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Spitfire Player

Isn't the more appropriate comparison right now Kontakt Player and not Kontakt? Everyone is trying to compare the Spitfire Player to a _sampler_ not a sample player.
Yes, Kontakt proper has a bunch of features that Spitfire Player doesn't have today. It also has a bunch of features that Kontakt Player doesn't have, too.
From what I mentioned, only multiscript is a Kontakt full version feature. All the other stuff is also relevant with the player. So, for example, even with Kontakt player, instruments load samples to ram in the background, but that isn’t really the point ... most professional composers have the full version, anyway. And that is not only for being useful as a sampler recording your own material, it also helps with adjusting the libraries to your liking. Even if you just use the libraries out of the box, there is a lot that can be done to customise the way you use those libraries. And that has also to do with multi scripting, which uses a similar scripting language as instrument scripted, but is a separate thing. You can completely adjust the midi going in and out of your multitimbral Kontakt instance using it. To make a simple example, you can change incoming CC 1 on channel 1 to CC 11 on channel 2. Only a very simple example, of course ...
All of that functionality is currently impossible to replace when you host in VEpro. Part of the functionality can be replaced, when you host directly in Cubase or Logic (through midi inserts or the environment).
I'll accept that Spitfire has a roadmap for their player, and maybe even to extend it to have more Sampler-like features. They aren't just popping open the Spitfire Player and loading samples into it-- there's another piece of software that is essentially their library builder that presumably has scripting and setup they use to build these libraries. For now it's just for them. Maybe some day it'll be polished for everybody.
The aspect of being able to use your own material in a spitfire sampler is going a step further than what is being discussed here. We may remember the announcement of Play pro in this case ... but really, that is not even what I am talking about when I compare the current thing to Kontakt.
 
A lot of wild speculation, signifying... YOU decide!

However, that doesn't stop me from speculating either, my chief speculation continuing to be anti-piracy, though right behind that would be the zillion mic positions that, it seems to me, wouldn't fit too neatly in Kontakt. Then again, maybe they would and I lack imagination.

Why do I dwell on piracy?

Perform a search for any of Spitfire's libraries and a bunch of obnoxious, odious "free download" sites appear. It numbs me old brain to contemplate the volume of work, negotiation, editing etc. to produce even ONE instrument, let alone the BBC orchestra. To have that stolen by creeps who garble it and make money off your work would drive me mad.

So personally if I were a developer I'd rather sell my products with a very inferior player than suffer that indignity and theft of my hard work. Which is NOT to say that Spitfire's player is inferior. Quite the contrary -- it's pretty good. It's scalable and has a volume slider that is a great antidote to "super sul tasto" volume levels. I don't find it hard to stumble around it (without a manual) and make changes I want. I think it's just fine.

Are people even considering the huge number of mic positions? I am for sure. It is like having a dozen or so instruments in one.

Sure, there are some changes I might recommend and some here have offered sensible suggestions. No doubt the player will advance over time.
 
I much prefer the SA Player.
Opens and everything I want is there. Performance is fine. Can resize it. New player has custom preset function. Browser is great. The microphone save/lock function is great.
Doesn't feel like I'm opening a portal to another universe of sounds just to find one oboe.

Like others mentioned, I don't go under the hood with Kontakt, so it's just something I have to use. I don't doubt it's power and impact on sampling. But to me it's just a pain. I'll be glad to never use it again.

So @ OP, I like it :D
 
A lot of wild speculation, signifying... YOU decide!

However, that doesn't stop me from speculating either, my chief speculation continuing to be anti-piracy, though right behind that would be the zillion mic positions that, it seems to me, wouldn't fit too neatly in Kontakt. Then again, maybe they would and I lack imagination.

Why do I dwell on piracy?

Perform a search for any of Spitfire's libraries and a bunch of obnoxious, odious "free download" sites appear. It numbs me old brain to contemplate the volume of work, negotiation, editing etc. to produce even ONE instrument, let alone the BBC orchestra. To have that stolen by creeps who garble it and make money off your work would drive me mad.

So personally if I were a developer I'd rather sell my products with a very inferior player than suffer that indignity and theft of my hard work. Which is NOT to say that Spitfire's player is inferior. Quite the contrary -- it's pretty good. It's scalable and has a volume slider that is a great antidote to "super sul tasto" volume levels. I don't find it hard to stumble around it (without a manual) and make changes I want. I think it's just fine.

