Dear Spitfire: What Were You Thinking?
- Thread starter donnyluvd2bowl
- Start date
erica-grace
Senior Member
No. The design choices ARE failings.
The lack of features IS an error in judgment.
Just because someone chooses to design a piece of software a certain way, doesn't mean that software has been designed correctly.
Jeremy Spencer
Senior Member
According to you, anyways. No one is forcing you to buy or use it.
erica-grace
Senior Member
According to ALOT of people.
And, what's the point? That is just an immature thing to say.
its a good solution but you cant nest track stacks within summing stacks. i use a track stack per instrument but i separate my legato, longs, shorts, and fx. so in order to record I need to have the stack expanded and thus one BBC plugin with its related kontakt instrument. id much prefer having it all in kontakt.
Stop thinking like content creators for a second. Put yourself in their shoes. I work on an executive board for my main line of work, and you would be surprised how much strategy is constantly discussed to ensure the survival of a company. I can guess how some of their discussions went. Also, this player is done. It's not like customers complaining will stop them using it unless they take a huge sales hit, and there are no indications that has happened or will happen.
Spitfire as a company is sinking a HUGE amount of money into content creation and overhead to support the company. The libraries are getting bigger, they are taking on partners on libraries, and their goals are becoming more expensive to execute on. On the NI platform, they have very little control of new features, what NI will charge for licensing, how they choose to support the product, and the copy protection scheme on Kontakt which is certainly not an elegant solution. For small and middle sized devs, all this is acceptable to avoid supporting a whole platform. When you get to the Spitfire Audio, Orchestral Tools, etc level - it's just too large of a risk to put your entire business model in the hands of a company that just laid off 30% of their entire company while also NOT heavily reinvesting back in that platform. If anything, I would see NI as a company spending more money as a competitor in that space, than as a developer making a better application ecosystem. Sharing their sales numbers gives away another competitive advantage to NI. At some point the trade for risk associated with moving away from Kontakt as your main platform is smaller than the risk of developing your own.
East West's play engine while being much worse than Kontakt, allowed the company to move forward with a cloud based product that is providing sustainable and predictable monthly revenues for the company. That's what they felt had to be done to be a modern company that could thrive, and it's worked out well for them. They have a competitive advantage despite the play engine not being great.
Orchestral Tools from the looks of it, already have some novel features in Sine that will allow features Kontakt has been too lazy to add because it would appear they are mistakenly not working with developers to find out what they and their customers need. From what I've seen, we want easily downloadable libraries we aren't worried about losing after a drive crashes, something managed in the cloud with easy updates, the flexibility to not download every part of a library, the ability to make our own mixes to save resources, a UI that gets out of the way while allowing for expression and organization, decent under the hood features like good filters/envelopes/FX/extensible scripting if possible, and the overall respect for system resources that the platform is purpose built for the way composers work that takes into account some level of portability.
It will be interesting to see how Spitfire Audio choose to handle the customer reactions of their sampler platform. Criticism doesn't mean it's bad platform. What they are trying to do is hard, and making moves like that are complex no matter how well planned and intentioned. I think there is also a loud minority of people who take to the internet to complain. Give them time, and I think they will improve the UI, performance, and add features customers want. Just be realistic, because while I am a huge fan of NI, look how long it took them to get to where they are while missing some features Spitfire has already addressed, like library management and content delivery.
Spitfire as a company is sinking a HUGE amount of money into content creation and overhead to support the company. The libraries are getting bigger, they are taking on partners on libraries, and their goals are becoming more expensive to execute on. On the NI platform, they have very little control of new features, what NI will charge for licensing, how they choose to support the product, and the copy protection scheme on Kontakt which is certainly not an elegant solution. For small and middle sized devs, all this is acceptable to avoid supporting a whole platform. When you get to the Spitfire Audio, Orchestral Tools, etc level - it's just too large of a risk to put your entire business model in the hands of a company that just laid off 30% of their entire company while also NOT heavily reinvesting back in that platform. If anything, I would see NI as a company spending more money as a competitor in that space, than as a developer making a better application ecosystem. Sharing their sales numbers gives away another competitive advantage to NI. At some point the trade for risk associated with moving away from Kontakt as your main platform is smaller than the risk of developing your own.
East West's play engine while being much worse than Kontakt, allowed the company to move forward with a cloud based product that is providing sustainable and predictable monthly revenues for the company. That's what they felt had to be done to be a modern company that could thrive, and it's worked out well for them. They have a competitive advantage despite the play engine not being great.
