Michael Antrum
Only the good die young....
Personally, the player I have had the least grief with is the VSL Synchron player, and when there has been the odd issue, the speed with which things are put right is astounding.
The risk of using Spitfire plugin on a commercial project
- Thread starter Sugar Free
- Start date
Jeremy Spencer
Senior Member
Let's say you have to reinstall a library (or libraries) for some reason. If Native Access is down, you can't download your products (if needed) and even worse, you cannot authorize them. And although it's only happened to me a few times, for some reason certain libraries require reauthorization or go into demo mode. In either case, I needed to submit a support ticket and wait a few days.
Bluemount Score
Senior Member
Makes sense, thank you. This of course doesn't apply to NI Access only.
How is the title wildly overblown. "The risk of using Spitfire plugin on a commercial project" is pretty accurate when the OP clearly states a risk using spitfire on a commercial project with a deadline. If the title was "You should never use spitfire on a commercial project" than sure thats overblown, but OP never exaggerated anything.
Uiroo
Señor Member
I don't think it is overblown. Your experience might differ from Sugar Free, but he explains a situation that he finds is exceptional.
I have many, many kontakt libraries and ONE with the spitfire app, EWC (and the labs stuff if that counts). The player has driven me mad, EWC stopped working two times. And I didn't even use it that much. Meanwhile I had zero issues with any kontakt library since I've bought my first libary.
Using it commercially sounds risky to me.
dzilizzi
Senior Member
Well, at least Spitfire works on ProTools. Sine doesn't yet and I only realized after getting Tableau Strings.
I get making their own players. But I also know it took EW 5 versions to get a decently working one. And I hear few complaints about 6. From what I understand, one of the reasons, other than DRM, that companies make their own player is that Kontakt is limited in things like number of mics that can be used? I know Embertone ran into this with the Walker. Also, it is easier to sell parts of a library. If you do it through Kontakt, you either can't be a player library or the company has to buy SN's for each instrument, which can be very pricey.
I get making their own players. But I also know it took EW 5 versions to get a decently working one. And I hear few complaints about 6. From what I understand, one of the reasons, other than DRM, that companies make their own player is that Kontakt is limited in things like number of mics that can be used? I know Embertone ran into this with the Walker. Also, it is easier to sell parts of a library. If you do it through Kontakt, you either can't be a player library or the company has to buy SN's for each instrument, which can be very pricey.
Henrik B. Jensen
Senior Member
Some developer, can’t remember which one, stated a while back that NI has not been particularly responsive to developer requests for Kontakt features, and that this played a role in the developer’s decision to make their own player.
easyrider
Embracing the Absurd
NI can’t even be arsed to update Kontakt with a resizable GUI In 2020.
When 4k screens are the norm. I’m sure Sine and SF will tweak and make their own players more robust.
NI really need to invest some money into making Kontakt visually more easily readable....especially when developers are releasimg cool GUIs in their VIs
When 4k screens are the norm. I’m sure Sine and SF will tweak and make their own players more robust.
NI really need to invest some money into making Kontakt visually more easily readable....especially when developers are releasimg cool GUIs in their VIs
I think there are two reasons.
1 is piracy. Native instruments piracy protection is so bad (desite the fact that devs have to pay NI a license and one of the reasons is they claim they offer anti piracy) that Damage 2 got leaked to torrent sites before they had announced the teaser trailer, so people who don't even pay a license have access to it before any press emails were sent out. Heavyocity pay the price of having their launched spoiled because NI don't know how to run their platform securely.
2 is the limitations of kontakt. East West have said that they made Play because NI wouldn't add features that they needed to make their products at the time. I'm certain SINE is the same. I was fed up that CAPSULE was making my template save files so big, and did some tests. It appears that whatver OT are doing under the hood to add the functionality of CAPSULE is very resource heavy, and Kontakt cannot handle it very well. As a result my save files were getting enormous. But if you compare it with SINE where OT spent a long time coding very efficently for the features they want, they have made an incredibly fast, efficient and light player. 1000 tracks of CAPSULE purged save file was 8gb in kontakt where as 1000 tracks of SINE was ~90mb. Thats a facotry of 90 better than Kontakt. Not to mention the speed and ease of use of SINE, as well as mic merging features.
The spitfire player on the other hand seems to be a way of preventing piracy I think. I don't have Spitfire Player product, but I get the impression that the Player doesn't have any features that Kontakt doesn't already have? correct me if I'm wrong here. But what confuses me is that if it was anti-piracy, why would they release newer products like NEO back with Kontakt. So I'm not eniterly sure of the point of it after all. Other than maybe the microphones thing.
jononotbono
Luke Johnson
Just a guess but the development of Neo was probably years and they likely started it in Kontakt before their Spitfire player was ready, so they carried on working on it in Kontakt. The amount of work to start again would have been very costly.
I think everything will be changed over eventually.
yeah that would make a lot of sense.
xguitaristx
Never trust the living
I also wonder if they wanted consistency within the Albion range.
jononotbono
Luke Johnson
Ah I'm not sure. Otherwise Symphonic Motions would be in Kontakt as it's an "add on" to the Symphonic series. Which is all in Kontakt. I think Motions took a lot less time to make than, for example, Neo (not that it makes either difference to the quality) as they are such different libraries and they want as many people to use the Spitfire player as possible so it's always a good idea to release new products (I hate that word but I had to use it) on it. I can't imagine the Symphonic Orchestra not being ported over to the Spitfire player but I imagine that's a huge job so it's taking a while. Look at OT with Sine. Ark 1 just got moved over to it. The rest will follow.
But yeah, what do I know. Just a guess.
jononotbono
Luke Johnson
Probably!
JohnG
Senior Member
It is wildly overblown because:
1. The OP had a computer problem -- Computer problems cause -- problems. It could have been another library so why pick on any one developer? It wasn't caused by Spitfire or anything to do with the library, it was the OP's own issue with (presumably) his boot drive or the drive where the library was stored.
2. Limited Downtime -- Compared with, say, a destroyed iLok or a failed disk drive that involves a long re-download, even a three-day process to restore a missing library is no worse than you might find with any library; and
3. Professional composers always will find a workaround. If they don't (and they should) have a mirrored drive ready to go to restore anything lost, they will have an alternative library that will get the job done, or use a different sound.
It is overblown to imply that this would have been a catastrophe for anyone with that kind of time pressure. People with that kind of gig have backups, more backups, and extra backups so they can always keep going.
kimgaboury
New Member
Basically, you CAN’T move the location of the samples without being dependant on them to do a reset, just to be able to use the libraries using their plugin. I had to do a lot of changes with my SSDs and workflow over the last year, and having to write to them every time, and wait a few days for a reply, is extremely annoying and even arrogant on their part. I hate the way they have implemented this.
Last edited:
