What's new

Spitfire Audio “This is London Calling” - BBC Symphony Orchestra

the last BIG ANNOUNCEMENT i was paying attention to was from Plugin Alliance/Brainworx.

after all their blowout sales, i had little interest in signing up - i'm even letting my current vouchers expire.

after last year's SA sale, i am feeling the same way about this announcement.

i am flush with libraries.

and after all this madness, i FINALLY have a DAW/Articulation Management system that is usable, even motivating.

here's hoping for a huge disappointment so i can quit getting distracted by the latest shiny object.

self-control, wha?

source.gif
 
Last edited:
I was working in Germany when the UK joined in the EU, except they kept the Pound. My German colleagues all muttered "the Brits always feel like they're special ..."
Sweden is in the EU but kept the Krona. Not heard anything similar about us from the germs. ;)

Ok, back to topic!
 
let me help get the thread to 40 pages!

I would love to see Spitfire innovate in a new technical way related to sampling, sample-playback, or the business model. I hope it's more than a big dial in the middle of the UI. The Spitfire team have proven talented over the years and have definitely upped their game, so maybe this is fact a game changer.

Epic has proven that you can do very well with an open source world-class engine (Unreal) and then recoup licensing when used commercially. That would change the field 100%.
 
Okay my guess! (40 p is a must right?)

A new way to approach sampling. So a kind of real time generative sample based synthesis where you dont need to make a thousand round Robins and you can record all articulations just one time and have Ai do real time sample based synthesis for naturalism while all the math result in a dramatik fall in RAM usage (as there are way less samples). If you search for "game synth tsugi" you'll follow my thoughts i guess
 
Semantics, marketing (of which they have a substantially sized department AFAIK) is the art of generating hype.

No that's only small part of what marketing is - but it's the part that most people see so I can understand the confusion.

Also, can I start the movement to reclaim the word 'hype' for it's correct meaning? As in hyperbole - an exaggeration not meant to be taken seriously and used for comedic or narrative effect? By definition advertising cannot contain hyperbole (at least in most countries) since it would constitute an illegal untruth unless the comedy/irony was explicit.

In none of Spitfire's pronouncements is there any 'hype'. If they say it is the largest announcement they have ever made - then it is. WE CREATE THE HYPE.
 
A new way to approach sampling. So a kind of real time generative sample based synthesis where you dont need to make a thousand round Robins and you can record all articulations just one time and have Ai do real time sample based synthesis for naturalism while all the math result in a dramatik fall in RAM usage (as there are way less samples)

I think that's definitely a stage for the future. In fact it's almost what Orchestral Tools announced in January (that is still to appear). The legato, head, sustain and release portions of the note are all separate and combined on the fly when a key is pressed. The sustain portion can be synthesised to some extent (because its the least dynamic and the part we are the least sensitive to) allowing notes of any arbitrary shape, length and vibrato without requiring thousands of samples.
 
Also, can I start the movement to reclaim the word 'hype' for it's correct meaning? As in hyperbole - an exaggeration not meant to be taken seriously and used for comedic or narrative effect? By definition advertising cannot contain hyperbole (at least in most countries) since it would constitute an illegal untruth unless the comedy/irony was explicit.

In none of Spitfire's pronouncements is there any 'hype'. If they say it is the largest announcement they have ever made - then it is. WE CREATE THE HYPE.

Hard facts need to be true in advertising. With subjective statements, however, you have a lot of freedom. How could anybody ever prove that an announcement was not "our biggest announcement ever"? It's not possible. That means that such a statement is absolutely legal, i. e. it is not forbidden by law. But it does not mean that everybody has to agree with it. When people write that Spitfire marketing frequently uses hyperbolic language, it means that they think that the subjective statements used by Spitfire marketing are, in their opinion, frequently exaggerated.

If they say it is the largest announcement they have ever made - then it is.

If Spitfire says something it is automatically true? I hope that's not what you were trying to say. The only meaningful reading I see is this: If they say it is the largest announcment they have ever made - then it is for them. That's very likely true. But it doesn't mean that we all need to share that opinion. Everybody can decide for themselves after the announcement took place.

I think the frequent complaints on this board about Spitfire's marketing strategies show that many people often do not agree with the subjective statements they make, and wish they would tone it down a little, and generally provide more facts and less subjective opinion. If you saw some of their past ads and campaigns I find that a reasonable request. But that is itself a subjective opinion not everybody has to agree with.
 
Last edited:
How do you define the size of an announcement? Maybe you could do it for the event itself. For the event itself you could say that it is a factual statement. But that's not what is being discussed here most of the time. People are wondering if they will agree with the slogan 'our biggest announcement ever' regarding the product/service/whatever that will be unveiled. And that clearly is an opinion.
On top of that, whether the product/service/whatever will be 'a massive chapter marker in the history of sampling', that may be decided after decades, if ever. So for now it's not falsifiable and thus can only be treated as an opinion.
 
