....well..... [:D]

I have Mach Five, and K2 (and unity DS-1 [[:|]] )

K2 just does everything you could ever want - and it does it all without ever letting on just how hard it's working. I mean Mach Five won't even let you load an instrument without suspending all other functions (they shouldn't have made the samples have to squeeze through those tiny pipes! [[;)]] ).

K2 is a peachy - I'm sure it tidied up my studio once when I was out.

BTW It WANTS to work with huge VSL editions with scripts - it told me so.

K2 sounds good to me.

I would love to have the Perf, set or Orch. cube programed for Kontakt. Now that i have Chamber Strings in Kontakt format there are so many great things you an do in K2 with it and the Scripting ,Time.Tone machine, convolution.
I`m surprized more people arent talking about it .I really hope the VSL team take advantage of this great sampler... [:)] The integration is much , much better than GS 3..Rich

I use Kontakt, GS, and EXS24. Going forward, though, I really hope that VSL focuses on Kontakt and EXS24. VSL in Logic's EXS24 is quite a treat as far as ease of use goes.

GS has chosen to remain a question mark. I was hoping things would change after GS 3 was released, but they haven't. Now we hear that Pete Snell, the sole spokesperson for GS has left. Looking at the situation positively, I guess you could say it's a real testament to GS that it can survive with such neglect from Tascam. For such a product not to have a company sponsored forum monitored by staff is quite amazing. I really wonder, though, how long Tascam will continue to bankroll further GS development. They can't be making that much money off of it. They don't have multiple revenue streams from the product like NI does, nor do they have a stable of products that can benefit from shared technology. It's a head scratcher what Tascam is trying to do. If their hearts were in it, they could have done SO much more by now.

I bought the first edition of VSL for GS, then got the Pro upgrade for EXS24. If the future looked bright for GS, my plan was to buy the next upgrade for GS. At this point, however, I think I'd feel a lot more secure getting the next VSL upgrade for Kontakt. I think it's a much safer bet that Kontakt will be around for awhile.

I really wonder if GS will ever make the jump to 64 bits or Windows Vista. I'm certain that Kontakt will. In addition to the departure of Pete Snell, it also appears that Tascam has discontinued making computer audio/midi cards. They're no longer listed on the Tascam site. To me, it looks like Tascam is backing out the door of computer audio, focusing on stand-alone type products (which was always their strength).

Lee Blaske

Got I hope your wrong! I despise the Kontakt GUI - both its design, and speed (or lack thereof)

I would love to have access to my pro edition in Kontakt 2. I can run Kontakt in addition to GS via Plogue Bidule to squeeze more samples past the unfortunate ~1GB usable RAM in GS.

I have 2 GB of installed RAM and If I was able to use the instruments from the pro-edition in Kontakt, life would be great and my RAM investment would be so much more worthwile.

Please make this happen VSL!

@Christian Marcussen said:

Got I hope your wrong! I despise the Kontakt GUI - both its design, and speed (or lack thereof)

Yeah, it's one ugly interface OK...hard to read, etc.

But I realize it's popular so what do I know[;)]

TH

Whats wrong with converting the gig files to nki's with kontakt?

@Banquo said:

Whats wrong with converting the gig files to nki's with kontakt?

There not 100% accurate and theres so much more comvienent programming possiblities with K2 and scripting... [:)] Rich

I want to throw a monkey wrench into this discussion (just for the fun of it). In the past year, I produced an orchestral library for E-MU. I found that I really liked EmulatorX for the programming features and the resultant sound you could get since the company packages the program with a high quality audio card.

Now, I'm no programmer, but what I did like was that for each patch, 16 controllers were available. So if you want to control attack, release, and volume you can do it all in one program without having to have separate instruments to do this.

From a developer's perspective, you need less samples, much less than what you need in GigaStudio (at least the 2.54 version) which means fewer DVDs for duplication.

