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Shreddage 3 is EXPANDING with 5 upgraded instruments. Now available!

Hey Mark-

1. I thought we included a decent spread of jazzy/clean snapshots, and the unprocessed tone is as smooth as ever! All S3 guitars include some rock/metal sounds because we got a lot of requests for those. Otherwise, we didn't change the processing of the samples. If there's any extra sustain, it's probably coming from a compressor or amp in the preset in Console, which you can disable with a click.

2. The UI is indeed wider by design, something that became possible with more recent versions of Kontakt. We think it is much nicer on 1080p displays, ultrawides, 4K, etc and gives us more room to fit controls without sacrificing readability. You can view RAM used (etc) by clicking the little (i) icon directly to the left of the Kontakt solo button.

3. You absolutely should qualify for the discounted upgrade to S3 Jupiter from S2. If you shoot me a PM with your account email, I'd be happy to provide that.
 
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Andrew, thanks for the info. I don't tend to use snapshots vs. making my own from scratch, but hopefully will have time to go through these some more this weekend -- pretty crazy with gigs at the moment. Good to know where to look for RAM used etc.; this is the first Kontakt library I've seen so far that uses the super-wide format. I never even knew people could override the top part of the layout as I'm used to every library looking the same up there! I just updated Kontakt today so thought maybe it was a "surprise" in the new version.
 
Sounds like you didn't update Kontakt in a loooong time, because the wider format exists for well over a year now, and there've been quite a number of libraries using that possibility. Snapshots feature (the camera and (i) buttons in instrument header) is in there for over 2 years now...
 
Nope; I prefer to do my own presets as most vendor-supplied snapshots are too over-the-top for me, so I think you misinterpreted what I said about that. I updated Kontakt probably in late January when my Komplete Ultimate Whatever arrived (the new top-line version), but I work super-long hours at my "day job" and am gigging and recording constantly on the side, so I have been overwhelmed with the number of updates and new products to review and fit into my workflow these past few months.

This really is the first library I've seen that goes super-super-wide and loses its normal top-bar. I might have seen this on the Session Strings Pro update, but I threw that library out of my workflow so probably didn't care or notice those details; whereas Archtop is one of my most-used libraries (like most of the ISW stuff). At any rate, people were helpful in pointing out how to see memory used. I prefer for it to be always-present so that one can see it while it loads; especially in case of problems. But I'll see if there's a way to make it a preference.

Anyway, good to "hear" that the updates are all better sound-wise as well as having more programmability through heavier Kontakt scripting. When Shreddage 3 was announced a few months back, I thought it was primarily about scripting changes and didn't originally think it was going to involve actual sample set upgrades. Glad now that I held off on some of the other family members.

UPDATE: My mind was blown by how much better Pearl Concert Grand is after its late-2018 update (I finally got around to working with it last night after a four hour jazz gig that I led), so I fully expect I will find the same qualitative improvements in the Shreddage updates. I am sorry that I have been too busy to get around to the Archtop comparison yet in depth; my intent with my questions and comments was never to tarnish the vendor, the product, the update, or sales, so I will update and delete anything that was perceived that way once I have an accurate assessment at my end (and will probably update my other Shreddage products then as well).
 
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At any rate, people were helpful in pointing out how to see memory used. I prefer for it to be always-present so that one can see it while it loads; especially in case of problems. But I'll see if there's a way to make it a preference.

You can still see the loading progress even if the Snapshot view is in instrument header...

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If that bar is white it's good. If it's yellow, stuff is partially loaded, if it's red, stuff is purged.


There's no preference to have snapshot or info bar auto-selected across all loaded instruments, this is a per-instrument setting, so you'd have to resave every NKI with your preferred position.
 

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I know this probably isn't THAT complicated, but I'm still confused/unclear about a few things on the S3 train:

1. Shreddage Bass - I remember at some point having a coupon in the My Account to upgrade from the old Shreddage Bass Picked Edition to Shreddage Bass 2. I thought there'd probably be SOME kind of upgrade path from 1 to 3, but there doesn't seem to be? Also, there's no longer a path from 1 to 2? And presumably (if I'm understanding the discounts correctly) then even if you did go from 1 to 2, then because you didn't have 2 when the codes generated, you wouldn't qualify to upgrade to 3? TLDR version: I have the first one - is the crossgrade just going to be the best way to go?