Are people even considering the huge number of mic positions? I am for sure. It is like having a dozen or so instruments in one.

Sure, there are some changes I might recommend and some here have offered sensible suggestions. No doubt the player will advance over time.
Piracy is certainly a fair point speaking for bigger developers wanting to develop their own sampler - I totally get that. Yet, they also need to sell their libraries and the sound of their products - while certainly a major aspect - is not everything! There also is the aspect of usability and functionality and it seems obvious to me that they better develop something that is at least equal and possibly superior to Kontakt. There is not much speculation to that, as it is blatantly obvious how many features are missing in the current form of the spitfire player. The only speculation is, will they improve their player and if they do, how long will that take ...
It is certainly only a major inconvenience to have HZ strings or the spitfire choir in that limited format. These are rather special libraries you don’t need to load in your default template for everyday use. But I can assure you that I would not invest in a library like BBC, which is bread and butter orchestral samples, if the player cannot provide the same set of features as Kontakt. Not to speak about a multi volume library like the Berlin Series or the spitfire orchestra which the BBC thing is supposedly heading towards. Only the extra time I will have to wait for the full template because of the missing background loading is enough inconvenience for me to pass on that offer.
 
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Well, if you HAVE to have Kontakt, that's up to you. I think you've made the same points now quite a few times.

Collaboration

I'm working with eight orchestrators on two continents right now and I would love it if they could be using the same library and template as I am. It would make their lives so much easier, and I would have far fewer changes and corrections to muck around with. That part of composing is, to me, just lost time.

So I'm pretty excited about the collaboration thing.
 
haha.. ok so I'm not going down the rabbit hole of confected outrage.. but you want some hard facts. Well several very intelligent suggestions have been made already in this thread. Obviously I'm not going to "spill my guts" about all of the confidential conversations and reasoning behind our thinking on everything.

However here's a single example. One code related thing is the group limits that Kontakt can handle. In our experience, YMMV, 800 groups is where K slows down and becomes harder to manage. By default all groups are on when you create or play a note, so all play. It's the loop "for each group turn off voice" before we start turning on the ones we want that causes the problem. Once you start turning off 800+ish voices per event, it takes longer than the 8-12ms buffer most audio interfaces have.

And patch load time:
Each group, zone, modulator etc gets loaded on patch load and takes up memory, even when purged.
It's mostly the popping from cpu though that we stay under 800 to avoid. You can get around it by scripting volumes/dynamics to cut down on group count but this isn't the way we want to do it.

So one of the reasons for us developing our own tech was to eliminate these problems and enable us to have all the mics and all the arts in one patch.

Totally understand that it might not work for everyone - not having a "sampler" available to make your own tweaks. However you may or may not be amazed how few people open a patch and fiddle with it. I'm not sure if thats NDA so I won't quote the actual figure but its very very very tiny.

Of course we have a roadmap, and an insanely clever team working on all kinds of cool stuff.

Anyway - happy Saturday all!

Paul
 
I’ve got a day of so I’m going to load every single articulation of HZ Strings in VEPro. Just to see if the computer can handle it... and that’s what nerds do! 😉
 
So one of the reasons for us developing our own tech was to eliminate these problems and enable us to have all the mics and all the arts in one patch.



Paul

Paul, I totally accept this. When I first went to work part time for EW years ago and I asked Doug why they switched from Kontakt to Play, he told me that one of the reasons was that when they were developing Hollywood Strings there were things they wanted to do that Kontakt could not handle well and when they reached out to N.I to implement those necessary changes, they were told no.

Some people here did not believe it of course, because of the times we live in, but I did then with EW, and I do now with Spitfire.
 
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... inferior software ...
I’m sorry, but that’s just absolute nonsense! 😂
First of all, this seems like a very rude and inappropriate way for a developer to dismiss a users opinion.
If you're going to use the word "inferior" to describe someone's software, then I would expect a response exactly like what Paul gave you, and IMO he was smart to not engage you further.

It's not Paul's responsibility to give you (or anyone else) a detailed response to each criticism you put forth. Especially in your case, where you're someone who loves, loves, LOVES to argue, so that's going to lead to an endless string of responses from you, and Paul would end up thinking, "Why, oh why did I get myself into that discussion." (I've been there myself on that one.)

This, along with your little spat with Jay, is getting very tedious, so I'm going to ask that you stop posting in this thread (or related threads) unless you have something truly new to say AND if you can manage to say it in a way that is nice, as opposed to combative.

NOTE - I left almost all the posts as is, but I did delete a few short ones that are just silly "I know I am but what are you?" posts.

ONE MORE NOTE - MY USUAL DISCLAIMER - No one from Spitfire (including Paul) contacted me at all about this. I'm chiming in and doing minor edits for the good of the forum, not because (as someone else claimed) I am worried about losing ad dollars.
 
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As a Kontakt Dev, I can concur with Paul here. Kontakt is a platform you have to work around not with, and eventually you end up down a rabbit hole looking at a brick wall thinking - "OK well there's a feature thats not gonna ship". I absolutely understand many many users love Kontakt as a platform they know and understand - but NI just wont wont wont move to add/change features or functionality unless they need it themselves - likely not to change given the recent machinations in Berlin.
Like Spitfire many many of us developers are getting off the NI/Kontakt wagon - despite the knowledge that many users will be saddened to hear it, and we may lose some of you on the way.

Good luck Paul, and if it all falls over (it wont) you can join us over at the HISE developer forums...
 
I like Kontakt, but it is far from a perfect platform. When you start putting together large complicated libraries, you start running into issues like what Paul described. Even in my own case, my issues are different from Paul's, but I'm still in a situation where I'm not sure I can make Kontakt work for the next word-builder instrument we're doing. I know for sure that if I could build my own player and make it do what I want it to do, my vocal instrument would be better.

That's not a knock against Kontakt, it's just that we all have our individual needs for our particular instruments that a one-size-fits-all platform can't always address. I think just about all of us developers have toyed with the idea of creating our own samplers, not for cost reasons (as Daniel said, the KPlayer costs are pretty reasonable), but because we all have stories like that.

Plus, as mentioned before, piracy is a major concern. We say that to NI again and again, and over the years, we've suggested a few simple things we'd like them to add so that we could at least add our own CP coding, but we get nothing.

One additional factor that hasn't been mentioned is NKS compliance. That's a major PIA that adds days to the process, plus in my case (admittedly, I'm slow), weeks of learning how to do all those steps. None of which makes my instruments better, it's all for the purpose of making their hardware a more attractive purchase. They're still waiting for me to send in Hip Hop Creator for compliance inspection, but I'm absolutely dreading it, so I keep putting it off.

So my hat's off the Spitfire and OT. I do like the people at NI a lot and Kontakt is a great sampler, but sometimes a company has needs that have to be addressed with a custom platform.
 
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As I venture down the long road of adding all of HZS patches in a VEPro template something is bothering me and perhaps this could be an update to the player? When I click on the articulation bar to select articulations, can the box made to be resizable? Constantly scrolling to find the arts I want. The buttons to quickly go to VLNS, VLAS etc are handy but it would be great if the box could be resizable so I can just see most of the list without scrolling.
 
So after most of the day, I have loaded 148 Spitfire Player instances in VEPro (Photo shows 161 tracks but 13 of them are folders so I have deducted from them). The photo also shows 3.83gb of RAM being used but I've also looked with Activity monitor and VEPro is using 21.49gb of RAM.

Not sure if this data helps anyone but that's what it is if you're wondering about the whole footprint of having this beast loaded and ready to go with 148 instances of Spitfire Player. ;)

Screen Shot 2019-09-14 at 22.26.25.png

Activity Monitor...

Screen Shot 2019-09-14 at 22.26.49.png
 
The photo also shows 3.83gb of RAM being used but I've also looked with Activity monitor and VEPro is using 21.49gb of RAM.

Interesting, not sure if you seen mine? But Logic show's 10.53GB RAM on mine... the Player is the same with 3.84GB.

 
Interesting, not sure if you seen mine? But Logic show's 10.53GB RAM on mine... the Player is the same with 3.84GB.


I’ll have to double check something else isn’t turned on in VEPro as it could be possible due to lack of sleep. I’ll check in a few hours.
 
I’ll have to double check something else isn’t turned on in VEPro as it could be possible due to lack of sleep. I’ll check in a few hours.

It's so much fun adding every one of those articulations isn't it o_O
I finished doing the same with BHCT last night, I wanted to die by the end

See what you find and give me a shout if you need me to load anything etc to compare
 
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