At any rate, if there are any here using EmulatorX maybe you'd consider adding your input separate from Kontakt.

The one thing I learned from previously doing a program in Kontakt, is that while Kontakt is really a great program, the heavy purchasing is with Kontakt player packages rather than the actual Kontakt program itself.

One other thing about EmulatorX I found rather appealing was that it easily imported the VSL GS 2.54 files. I haven't had time to really test this out, but what I tested sounded quite good.

PA

@Peter Alexander said:

From a developer's perspective, you need less samples, much less than what you need in GigaStudio (at least the 2.54 version) which means fewer DVDs for duplication.

The EXS version of Opus 1 contains 25 GB of samples (+ 120.5 MB of instruments data), the Giga version is 27.1 GB in size (said Martin ) and both, EXS and Giga version ship together on 4 DVDs. It wouldn't save one DVD here, nor on all the other distributors who are also most pressing all different sampler versions on their DVDs... And most libraries around are smaller than Opus 1...

PolarBear

and please don't forget (at least that happened with the version of EMU-X i've tested) the samples are converted into a proprietary format. so additionally to the .gig and .wav files we had another 50% more disks if one would add an EMU version of a library (but possibly i've missed something)

just to mention: the difference in size for giga and exs is related to the fact, that some .gig files contain the same wave files (eg. release) due to the design of a gig-file, whereas an exs file can point to wave files in any folder of the samples hierarchy

christian

@Peter Alexander said:

From a developer's perspective, you need less samples, much less than what you need in GigaStudio (at least the 2.54 version) which means fewer DVDs for duplication.

The EXS version of Opus 1 contains 25 GB of samples (+ 120.5 MB of instruments data), the Giga version is 27.1 GB in size (said Martin ) and both, EXS and Giga version ship together on 4 DVDs. It wouldn't save one DVD here...

PolarBear

I was working on a larger library where it did.

@cm said:

and please don't forget (at least that happened with the version of EMU-X i've tested) the samples are converted into a proprietary format. so additionally to the .gig and .wav files we had another 50% more disks if one would add an EMU version of a library (but possibly i've missed something)

just to mention: the difference in size for giga and exs is related to the fact, that some .gig files contain the same wave files (eg. release) due to the design of a gig-file, whereas an exs file can point to wave files in any folder of the samples hierarchy

christian

I didn't find that in this project. The files we worked with were imported from a GS2.54 version and we didn't experience a 50% increase in size. A while back I sent you the programmer's e-address, so feel free to write and ask. Again, I'm not a programmer so I'm just passing on my observations.

What does seem to be true, though, is that because of E-P/X street pricing and audio card bundling, you can develop products which can be copy protected without paying licensing fees. That should surely help out some developers!

sorry peter if i wasn't clear enough - what i wanted to say is, the size does not increase for the library, but the amount of data to be pressed on a DVD would be 50% more if an EMU-X version had to be additionally on them.
christian

@cm said:

sorry peter if i wasn't clear enough - what i wanted to say is, the size does not increase for the library, but the amount of data to be pressed on a DVD would be 50% more if an EMU-X version had to be additionally on them.
christian

Well, again, we didn't have that experience. But I'll check with someone who knows more than me about this because it's an important point.

Still, even if the EMU version is only 10% of the EXS size (which I hardly believe, because hmm, lossless compression can only do about 50% so far) there still has to be pressed 110% of the current data on DVDs if the additional format is considered. of course, if you do 101 variations of the same sample in programs you could push the comparison to one side... Anyway, it's not lowering the numbers of DVDs to press at all. And my guess is that most developers ship on multi-format discs for a reason, maybe it just costs too much to hold the proprietary discs in stock in a reasonable number for a good price?

And also, I can count the libs that are larger than Opus 1 with my 2 hands here...chances aren't high developers aren't researching the field themselves with such a beast for release IMHO. And if they don't, well... no comment.

PolarBear