This is all up to Herb and our developers - and finally our marketing team. I won't spill the beans, that's for sure [;)]

@William said:

There is also maybe the most basic recording engineer's philosophy that is egregiously violated by synful - not to tamper with the basic waveforms of the original recording. To present them in the most pure fashion possible is the goal, which is what VSL has done, but synful literally rips them to pieces then "reassembles" them.

I don't care what happens to the samples as long as it sounds good. However, the fact that the samples have been tampered with may be the reason why it doesn't sound good [:)]

DG

@William said:

There is also maybe the most basic recording engineer's philosophy that is egregiously violated by synful - not to tamper with the basic waveforms of the original recording. To present them in the most pure fashion possible is the goal, which is what VSL has done, but synful literally rips them to pieces then "reassembles" them.

I don't care what happens to the samples as long as it sounds good.

DG

I have to agree with DG here, William. Your point is completely valid regarding the sustain portions, but I am referring to the critical 0.3 - 1 sec attack/note transitions, and the myriad variations that this demands. I don't think this is best addressed with sampling technology. Surely it would mean even bigger libraries? And the bottom line is that, even in it's infancy, Synful is doing a better job of interpreting and creating legato and portamento articulations than anything else I've heard so far, on a time-to-results ratio.

Am I ready to buy Synful? No
Am I excited at what this technology may lead to? Oh YES. [:D]

Mike.

Mike McCarthy -
I disagree. The VSL sampled legato on horns, flutes, clarinets, trumpets, etc., basically all of the performance instruments, are far beyond those Synful legato sounds.

DG -
That is why the art of recording has, in general, the underlying philosophy I spoke of.

Despite this, some combination of automated sample intelligence is obviously in the future. My problem is tampering with natural, perfect waveforms to get it. Of course many people don't mind because they don't hear the difference and are willing to accept compromise for convenience. I don't mean the people on this thread, but rather the people who are buying the hard sell advertising on the Synful website which arrogantly dismisses the entire art of pure sampling and pretends to offer something better. I was offended by that and it will take quite a bit to compensate for the way they stated that it is impossible to create a fluid line with single note samples as they are originally recorded in isolation. That is complete b.s. because when samples are recorded with - 1) consistency, 2) expressive and articulated variations and 3) actual legato - and then played with musicality in connected phrases they BECOME connected. That is music. That is how the human brain connects things that are isolated even in live performance. That is the whole philosophy behind the pure sampling approach.

So anyway I don't undertand how someone can state that the good thing about sampled instruments in VSL is just the sustain notes. When everyone agrees the actual recorded legato makes all the difference in the world and is probably the outstanding thing about the entire library.

[quote=William]Mike McCarthy -
I disagree. The VSL sampled legato on horns, flutes, clarinets, trumpets, etc., basically all of the performance instruments, are far beyond those Synful legato sounds.


William -
Absolutely no argument - and I stated as much in my first post. But don't you agree that it is the potential of something like Synful that is exciting, especially if it could somehow be integrated into a future Perf Tool upgrade.

I never intended this to become a "Synful-is-better-than-VSL" debate, but rather a discussion of the merits of combining the two technologies.

Also, I'm certainly not suggesting that VSL is only good for sustains! [[;)]]

Mike.

@Mike McCarthy said:

[quote=William]Mike McCarthy -
I disagree. The VSL sampled legato on horns, flutes, clarinets, trumpets, etc., basically all of the performance instruments, are far beyond those Synful legato sounds.


William -
Absolutely no argument - and I stated as much in my first post. But don't you agree that it is the potential of something like Synful that is exciting, especially if it could somehow be integrated into a future Perf Tool upgrade.

I never intended this to become a "Synful-is-better-than-VSL" debate, but rather a discussion of the merits of combining the two technologies.

Also, I'm certainly not suggesting that VSL is only good for sustains! [[;)]]

Mike.

Well said Mike. No one disputes the superior results we can get using VSL. But in 5 years from now, we may look back and think - 'how did we originally use VSL.....?

I have invested the bulk of my sample library investment in VSL because I felt they had the 'vision' needed to continually innovate. I am quite confident this will be the case. Exciting times are ahead - that is for sure.


Rob

@Rob Elliott said:

I have invested the bulk of my sample library investment in VSL because I felt they had the 'vision' needed to continually innovate. I am quite confident this will be the case. Exciting times are ahead - that is for sure.


Rob

VSL certainly has the vision. They are the only one's who don't play games with their sampling and do things right and fully.

