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Dear Spitfire: What Were You Thinking?

D

donnyluvd2bowl

Member
Dear Spitfire

Why?

Why did you decide to move from Kontakt and make your own player such a disaster for organization?

Why would you organize your library in such a way that if you want all the available articulations of an instrument you need to create multiple tracks with multiple instances of your player and eat up MIDI channels and resources when Kontakt handled this beautifully as a multi with transform ksps and instrument banks?

This is kind of a nightmare for anyone who likes to keep as leaned out a template as possible or isn't using a server with 1TB of memory.

If Paul or Chris actually happen to be on here and read this:

For the love of god, please redesign the player so that it has patch banks where you can load or unload as many patches from that library for that instrument as you need-- needing two or three instances of HZ Violas so one can use pizz and strummed pizz is, to use a technical term, B A N A N A S.

(And why these aren't coming pre-mapped to UACC after pushing this for years is kind of beyond me as well.)

/rant
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This is why people who have learned from the PLAY disaster will diligently ignore new releases that rely on new proprietary player software until it proved itself in the real world. When you find positive reviews about the player in 2 years you know it's safe. I love Spitfire libraries but for the next two years only Kontakt libraries will be on my shopping list.
 
This...."please redesign the player so that it has patch banks where you can load or unload as many patches from that library for that instrument as you need". I agree that loading multiple instances to get the articulations you need for a project is not great.
 
donnyluvd2bowl said:
(And why these aren't coming pre-mapped to UACC after pushing this for years is kind of beyond me as well.)
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Spitfire has a long history of handling UACC haphazardly. Even fairly new libraries were released with patches containing articulations with duplicate UACC numbers. It was a good idea, but they stopped evolving it and I don't see much evidence that they use it internally (or test it).
 
donnyluvd2bowl said:
Why would you organize your library in such a way that you if you want all the available articulations of an instrument you need to create multiple tracks with multiple instances of your player and eat up MIDI channels and resources when Kontakt handled this beautifully as a multi with transform ksps and instrument banks?
Click to expand...

Is it really like that? That blows my mind. My only contact with the Spitfire Player was through that Epic Strings thingy they gave away for Albion owners recently. When I realized I couldn't actually keyswitch between articulations, nor unload them, I thought it was ridiculous, but assumed that this freebie ran in some bare bones version of the player and the "real thing" surely wouldn't suffer from such madness. Wow, seems I was wrong.

The discouraging thing about this is that maybe 2 years ago, there was talk of re-organizing the content of the symphonic range, since the articulations are all over the place and having all those different nkis is just a mess. I was having high hopes for that, dreaming of one master nki where you could load and unload any articulation according to your preference, seamlessly switching between them via UACC. When I heard that they were doing their own player, I assumed it would be an improvement, something like OT Capsule and the VSL players, where you have your slots and you can load any articulation in there and design your own multi articulation instrument.

But now I guess that ship has sailed and seeing how little thought was given to the subject, one can only hope that the older stuff just stays in Kontakt!
 
tack said:
I don't see much evidence that they use it internally (or test it).
Click to expand...

I mean, I'm actually getting this impression about them with their plugins in general. I don't personally use keyswitches, but I'm installing HZ Strings for a client right now and the pre-mapped keyswitches are not remotely consistent; it makes no sense.

Like: you have string library, and Short notes are F-1 on Violins and A-1 on Violas... do you seriously not preempt the composer deciding to move a Violin part to Violas or vice versa, and how dragging the part down and being done with it is a massive time-saver?

(I know you can re-map it yourself, but this illustrates the notion that people aren't thinking practically about plugin design-- hey if you ARE reading this Paul or Chris and want to hire a consultant please slide into my DMs).
 
Jimmy Hellfire said:
Is it really like that? ... When I realized I couldn't actually keyswitch between articulations...
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you can switch, it's just that you are stuck with whatever articulations were preloaded into that instrument-- can unload them but you can't add any. Which was fine in Kontakt because there are ways around this, but now... and also you can't purge and manage resources either. It's really just not great. And it's not like the scripting is massively improved, BBC French Horns have this ridiculous dynamics gap that makes you truly wonder if they sat and played their own instrument.
 
donnyluvd2bowl said:
Dear Spitfire

Why?

Why did you decide to move from Kontakt and make your own player such a disaster for organization?

