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  • VI questions

    R
    R
    I have read the product info about the VI, it looks very cool. I then went to the discount calculator, and it seems I'm elligible to get it for about $6k. That looks even better. Here there are my two preordering questions then.


    1) I own the Gigastudio versions of Complete Orchestral Package, and several Horizon Series. One fundamental aspect of any sample library for my needs, is knowing if the samples are 'open'. Meaning, if I can open the samples in a wave editor somehow, to edit and adjust them to my needs.

    Do the VI samples allow that, as the Gigastudio libraries?


    2) Is it possible to remap the samples, and/or combine samples from the different VI instruments? I have hundreds of instruments crafted in GS3 using samples from all over the Orchestral Package lib, adjusted to particular needs. Can this be done with VI?


    3) Is *everything* in the Complete Orchestral Package *and* Horizon Series included in the Extended VI set? Could one think of VI as "100% exactly the same samples in previous products, plus many more plus the Instrument software"?


    Thanks in advance,


    -René
  • J
    J
    1) No. The VIs are encoded into monolithic .dat files. Totally proprietary. Also, they use a form of lossless compression, to save RAM, which is decoded on the fly. It's a bit of a bummer that we can't access the files, but there are a _hell_ of a lot of them, so I'm not sure we'd want to! (And yes, I used to do a lot of that myself.)

    2) You could produce pretty much any combination you wanted, and have a vast degree of control over how they're used. The one thing to keep in mind, though, is that they must all be on the same Vienna Key if you're going to use them in this way... and obviously, they must all be on the same machine! Sounds like a stupid reply, but most people have them distributed over multiple machines...

    3) Hmmm... I do know that a full Symphonic Cube gives you everything plus _much_ more, but I don't know that they are exactly the same samples... There is a great deal of tricky, behind the scenes functionality and mapping going on in the VIs. It would be almost impossible, I think, to determine where every sample is coming from by comparison to the Pro Edition. It would really be kind of a waste of time. I can say this: I was enormously impressed by the sound quality of the VIs right away. I can't really explain why. They just sound much warmer, more expressive, and more "present" to me than the standard libraries. Top notch. They take some serious resources to run well, but they're absolutely brilliant once they're going.

    J.
  • J
    J
    last edited
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    @jbm said:

    I can say this: I was enormously impressed by the sound quality of the VIs right away. I can't really explain why. They just sound much warmer, more expressive, and more "present" to me than the standard libraries. Top notch.


    24-bit, perhaps?
  • P
    P
    In all the forum reading I've done, I've never heard anything like "Hey, we used to have such and such a sound, and now it's not available in VI." Perhaps there are some Horizon disks that have yet to be imported. (No VI Electric Guitar to my knowledge.) But I think the entire Orchestral Cube is there (and much more).

    Many of us have spent months hand-crafting sounds in Giga, EXS and the like. The layering possibilities of VI put it all to shame. At first it felt strange not having access to the samples. But within a couple of days, I ceased to care.
  • J
    J
    last edited
    last edited

    @jbm said:

    I can say this: I was enormously impressed by the sound quality of the VIs right away. I can't really explain why. They just sound much warmer, more expressive, and more "present" to me than the standard libraries. Top notch.


    24-bit, perhaps?

    Well, I guess... maybe. I honestly never thought it could make that much of a difference. After all, I've heard one camp say, "nobody can hear the difference between 16, 20, and 24-bit", while others say it's night-and-day. I guess, if it's down to that, then I'm in the latter camp. Night-and-day, IMO!

    J.
  • D
    D
    I think that for me there real difference is in the way that the samples have been edited. Every transition seems much smoother and therefore it is easier to get a good sound. If I listen to individual notes I don't hear any difference, even with an A/B comparison.

    DG
  • J
    J
    Yeah, that may be it. I haven't actually A/B-ed them, so I can't say about that. I just know that I heard the difference as soon as I started playing, but I do think it was more to do with the overall treatment of the samples. I noticed it first with the VC legato, which I found to be much warmer and richer... I had the HOR Solo Strings, and the cello didn't seems as rich. Don't know. Maybe I just wanted to be proud of all the $$$ I'd spent! [;)]

    J.
  • R
    R
    Thank you jbm and all for your kind answers, much appreciated.


    -René