# NAMM -- as experianced by a Kontakt user.



## Thonex (Jan 19, 2008)

OK.... I just came back from my day at NAMM. 

First a little background. You can't just "get into" NAMM. The general public is not allowed. It is only for exhibitors and their employees or registered guests. The reason I was able to attend this year is because I was graciously invited to be a member of the Realitone booth (Mike Green's new sample developer company). Thanks Mike!!

So, I left my place at 8 a.m. (51 mile northwest of Anaheim) and it took me almost 2 hours to get there (you've gotta love LA morning rush hour traffic). I paid $12 for parking and followed the mass of people entering the convention center. My first stop was to hook up with my awesome host (Mike Green) and he was in Hall E... the lower level and clear on the other side of convention center from where I parked. On my way to Hall E, I remember someone telling me that Apple did not make a showing at the NAMM show.... well quite honestly... they didn't need to. Apple computers were EVERYWHERE... it seemed like all the exhibitors were using Macs to exhibit their wares... as well as the internet cafe's were all Macs. (just an interesting observation).

*Realitone*

Anyway, I made my way to Mike's booth "Realitone". Mike was there playing his new vocal library and had a nice fresh platter of brownies for anyone who wanted one. It was really cool to see Mike wearing the "developer" shoes... and his Library was very cool. It was also good to see Jose there (a Vi Control regular). Mike's product is a Kontakt based vocal library focusing on pop vocals... oohs, aahs, shebops, and a bunch of other articulations. The great part about this library is he had a bunch of different solo vocalists doing the exact same articulations (in isolation) so you can layer them or play them alone and whatnot. He also had a classical sounding singer... oh.. and I forgot to mention.... all of the singers were also recorded with legato intervals (very cool!) They have a wide range of expression and I think Mike's library will fill a definite gap in the sampling world.

After eating a brownie and getting the full demo, I set off to explore other booths that interested me.

*Art Vista*

I met Hans and his beautiful wife and he gave me a demo of his Virtual Grand Piano. It sounded great... but we all know that. What I found very cool is that Hans created velocity curves for all the most popular keyboard controllers to give his piano the most realistic dynamics... identical (or at least very close) to the real thing. Quite impressive!! He also had done a lot of presets for jazz piano, or gospel, or film, rock etc. Serendipitously, a great piano player happened to stop by and play his presets. His presets definitely stayed true to their name. His presets are all clearly meticulously programmed.. and there is a lot happening under the hood to achieve the different sounds.

*Native Instruments.*

They will be going to 64 bit later this year. But more importantly, [EDIT] They said that K3's next upgrade will give the application access to more than 2 gigs of ram access.... with 64 bit OSs!!!!!!! [END EDIT] I whined to them about batch renaming samples and some other things... and they nodded... but in general I was impressed. Another side note. A lot of the sample developers were demo-ing their stuff on K3... not K2. 

*Chicken Systems*

I met Garth from Chicken Systems there. He's a great guy who listens to his end user's requests. He had a host of different applications. Of course Translator was there and he is working on Kontakt Assistant and Constructor. He's including a lot of feature that will make people who program in K2 very happy. Like batch sample start offsets, batch sample renaming and other things.
*
Euphonix.*

I checked out their MC Control..... VERY COOL. The master section (with 4 faders and a touch screen) has a street price of $1499 and the 8 fader section (or whatever it's called) for $999. The cool thing is that it can control plugins... so I'm assuming K2. Also, the fader pack can work alone... it doesn't need the master section.... very cool. Finally, a professional control surface that composers can afford.

*Vir2*

There I ran into David Dass who gave me (and Christian b) a demo of Benjamin's (Dynamitec) legendary long scripts  Vir2 seems to use Kontakt as it payer of choice for all their libraries. Even though they are released as K2 player libraries, they were being demoed on K3 (no crashes). Clearly Benjamin has been hard at work. Not only did he employ pitch bend legato type scripting, he also did some formant-correct scripting. Also things like performance tools that are user customizable mini sequences that will play to tempo (like a flam or 16th note triplet etc). He had custom vibrato stuff going on... and a whole host of other stuff. I listened to Basis, and their Percussion and Horn libraries. These were all good libraries... but it was just so cool to see one of our resident scripters involved with the commercial libraries.

*SoniVox*

I heard Broadway Big Band... well... it's pretty awesome. Period. They have a new library called Anatomy that is a bunch of sounds by the human body... grunts, slaps, raspberries, coughs, sneezes.. anything and everything and created patches that can be used in a musical way. Flying Hands Percussion was also very good. These were also K2 based. But BBB was not... that uses Halion with a intermediary software to handle the complex midi processing.



*Redmatica -- Keymap*

I met with Andreas and he was just great. He's a one man show. Although Keymap was designed for the ESX sampler, it can be used for K2 programming because K2 will import ESX patches. However, once you start programming in K2, you can no longer take the K2 patch an open it in Keymap. But.... what Keymap does, it does so well that It's worth it to get it even for K2 if you do al lot of sampling. Basically Keymap will take a recorded sample session files.... chop it up, and map it to the keyboard and loop the samples... all in 1 shot. Quite amazing.

*Steingberg*

No big news... but since I use Nuendo and know some of the guys I visited them. 

*Celemony*

Melodyne. A great tool for correcting potentially useless samples. Quite simply... I think they are the best at what they do. 
*
East West*

I saw and tried their Play vi. They will be offering scripting based on the python language... or so I was told. There is no ETA for this feature.Also, I believe they are the only 64 bit player at this time. No? They have a new soft synth.. whose name I forget... but that 's certainly new. Oh yeah... Storm Drum 2 was demoed.... sounds great. Pretty much a "no brainer" except that it's only in Play format. Don't get me started on these closed formats...

