files. (However, this point mostly just applies to "loose" preset files and samples, not those encapsulated in a copy-protected UFS.)

Shooshie wrote:Anyway, GigaStudio folks shouldn't feel too bad. There will always be samplers that play the Giga format. It's just that there are so many ways to lose your money in this racket.

One thing Giga users might want to keep their eye on is LinuxSampler (which despite the name is available in varying states for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X), which provides a way to playback and edit .gig files. I've played around with it a little bit on OS X and Windows XP and I found it interesting (if a bit unpolished); I think the client/server model is a good choice in this particular case, especially if it scales well & can be managed across different computers.

There's no guarantee that an open source project won't be dropped just like any other proprietary project (though maybe for different reason), but perhaps this recent turn of events will encourage development to keep pushing ahead. Who knows, maybe someday the Giga PC farm crowd will be running Linux instead of Windows.