Orchestral Tools from the looks of it, already have some novel features in Sine that will allow features Kontakt has been too lazy to add because it would appear they are mistakenly not working with developers to find out what they and their customers need. From what I've seen, we want easily downloadable libraries we aren't worried about losing after a drive crashes, something managed in the cloud with easy updates, the flexibility to not download every part of a library, the ability to make our own mixes to save resources, a UI that gets out of the way while allowing for expression and organization, decent under the hood features like good filters/envelopes/FX/extensible scripting if possible, and the overall respect for system resources that the platform is purpose built for the way composers work that takes into account some level of portability.
It will be interesting to see how Spitfire Audio choose to handle the customer reactions of their sampler platform. Criticism doesn't mean it's bad platform. What they are trying to do is hard, and making moves like that are complex no matter how well planned and intentioned. I think there is also a loud minority of people who take to the internet to complain. Give them time, and I think they will improve the UI, performance, and add features customers want. Just be realistic, because while I am a huge fan of NI, look how long it took them to get to where they are while missing some features Spitfire has already addressed, like library management and content delivery.
Stop right there, fanboy scum. You are clearly a $hill for the evil Spitfire empire. Thankfully there are noble heroes here to temper your LIES.
No no and NO . They told everyone this is a Sine player only library.
Would be so cool, but ...
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staypuft
Member
I was about to drop Tobias @OrchestralTools a message when I saw Rob´s message. Just check the specs page and it says ´´Works with Orchestral Tools' SINE Player``. No mention of Kontakt.
Jeremy Spencer
Senior Member
The point is....use it or don't, it's that simple. The SF Player is fully functioning, works exactly as it's designed to, and gets the job done for "simpletons" like myself (I admit I love the simple, no nonsense design, so I can just get shit done without fiddling). There are other options out there, this one's obviously not for certain users. I don't prefer Kontakt, but it's a personal preference. I absolutely hate Native Access, but it is what it is, and it doesn't stop me from meeting deadlines and being creative.
I'm all for input from users, but it's very counter productive to tell a developer their product is crap just because it doesn't suit their needs, and that's pretty much what's been happening. There are probably thousands of satisfied users, it can't be THAT bad.
brenneisen
Senior Member
staypuft
Member
For the sake of comparison. Sine is a new player that not only embraces what´s best about Kontakt but takes it to a whole new level of usability. Function over form.
Legato maps to change the attack and release of articulations, custom dynamic and envelope editors and much more. Basic stuff that everyone that writes for MIDI should be invested in. This is not rocket science... ´´The Sine player is created to serve the needs of professionals as well as being accessible to beginners´´
Are there problems with the Sine Player?
I did a search about Sine Player here in VI Control but very little came up on it.
*** Silly me, it hasn't even been released yet.
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brenneisen
Senior Member
December, 16
Nothing wrong with SIne player or Spitfire's one.
It is just the fact that i can't follow them with their new player.
I have invested so many years in Kontakt to be able to learn it and tweak it to my taste that i just won't follow them with their new players.
No need and desire to move to new players....no time to learn. No time to adapt....
It is just me.
I regret those choices, i LOVE their products so much, but i won't follow them now.
But as i said, it's just me....
Nothing agains the new players...
They are for the next generation !!!
Alex Fraser
Requires ☕️
S**t, busted. But I was so careful not to use the words "very" and "excited." How did you know?
<Removes mask to reveal the face of Paul Thomson.>
Just found out when I went over to the OT site.
The feature set looks good though. The volume normalisation being done by the Sine Player would definitely a step up. I was mulling about this auto gain plugin.
https://www.hornetplugins.com/plugins/hornet-autogain-pro/
BezO
The Artisan
Help for a new Spitfire user, please. And pardon if this is documented or obvious, but I'm having trouble finding it, if it's a feature. And this is for the Studio series in the Kontakt / Komplete Kontrol player.
Is it possible to swap available keyswitches? For example, can I swap out a basic for a decorative articulation in the basic patch?
Is it possible to swap available keyswitches? For example, can I swap out a basic for a decorative articulation in the basic patch?
Alex Fraser
Requires ☕️
I can't remember there ever being a way to do that - but quite happy for someone to correct me.
You could unload the articulation you don't want (the microchip underneath) and in the next Kontakt slot, load the individual articulation you want to replace it with. Set both slots to the same midi channel. Using UACC switches correctly between the slots.
