Which instrument is this?

[lumpyhed]

I'm kinda considering the brass/woodwind section for use in the soundtrack for a neverwinter nights module i'm doing, but i'm not exactly musically educated! [:)] I'm wondering whats the instrument playing in this sample: *removed*

I don't seem to hear it in any of the demo samples on this site, unless its because of the relatively poor quality recording compared to what we have availible today to do these sample sets.

Any indicators would be appreciated.

ack! it starts well into the track & misses the instrument i'm hearing. [:(]
Oh well if any of you have Basil Poledarises Conan the Barbarian album, its the Recovery track at the very beginning with the solo of what i presume is some woodwind instrument.

[lumpyhed]

Well i never did find out [;)] *but* i have decided n purchased the brass\woodwind & percussive packs! [:D]

This should be....interesting. [[:|]]

[herb]

Hello Lumpyhed,

sorry that there was no time to feature the percussion more exclusively in our demosection. But Maarten Spuijt used a lot of the percussion instruments in a very transparent way in his demos.

For the upcoming Pro Edition demos, I'll try to feature also some First Edition Percussions.

best wishes
Herb

[lumpyhed]

Well after some effiecent delivery i got me pieces of orchestral goodness on friday! I've been busily importing instruments into Halion 2.0 and all is going well so far.

I've managed to get the Alternation tool working with Fruityloop after much tweaking. The Midiyoke utility was very useful for this, and i took advantage of the macro function for the alternating - just how i imagined it would work.

The performance demo also got to work with this util. I'm not sure whether it is a excellent demonstration of its strength though, because it didn't have that 'wow must buy!' factor like the audio tracks did. Perhaps a whole instrument played in each way *but* only offering one octave to play it would demonstrate this facility better? I knew it was working correctly as those nuiances were there depending how i played the keyboard.

Nonetheless it does make for a potential future purchase now i know it works with my system! [;)]

One query for you though; are the Pro & First editons of the cube both Gigasampler 2.5? I couldn't figure out if this was the case because Halion currently does 2.0 Gigas & my first edition purchase works fine on it. If First edition is 2.5 sampled then at least i know the new Pro stuff will be worthwhile.

Finally ^_^ what disk system would you recommend? I'm currently running a few of the instruments off a 7200prm 8mb IDE drive & I can play more polys than i have fingers on the one instrument, but upon layering a range of instruments to create an ensemble it will only do 6 polys - one per instrument as the CPU utilisation zoops up to near full to load em off the drive. [:(]

Would SATA drives do it? i've had a look at a SCSI setup, but to get everything on there you could want you are talking large money for something that won't ever make a return..

Any advice would be welcome! [:D]

[cm]

hello lumpyhed,
maybe there is a confusion regarding the version-number, wheras the fileformat of the instruments is called gigastudio2.0-file the current version of gigastudio is 2.5 - the mapping was done for gigastudio 2.5, so probably you will not be very happy using an earlier version (we never did).

your harddrive should be fine, we never noticed something you described. which cpu do you have and do the figures come from the taskmanager or the built-in cpu-meter of gigastudio? you should be able to run as many tracks as you can load into gigastudio, so i'd recommend to check the cables or the driver of the IDE-controller

christian

[lumpyhed]

Good good, i haven't had any difficulties with utilising the format of the Gigas on my setup. All appears to play as it should anyway.

Just to clarify, i'm using Halion 2.0 which supports gigasamplers & all the other formats, as a VST within the confines of Fruity Loops Production Studio. This setup does me well as i can have access to other these other plugins and complex utils within this easy to use application.

I don't whether the default settings i have the voice\sound caching settings at is not correct. That could well be whats making my system cry. Basically the cpu load shoots up at the point where the notes are first played. I'm assuming this is when its attempting to stream it off the hard drive.

Depending on how many notes i'm playing it will either fall back down to a much more acceptable level - say around 30% with a full chord being played. If its needs more than the CPU can process in realtime the whole system will stutter till it can regain itself.

If i go play the same chord again, there is no stutter as i assume its now all in ram.

Incidentally i have 1GB of the stuff - DDR2700 to be exact, accessed by an XP1800+ which has plenty FPU power to do this stuff.

It is a VIA based motherboard which is apparently known for its relatively abismal IDE controller, however i am using a PCI based Maxtor controller on the hard drive that stores all the Gigas & VST's which should avoid such problems.

I have an Audigy 2 ex platinum for the sound card with ASIO drivers implemented. I have found this helps immensely compared to my previous sound card which lacked this feature.

Oh and by the way i am monitoring CPU usage via Fruity's indicator on the console.

On a trail of thought, it seems unlikely as SCSI has to be on the same bus anyway, but could the PCI IDE controller be fighting for bandwith with the soundcard? I'll check their website to see if theres any new drivers just to be sure.

[cm]

IDE-controllers don't interferre with PCI-slots, don't worry about that.
good you mentiond to play the samples from halion - we've never tested that intensivly because some needed features are currently not supported, so unfortunately i can't tell you something about neccessary settings.
maybe a hint: gigastudio uses 128 KB buffer per stereo-sample
christian

[lumpyhed]

Could you please specify what Halion is missing? Perhaps 2.0 has these features? or are we talking about tests on the 2.0 plugin? [;)]

Its a bummer that is missing some features because i'm running a Creative card which lacks GSIF functionality for gigasampler to work under 2k/XP.

If i was to go down the Tascam route, what cost-effective soundcard would you recommend? Bearing in mind it would need current Directsound compatibility unless it will happily co-exist with my Audigy then it is not a problem.

A separate system for music production isn't really a possibility at this point. I currently have 2 systems side-by-side already, and room is at a premium! It is wired up with 100MBit ethernet between them, so i suppose i could make use of it with gigalan streaming. Not sure Halion would react to that however.

Oh hum, spend spend spend! At least its not being wasted on things like beer or other other short-term pleasures. [:D]

[cm]

lumpyhed, i'd ask you to run a search with the keyword *halion* through the forum - also herb pointed out we'll focus more on this issue after the pro has been released.
depending on the conversion-method users reported a more or less satisfactory success so far
christian

[lumpyhed]

Ok i'll have a look through. Just while i'm here i tried uploading a few instruments to a share on my other pc, loaded them up in my sequencer and it was doing 30 polys without breaking a sweat! [:O] Looks like my new 200gb drive will be going in there. [;)]