2. No Stratus crossgrade? - I didn't jump on the Stratus train when it came out because I was 100% in Orchestral-land when that dropped, and thought that with the little S2 collection I had that when the S3 upgrades came along there'd be some way to get in on Stratus through a crossgrade - but there don't seem to be any crossgrades from the S2-S3 upgrades back to Stratus? I mean - at some point there was a coupon to crossgrade price into Stratus from an S2 instrument? Did that expire? Having upgraded those to S3, did that invalidate that somehow? Am I missing something?

Thanks, all...
 
2. Stratus is pretty much the same product, nothing new in S3 branded version. Just renamed.

Sorry - I might not have been clear. When I said "from an S2 instrument" I meant from an S2 instrument that was not Stratus, i.e., Shreddage 2 vanilla, IBZ or SRP.

To recap on that one - I had those three (S2 Vanilla, IBZ, SRP), didn't get Stratus, and don't seem to have any coupon, crossgrade or deal for S3 Stratus - I've upgraded those three since. Is there something going wrong there, or is that what's meant to happen?
 
Ah good to know that the loading progress still shows in some form. It's important, because I've had a LOT of crashes lately with various libraries due to trying to do something "active" before they've finished loading. Might be a Digital Performer v10 issue though vs. Kontakt per se (Falcon seems to have the same problem, for instance). With the larger libraries, one has to be patient (even on SSD)!

Also, I notice with the newest Kontakt releases that the snapshot-vs.-info is a toggle so is easy and quick to access after all. Super-wide can be a problem when multi-tasking, but luckily I have a high-res retina-based 27" monitor now. But I wonder how many will have trouble with these new wider interfaces, such as on Session Strings Pro 2 and now Shreddage 3? Probably by now the majority of people have had to abandon their older computer gear due to OS compatibility anyway.

I still haven't had a chance to do a thorough comparison with Archtop and preparation of new settings templates or snapshots, and apologize. Too many product updates flew at me the past few days and I'm seriously overwhelmed. I cannot remember another time when there was so much heavy activity by sample vendors all at the same time!
 
Ah good to know that the loading progress still shows in some form. It's important, because I've had a LOT of crashes lately with various libraries due to trying to do something "active" before they've finished loading. Might be a Digital Performer v10 issue though vs. Kontakt per se (Falcon seems to have the same problem, for instance). With the larger libraries, one has to be patient (even on SSD)!

Also, I notice with the newest Kontakt releases that the snapshot-vs.-info is a toggle so is easy and quick to access after all. Super-wide can be a problem when multi-tasking, but luckily I have a high-res retina-based 27" monitor now. But I wonder how many will have trouble with these new wider interfaces, such as on Session Strings Pro 2 and now Shreddage 3? Probably by now the majority of people have had to abandon their older computer gear due to OS compatibility anyway.

I still haven't had a chance to do a thorough comparison with Archtop and preparation of new settings templates or snapshots, and apologize. Too many product updates flew at me the past few days and I'm seriously overwhelmed. I cannot remember another time when there was so much heavy activity by sample vendors all at the same time!
Yeah I as soon as I recovery from a 13 day 300 GB install.I will look into upgrading.The new videos are great.Hope I have enough HD space for these.
 
But I wonder how many will have trouble with these new wider interfaces, such as on Session Strings Pro 2 and now Shreddage 3?

Not many I would assume, anyone who's on desktop and doing composing for living is probably having at least a 1080p monitor which is perfectly sufficient.
 
Not many I would assume, anyone who's on desktop and doing composing for living is probably having at least a 1080p monitor which is perfectly sufficient.
If you are on an older MBP like I am, It's very easy to close the browser and use the wider versions. I first had to do this with Riff Generator from InSession Audio.
 
For those who may not have experienced a "wide format" Kontakt library yet, rest assured that when you load another library that isn't in that format, Kontakt goes back to its "normal" size. So you're not going to get sloppy layout on your other libraries as a result, and it'll also be easy to line up two Kontakt instances on your screen.

Overall this is a good thing to have the wider format available, as quite a few libraries by now were requiring vertical scrolling due to layout restrictions in the horizontal dimension. So we'll probably all get adjusted to this new layout rather quickly. Wider is usually better than taller, such as for mixer layouts. It's the main reason most of us went to widescreen format monitors as soon as we could!
 
Also, a good thing to know about is Kontakt's "mini" mode, which only shows you one single patch at a time, no other extra fluff.

upload_2019-3-27_7-52-40.png

This way you don't need to collapse the browser, you just toggle between mini mode on/off as needed.
 
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