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Universal Sampler

d.healey said:
Blender is open source under the GPL. So HISE would again be the answer. The difference is Blender doesn't include its own source code in its output. Audio plugins are quite a unique case and I don't think you will find many comparable examples from other industries.
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Hise is owned by a commercial developer. And you make my point for me: Every industry is unique and requires solutions that address it's unique requirements and use cases. The absence of directly 'comparable' examples in other industries does not invalidate the premise of what I am suggesting.
 
 
nusonik.com said:
Hise is owned by a commercial developer.
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Is it? Are you sure? What plugins has ChrisBoi released on his own label? What commercial (closed source) products of any kind has he released? HISE is an Open Source project, he cant "own" it neither can you or I...
 
nusonik.com said:
The absence of directly 'comparable' examples in other industries does not invalidate the premise of what I am suggesting
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I only asked for an example because you were saying there is a precedent in other industries to indicate it would be viable in the case of sample libraries. The only thing that comes close in my opinion is a game engine like Godot. But as has been explained by others, what works in a massive industry like games (which Godot is a tiny part of) won't necessarily work in a much much smaller industry like audio plugins.

nusonik.com said:
Hise is owned by a commercial developer.
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HISE isn't owned as such. The copyright for the source code is owned by Christoph, and JUCE, and me, and anyone else who contributes to it. However, the right to issue licenses for proprietary releases is owned by Christoph and whoever owns JUCE these days.
 
nusonik.com said:
Having read some recent posts about various new proprietary samplers it strikes me that it is a really high-risk commercial strategy because the introduction of a new workflow for Musio, Sine , Spitfire engine, Soundpaint, Crow Hill etc, etc is ultimately going to result in losing that race on the basis of adoption of a preferred subset of samplers/players. For example: I see a lot of loyal Cinesample users indicating that they will not be going the Musio route. Do these companies really expect/ believe that clients will invest in learning the inner workings of an ever-increasing number of samplers, many of which are still ironing out their functionality?

Some of the reasons they appear to do this are:
+Licensing costs associated with Kontakt
+Encoding time needed for new libraries and re-encoding for fixes of Kontakt libraries by Native Instruments
+Perceived innovation limitations in Kontakt
+User lock-in (- Which may be a disadvantage if your existing loyal clients do not wish to adopt your engine as part of their workflow!)

The fact of the matter is we primarily buy libraries for the quality of the sampling/sound and not the sampler. (Kontak may be the exception here just because of the wide adoption and established workflows.)

So here is the proposition:
Why does someone (one of the leading developers [- Christian Henson are you listening?!]) not take the initiative to set up an independent consortium to develop a 'Universal Sampler' to which all developers can contribute financial resources and provide direction. Some financial contribution model may be possible to allow smaller developers to have access based on units sold per annum while larger developers can pay a higher tier access to sit on the development committee that determines the development roadmap. Pooled resources and knowhow may result in a far superior sampler technology over time with the huge benefit that comes from users only having to master a single (or smaller number of) technology(-ies). That way we can all just focus on the music and not the sampler, while the developers can focus on investing in sampling content rather than competing on the basis of duplication of expensive sampler code development.

I fear for companies like Cinesamples and others who are betting the farm on the adoption of their sampler, and my prediction is that investment in such proprietary sampler strategies by late-comers to the party, is a hugely risk filled approach. Any future disruptive development in sampler technology or AI could leave a developer high and dry if their client base abandons or refuses to adopt their sampler platform. Technology platforms shuts out as many more potential users than what it locks into your product, as anyone in the computer aided design software field as an example will tell you.

In the world of technology there are often just a few big finishers and many, many starters who fell by the wayside.

Thoughts please.
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One but thing you're missing is that the forums are a small slice of the market. Just because people here who have been using Kontakt for years and don't like change doesn't mean proprietary players aren't successful. Actually the widespread adoption of SINE and new Spitfire libraries here even among long-time users kind of goes to show that it's mostly hot air. And as a business, you're ALWAYS better off not tied to an expensive third party
 
Lindon said:
Is it? Are you sure? What plugins has ChrisBoi released on his own label? What commercial (closed source) products of any kind has he released? HISE is an Open Source project, he cant "own" it neither can you or I...
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Thank you for correcting the misconception.
 
nusonik.com said:
Well that certainly puts your comments and objections in perspective!
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Exactly, and it supports your argument. I am a sample library developer, I don't own HISE or make any money from other people licensing it. Yet I'm able to contribute to its codebase to give me the features I need for creating my own sample libraries - this is exactly what you've been asking for since your first post.
 
Mike Greene said:
The advantage Gorilla has is that it's very similar to Kontakt, even in its scripting. (Mind you, I haven't actually seen it for myself, this is just what I've been told.) And it's really efficient, in terms of loading times, voice counts, and all that. (Much faster than UVI, but I'm not sure how it compares to Kontakt.)
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err... its not as similar as you think, my experience is that its about as similar as HISE (actually a bit less intuitive but I'll put that down to my addled brain).