Why would you organize your library in such a way that if you want all the available articulations of an instrument you need to create multiple tracks with multiple instances of your player and eat up MIDI channels and resources when Kontakt handled this beautifully as a multi with transform ksps and instrument banks?

This is kind of a nightmare for anyone who likes to keep as leaned out a template as possible or isn't using a server with 1TB of memory.

If Paul or Chris actually happen to be on here and read this:

For the love of god, please redesign the player so that it has patch banks where you can load or unload as many patches from that library for that instrument as you need-- needing two or three instances of HZ Violas so one can use pizz and strummed pizz is, to use a technical term, B A N A N A S.

(And why these aren't coming pre-mapped to UACC after pushing this for years is kind of beyond me as well.)

/rant
Click to expand...
Have to agree. Loved when they were on Kontakt. Their own player is not friendly ("let's try and fix this" message). It kept me from their new offerings.
 
donnyluvd2bowl said:
BBC French Horns have this ridiculous dynamics gap that makes you truly wonder if they sat and played their own instrument.
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This.
BBCSO is rarely used by me. It doesn't make work any easier even if the sound is good (I rarely use keyswitches either).
I wait until the player has received improvements and hope for updates for some instruments.
Hopefully just a matter of time. A Kontakt version might solve many problems.
 
AndyP said:
This...
BBCSO is rarely used by me.... A Kontakt version might solve many problems.
Click to expand...

I'm assuming they moved away from it because the overhead on paying NI for Kontakt encryption was eating into their profits-- which is fine, but just... do it right! haha


I agree, I have BBC Winds in my template and that's it, kind of a shame.
 
donnyluvd2bowl said:
I'm assuming they moved away from it because the overhead on paying NI for Kontakt encryption was eating into their profits-- which is fine, but just... do it right! haha


I agree, I have BBC Winds in my template and that's it, kind of a shame.
Click to expand...

I don’t think it had anything to do with paying NI, and more that NI made some risky business moves that has caused them some issues. If you’re a leader in sampling, you don’t want to rely so heavily on a company that’s making bad business decisions. I doubt they’re really saving that much money developing their own player. Orchestral Tools is doing the same thing, albeit a very different approach.

I think the player could use some improvement, but it’s working ok for me. With my template set up, I’m not even interacting with it much.
 
Getting an NI license is expensive, so it makes financial sense to move away from Kontakt, especially if they want to offer more budget libraries like the "Originals" $30 series.
Spitfire's new player is relatively new, but I believe they'll perfect it as time goes on. Its now a mid-sized company and they probably have the personnel now to invest in their player project.
 
I don't have the library, but I'm pretty sure you can load a custom set of articulations and associated keyswitches in the BBCSO plugin.

I'm also surprised that anyone would be using old school key switching - using articulation maps in Logic for example would make Spitfire's chosen preset key switches kind of irrelevant.
 
Alex Fraser said:
I don't have the library, but I'm pretty sure you can load a custom set of articulations and associated keyswitches in the BBCSO plugin.

I'm also surprised that anyone would be using old school key switching - using articulation maps in Logic for example would make Spitfire's chosen preset key switches kind of irrelevant.
Click to expand...

Articulation mapping works great after its been played in, but some people like to keyswitch live. I don’t do this personally, but some people do. I can never remember what key does what.
 
Alex Fraser said:
I'm also surprised that anyone would be using old school key switching - using articulation maps in Logic for example would make Spitfire's chosen preset key switches kind of irrelevant.
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Consistency is still beneficial in this case, so that you can more easily reuse articulation maps between the different instruments. So at least to the extent you're tweaking them, it's to accommodate different articulations, not because the common articulations ended up on different keyswitches.
 
mralmostpopular said:
Articulation mapping works great after its been played in, but some people like to keyswitch live. I don’t do this personally, but some people do. I can never remember what key does what.
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Live keyswitching is very much a thing with the Logic system. You also get a handy graphic, like this!

S1007_traKeyswitchesPane.png

tack said:
Consistency is still beneficial in this case, so that you can more easily reuse articulation maps between the different instruments. So at least to the extent you're tweaking them, it's to accommodate different articulations, not because the common articulations ended up on different keyswitches.
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Fair enough, but multiple tools and methods are available to switch things as the composer sees fit. It's not a show stopper in the way the OP makes out. I understand that Kontakt offers more flexibility - I get it - but where there's a will etc etc. I guess the central discussion is: Should the composer have to do the extra work? Argue away..
 
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