*VSL*

Nothing new that I saw... I mean... nothing that we don't already know.


Anyway.... I had a great time... I ended up seeing a bunch of old friends and it's truly inspiring to see the creativity people have demonstrated in their products.

Ok... that's it for now. If I remember anything else of major importance I'll add it later.


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## Rodney Glenn (Jan 19, 2008)

Many thanks for your report Andrew. 

Realitone sounds interesting, can't wait to hear some demos.

ArtVista...must have been a monster job creating all those velocity curves etc, but I know Hans to be a very hardworking and disciplined guy, so I'm not surprised.

Had no idea about the next K3 version being able to access more than 2 GB RAM. Completely missed that so thanks for the heads up! Thats great news indeed.  

Btw, is it just me or has NI recently become more active and sensitive when it comes to responding to customer needs and feedback? I know its mainly one NI guy (Thomas) who is posting on their forums, but first announcing 64-bit support (as a free update) so far in advance and now this? Hope its not just a temporary trend.

Chicken Systems Kontakt Assistant and Constructor also looks very interesting. Then again, if you already have Keymap then that might be all you need. Might be worth checking out though depending on price etc.

The East West soft synth you mention might be the Forbidden Planet. There is a link a bit further down that page with a .mov demo. Sounds pretty interesting IMO. The Stormdrum 2 demos also sound great...but as you already pointed out, its in Play format only which is a shame.

Anways, nice to see the Kontakt format still going strong, at least so it seems. With this next K3 upgrade soon and 64-bit support later this year it looks like it could be a good year for us Kontakt users. Just hope they do not completely forget about full multicore processor support as well.

I'm still on K2, but with Vista 64 (and drivers) hopefully being more stable by the time K3 64-bit is released, I'll probably go for it. Who knows, maybe even SSD's will have dropped in price for those interested. Time to start saving up I guess.

Thanks again! 

Cheers

Rodney

PS You didn't happen to see if Sample Modelled Instruments (Tomasini/Siedlaczek) are attending?


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## Mike Greene (Jan 21, 2008)

Ahhh! That's good info! I especially wish I could have seen the Euphonix MC. 8)


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## Thonex (Jan 22, 2008)

Rodney Glenn @ Sat Jan 19 said:


> PS You didn't happen to see if Sample Modelled Instruments (Tomasini/Siedlaczek) are attending?



HI Glenn,

I looked for "Tommasini" and "Siedlaczek" and any other search words that came to mind in NAMM's exhibitor locator on their website. I did this the night before I went (along with other names I wanted to check out) but they were not listed. So I think there were not there.

T


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## Thonex (Jan 22, 2008)

Rodney Glenn @ Sat Jan 19 said:


> Had no idea about the next K3 version being able to access more than 2 GB RAM. Completely missed that so thanks for the heads up! Thats great news indeed.



I just foun out that this was a misunderstanding:



Thomas Martin said:


> Hi Thonex,
> 
> What you heard at NAMM was probably a misunderstanding. Our developers looked into a "Windows 32bit memory hack" a while back and concluded that it is not practical. For example, you would need a server version of Windows, which is not what people are usually using for music production.
> 
> Regards, Thomas



Darn!!!! :cry: 

Although... why can VSL and PLay do it in XP 32 (AFAIK) ?

T


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## redleicester (Jan 22, 2008)

VSL VI Player has been 64-bit (on the PC at least) for about four months or so now...


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## Rodney Glenn (Jan 22, 2008)

Thonex,

Thanks for the info on Tomasini/Siedlaczek. Guess they are busy finishing their Trumpet for release.

Regarding the K3 2+ gig RAM access thingy...it was just too good to be true I guess. 

NI probably figured its not worth the extra effort, especially since they will be working on 64-bit support. I dunno.

Cheers

Rodney


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## Daryl (Jan 22, 2008)

Thonex @ Tue Jan 22 said:


> Rodney Glenn @ Sat Jan 19 said:
> 
> 
> > Had no idea about the next K3 version being able to access more than 2 GB RAM. Completely missed that so thanks for the heads up! Thats great news indeed.
> ...


They can't. It's only on XP64 and Vista 64, although it can be done (on VSL, at least) using the 32bit version of Nuendo. You don't need to run N 64bit.

D


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## Thonex (Jan 22, 2008)

Daryl @ Tue Jan 22 said:


> They can't. It's only on XP64 and Vista 64, although it can be done (on VSL, at least) using the 32bit version of Nuendo. You don't need to run N 64bit.
> 
> D



Ahhhh.... ok. Thanks for clarifying that Daryl. 

[Sigh]..... I guess we'll have to wait about 6+ months before any real ram benefits from NI.

Cheers,

T


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jan 22, 2008)

"Also, I believe they are the only 64 bit player at this time. No?"

What RL says, plus it does audio and MIDI over ethernet. Yeah baby.


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## Jack Weaver (Jan 22, 2008)

It's phenomenal that VSL is coming out with this VE3 product. Especially for those, like me, who do the majority of their work in VSL.

(I'm probably just stating the obvious but I do want to bring it to everyone's attention.) It's doubtful that VSL will deliver their solution with it working for any other product - like Kontakt, etc., etc. 

They tend to believe in a pretty much 'closed' sytem. 

So to get the most usage of RAM with other players like Kontakt in standalone mode (to take advantage of the most RAM on Macs) we will have to use them on the Master DAW machine. 

To take the highest advantage of those other players we'll have to most like use of Soundflower (Mac) and/or loopback-capable audio interfaces on our Master computer.


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