Mike Greene said:
Plus, staying close to Kontakt allows a few shortcuts. For instance, we don't really even need to build a drag&drop GUI for the mappings, since we could get Garth (Chicken Systems) or someone to build us an equivalent to his Translator app. So we could build in Kontakt, then it's translated into data and ported to our player.
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Good grief I wrote this in an afternoon for porting from Kontakt to HISE sample maps: You take a kontakt instrument - run a Creator Tools script over it and out comes HISE Sample maps ready to load. So this is done already for HISE.

The *important* point here wasnt that I could do this in Creator Tools ( it was nice but I had to learn LUA at the same time ) - no the really important part was that the HISE Sample Maps were open and human readable, they are XML (an open well understood format) the sort of thing NI will never do for their data formats, and that you will *need* to do for your sampler MIKE

The lesson I learned: if the tools are properly designed and open - you can do this sort of thing easily yourself.

Mike Greene said:
The user interface is a similar situation, where there are already third party UI builder apps, including ones that direct-port to Kontakt, so that could be our front end for designing GUIs.
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Yeah I wrote one(in python) that ported Skinman files to Kontakt interfaces(a pile of ugly KSP) for my own work, I used it for years - it saved me acres of time. So when I got to HISE one of the first thoughts I had was "well now, lets see what the format is for UI layout is here, and extend the UI Composer I have..." took me about ten minutes to see the UI format was waaay easier to understand in HISE.. "woohoo this will be simple". Luckily I spent an afternoon in the UI builder *inside* HISE, and realised "hey, this UI builder is already more powerful and better than the external system I have, come to that better than *any* UI builder in or out of any sampler platform!!"

The lesson I learned: in HISE you dont NEED another UI builder - its already there.

Mike Greene said:
Effects can be licensed. Especially now, when there's so much competition, so deals would be easier to make. Even with time stretching (TM-Pro), I'm told everybody licenses Z-Plane, so in theory, we can cross that off the to-do list as well.
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Have you looked at the licensing price of Z-Plane? Have you ever built an effect? The first one I built took me two weeks, and it was rubbish, then I started using ScriptNode - it took me 2 days and it was pretty acceptable. I installed and integrated Faust - and built another - it took me an afternoon and it was commercially viable. I've built 20 effects this year - yeah if you understand DSP thats *insane*, especially as most of my time was spent on virtual instruments....

P.S Time stretching is already available (as part of the core package) in HISE...

The lesson I learned: With the right tool set already integrated then there is no reason to pay a 3rd party to either build it for you or to license their code(which you will then have to integrate).

Mike Greene said:
For scripting, KSP is based on PASCAL, which I think is public domain, plus NI doesn't own those shortcuts on Sublime text that we all use. So we could create a scripting language everybody's already comfortable with, without legal worries of infringement.
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HISEScript is based on Javascript - so its as public (if not more so) than Pascal, and you dont need any 3rd-party extensions in some 3rd-party editor.

Mike Greene said:
This is all very early, though, and I don't want to come across like I've got it all figured out. I don't, and I fully understand everything's easy ... in theory. :grin:
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Mike, we need to have a conversation - before you spend your $1M or any part of it. I know from first hand experience you are a good man and I dont want to see you throwing your money away....and from where I'm standing this looks pretty much exactly like what you are proposing. Happy to be proved wrong.
 
nusonik.com said:
So inform me: Is Hise a fully featured sampler comparable to any of the players from the big developers or a general framework for building audio apps?
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Ah that's a little complicated to answer.

HISE is a development tool for creating sample libraries and audio plugins. It's not something designed to be run by an end-user. The output of HISE is a plugin (VST, AU, AAX) or standalone app.

As part of its makeup HISE contains a streaming sampler engine, with compression, time stretching, pitch bending, multi-mic handling, etc. (basically all the features you'd expect of a modern sampler). When a developer exports their project from HISE this sampler engine (along with lots of other great modules) are included in the output.

There is also another, simpler, option which is to export from HISE to a format that can be launched from my Rhapsody player (which was also built with HISE). But since this is open source most commercial developers will discount this option.
 
Lindon said:
P.S Time stretching is already available (as part of the core package) in HISE...
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RubberBand?

Yeah that's not as good as zplane stuff (and even zplane is not the best).


EDIT: I see it's the Signalsmith one. Yeah that one is better than RubberBand in some cases, and definitely more CPU efficient.
 
RubberBand?

Yeah that's not as good as zplane stuff (and even zplane is not the best).
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I totally agree and that's the reason why I didn't include a timestretching algorithm for so long. However the timestretching library I'm using is a relatively new library called Signalsmith stretch which I think competes with the commercial libraries in both quality and performance. It's not 100% there, but it's completely free to use without any GPL license in the way for total commercial exploitation :)

EDIT: I See David was faster :)
 
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