Last edited:
I'd like to see this hit 40, and this is entertaining to me. So:

Pirate Radio to me means "thrown together by individuals operating outside a regulatory authority".

Applied to sampling? It's hard to parse. It's kind of like saying that small developers are like criminals and so are their users, if one is to take the sense of pirate radio as applied to Radio Luxembourg in the sixties, because of the usage being beyond regulations. So it's like he is saying we all have been doing it wrong so far. I'd wondered if it meant that we would pay a fee to the BBC Orchestra every time we used the library commercially - which is certainly a great way to share profits with the musicians that we would have nothing without, and without precedent on this scale. There was a time when if you used some sound libraries - loop-based ones - you would have to credit the creators. That came and went - though it was fair, most users just didn't feel like doing it. But would they object to a very inexpensive entrance to a library that only cost when you were going to make money with it?

The other sense of Pirate Radio I think he might be using is simply that people have been making libraries without standards, and perhaps Spitfire wants to impose some. Beyond UACC, which isn't universal.

I'd really like it if they make an attempt to go the way that SampleModeling and AudioModeling have gone with controllability - and as cpaf says, making use of synthesis for state transitions would be great - if done well - but it seems like RAM is cheap compared to CPU power, so that might not be much of a market motivator - and honestly, given the marketplace and how so many people would rather play a recording of an instrument that sounds kind of emotive than make the instrument actually do that, I would have my doubts. Happy to be wrong about it, though. But that doesn't seem to have anything to do with Pirate Radio.

I need a new library for strings very shortly, and what Spitfire have been putting out isn't quite getting it for me. I like a lot of the detailed character and vitality of the Orchestral Tools things, and really love their idea (upcoming) of being able to make mixes of all the room mics and then render those as a single stereo custom-mix mic position, saving system resources. So that would be a great feature. And I'd really like a dry, forward perspective available, more than what's available. These are things I'm hoping for. If not now then soon.
 
If every previous announcement was a library, or a library and a new player.
Then an announcement of a say a library, collaboration and updates to existing libs would surely be their biggest announcement. 3 things. As it is by fact the biggest one they have done (using that example).

Our biggest announcement doesn't necessarily mean "our best announcement", that being an opinion. Only SA know the answer to this at the moment.
But I'd imagine they have discussed this at length knowing the potential backlash at the sentence.
 
SF libraries of late have often been on the inexpensive side. I wouldn't be surprised if this new line is more expensive. But if the sound, arts & programming is innovative & top notch, I'm all in.
 
The sustain portion can be synthesised to some extent (because its the least dynamic and the part we are the least sensitive to)

What? No. What?

Attacks are important, releases are important, but they are also the shortest things in a note for anything but spiccato. There ought to be plenty of dynamics in the sustain available. Otherwise it will sound static. It seems to me that they said something about sustains being like that in their keynote, and I didn't buy it there either. I can't think of a single historic example of using great attacks somehow making poor sustains ok.

When I think of synthesizing sustains, I think of a sort of wavetable interpolation - where one captures several levels of dynamics, aligns them as sort of reference points, and interpolates a continuous morph between those values. The more the better. But that doesn't seem to work for ensembles because of the non-periodic variations that occur over time - random detuning and beatings, and at varying intensities due to varying loudness of individual instruments - and these variations, in order to be simulated, have to have a very intelligent pseudorandomization that constrains itself in varying amounts along different vectors according to the behavior that's being simulated - for example, the spread of vibrato that is similar among a group of people listening to each other without being homogeneous, but is not truly random, and the way that changes over time as a section leans into vibrato, and how that changes as a new note is approached. Like simulating the movements of birds in a flock as they change direction. It's no place to slack off, in other words. The best part of instruments like the SM and AM ones is what you can say with a single held note and all of the things you can do with it.
 
think the frequent complaints on this board about Spitfire's marketing strategies show that many people often do not agree with the subjective statements they make, and wish they would tone it down a little, and generally provide more facts and less subjective opinion. If you saw some of their past ads and campaigns I find that a reasonable request. But that is itself a subjective opinion not everybody has to agree with.

The point is that such people that complain about the marketing are overly sensitised to it because of the focus of this forum and the fact that Spitfire are the most successful company in the space. In the big wide world where 90%+ of Spitfire's customers exist, there is no such sentiment because the level of exposure is much smaller - a print advert here, a review there etc. Also, complaining about hyperbole in advertising is like complaining about water in the Ocean. It's the system man.

I'm well aware of every single Spitfire campaign from the past 6 years or so and in general they are very good. You could complain about certain aspects of execution from a technical point of view but in general the campaigns are well designed and professional. I think what people actually resent is their own weakness in the face of compelling products. I know I do on occasion (fuck you HZ Strings).

Do I believe Christian when he says that this is their largest announcement to date? Yes of course I do. I think that will turn out to be both objectively and subjectively true.
 
Top Bottom