One of the things I find appealing about Synful, apart from the already mentioned qualities, is the fact that it is so very light on system resources - its power needs are minimal. You can run it on almost any sort of system, including semi-antiquated laptops.
If in future updates VSL's legato patches could become 'hybrids' - full untampered with wavs, but using some sort of advanced synthesis for the connections ands attacks (synful's specialty) which require little to no extra system resources, that might be a 'best of both worlds' scenario.

On the other hand, the end of the 2gig ram barrier is nearly at hand and such things won't really matter any more... I'm really frothing at the mouth for this... 16gigs in a single system - twice the loading power in one box than what you would currently have with a network of eight systems!
An Opus bundle user like me could load every last sample, and it would only take up a fraction of total system resources... no more network glitches every other day... ah pleasant speculations... [[;)]][/i]

I think that the VSL legato establishes it is unnecessary to fake legato at all. That was always what I wanted in the dim past of sampling - connected notes. And the sampling of legato seemed impossible since it always was tied to frozen performances like runs, glisses, etc. But the dissecting of the transition and inclusion of the target note was a stroke of absolute genius. So that is mainly what I disagreed with - that you have to use some complex manipulation of waveforms to synthesize or emulate legato rather than the actual recordings now possible.

Also, I don't believe what people keep saying - the future is a matter of "synthesis." It is a matter of musical intelligence in software applied to samples, mainly to automate the selection process and stop the user from having to use more than one track per instrument.

More than one track - that's funny, eh Jay? [[;)]]

The best should be a full VSL orchestral library (with "musical intelligence") on a 20 Gb with 256Mb RAM [8-)]

We're talking about the future when presumably those numbers will be a joke.

Of course, i'm joking [:D]

The best should be an orchestral library you could play an old midi file and it sounds like a real orchestra.

[:)]

@SyQuEsT said:

The best should be an orchestral library you could play an old midi file and it sounds like a real orchestra.

[:)]

I disagree, as most old MIDI files would have been massacred in order to sound good with c**p sounds. I'm speaking for my MIDI files of course [:O]ops:

DG

I talked about a midi file you can find online, on any midi webpage

I have both libs,

One of the advantages also of Synful is dynamics. It really reacts not only to p and mf and fff levels but increments in between. Sonically IMO it can't hold a candle to VSL and of course this is it's major drawback, but I will occassionally use it as it does things no other lib can do.

The other thing to bare in mind is that samplers will become more clever. We talk a lot about the 2gig limit. Personally, I believe with clever programming a lazy sample loading, that limit would be largely not a problem anyway.
Halion (my choice) already has pre-load down to 0.2 seconds, which means I can quite happily run all my orchestral samples in real-time on a single pentium 4 machine. As disk/memory becomes more efficient, that pre-load will drop. Eventually the size of the samples will become largely irrelevant, especially if samplers can just pre-load the first time that a sample is used, thus avoiding loading unused samples.
That said, the future is not in sampling... but in synthesising the samples. It has to be. We are already seeing successful results in modelling older synths. The same will happen for orchestral instruments. Synful is just the start. It is important to bare in mind that synful still has samples at its heart too... it just used them differently.

@paynterr said:

Halion (my choice) already has pre-load down to 0.2 seconds, which means I can quite happily run all my orchestral samples in real-time on a single pentium 4 machine.

I think you are quite right in what you say about some things, however you have to remember that whilst you may be able to run all your orchestral samples on one machine, you certainly couldn't get close to running all mine.

DG

I don't know - lower the pre-load from 0.2 seconds to 0.0001 seconds and suddenly you have 1000s of gigs of samples available.
The real challenge for sampler developers is to see how low they can get the pre-load. Of course, hardware manufactuers will do a lot of their job for them.
RAM is just fast disk space. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need RAM at all. RAM and Disk would be the same thing. As they will eventually be. We are getting there quite quickly if you look at memory sticks for cameras and the like, which are already exceeding 1gig.
I would like to see samplers with 0.0 seconds pre-load right now and take the hit of the slightly latency in pulling the samples from disk.
This would allow:
a) My projects to load immediately.
b) A huge orchestral template.
with the downside:
c) I could not play in real-time...
I could live with this, since invariably I draw my projects with a mouse rather than play them in...

Just wanted to thank Mike for the original post that started this thread. An excellent, carefully phrased question, which prompted this great discussion about the future of the tools we work with. I'm sure VSL is enjoying this discussion, and possibly benefiting from the pool of ideas.

I agree with that Hoff, and wonder about the far future of "sampling" or "synthesis." When the ideal system evolves, freed from technical limitations, what will it be? Obviously some perfected emulation or original presentation of any timber including orchestral, with no effort on the part of a composer other than a purely artistic one. Which is as it should be to begin with but isn't.