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Spitfire Player

synthetic

Senior Member
I don't see a thread for this one yet. I'm considering the new BBC orchestra but I have no experience with their VI player. (Yes, I know I need to download one of the free LABS samples.)

What is the performance like? Does it do multitimbral, or do you instantiate one plug-in per instrument? If it's one per instrument, how does the performance of 48 Spitfire instruments compare to 4 Kontakt instruments with 16 channels each?

Any other advantages or disadvantages you've found? Thanks.
 
I'll hijack the thread to ask another related question: can it be purged à la Kontakt where you purge everything and it loads samples as needed? The free LABS one doesn't do that.
 
Can it be used to route individual midi channels do individual articulations to eliminate the need for keyswitching?
 
How does it perform in VEP? Anyone using the choirs in their template, for example?

I guess in my example you would add 48 instances of this in VEP, set the first 16 to port 1, and put each on a different MIDI channel. It should work but I don't know how grumpy VEP gets when you add lots of instruments because I haven't tried it yet.
 
The debacle with the PLAY engine years ago taught me to be really really careful with new sample players. I would definitely give it at least another year and watch user reports before adding it to my workflow. Kontakt too took a long time before it reached the level of usability and stability that we enjoy now.
No piece of software that is this demanding can be developed and expected to work flawless within a short time. These things must grow and ripen for a good while.
 
Even, if the new SF player was up to par with Kontakt in its basic features (which it is far from at this point) ... what about multi scripts? There is a lot more to Kontakt, of course! But multi scripts alone offer such an incredible wealth of user programable possibilities to fit your libraries to your demands, in cases where the libraries simply do not work as you want them. I am aware, to many this may be a totally unused feature, but to some (like me) I simply do not want to do without it ...
 
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Isn't the player/plugin that's going to be used for the BBC Sym. the same one they developed for the E.W. Choir and used for the Labs?
If so, the Labs are free to download and use.
 
Really though, what is the reasoning behind not having a feature to time stretch samples in the new player so we can basically have the TM patches Spitfire offer with Kontakt? Being able to change short note lengths is priceless.
 
Lack of Time Machine patches is big in the SF player. I also REALLY wish you could route each mic position to its own output from the sampler as you can with Kontakt multi-outputs, but as it stands you're stuck with everything going to the stereo output. In my view it's unfortunate that Spitfire has moved away from Kontakt. I don't really see an advantage to moving to a less feature-rich system.
 
Also not sure if this is related to the Spitfire player or not, but I've found the legato patches in Hans Zimmer Strings to basically be useless. There is definitely a big possibility of user error here, but every time I try to use them I give up and go to CS2 or something. Unfortunate because it's such an amazing library in so many ways.
 
I read the justification in another thread that SF player is cutting out all the non essential features you would get with Kontakt to make it have a lighter footprint, which totally makes sense, to a degree.

Although I personally much prefer having things like Multis, per patch FX, being able to load an entire section into one instance and have all its articulations loaded. Being able to add performance scripts, manually fix bugs that inevitably come from automated sample editing (I don't imagine they manually edited all 1,000,000 samples in BBCSO), And if course purge all samples button is a handy feature too (Although I am not sure if this is in the SF player yet, it could well be). I am also not a huge fan of the wasted space on the UI, but I have covered that one before.

Kontakt to me has had the benefit of years of development, taking in advice from a hugely diverse musical user base and building on a solid sampler foundation, with updates that add to the features you already have.

I have never been a fan personally of closed system custom samplers unless its for a solid reason. With the SF Player I struggle to see what the benefit is to me as the user. I can see plenty of reasons why a custom sampler is beneficial to them. But not for me. I had the same stance on EW PLAY when they ditched Kontakt. BBCSO on Kontakt would be undoubtably more appealing to me.

-DJ
 
Spitfire player in its current state does not beat Kontakt overall, for sure. But I like to assume that features like Time Machine, Multi-Timbral support, individual mic output routing, etc, are all tick-boxes on a nice long list they've been working through from the beginning. They're important features for us, but there were probably 89 other features that were more important to another group of people.
But also it doesn't make sense to me to have a development team create a "v1" of a new program/sampler, and then say "Rightio i think that'll do it."
They'll obviously keep updating it, just as Play and others have done.

I see Spitfire as a business who works in stages, and are always looking long-term. Such as their recent trend of releasing fairly substantial updates to products a few months after release (new sample content, new legatos, supposedly some more planned updates for BBC already, etc). Like, they already know this stuff is coming before they even release the v1. "Releasing an unfinished product" you say? No no no... it's extra content for FREE!

Anyway, they won't be dedicating all of their resources to the Player, but I'm sure it's one of a dozen concurrent projects being chiseled away at behind the scenes.
 
Maybe it's just that I come at all of this from a very "composery" angle, and so have very little use for the undoubtedly huge power of Kontakt that is valuable to those who like to tweak and program, but I'm definitely on board with Spitfire, and any other developers, moving towards their own players. As long as the fundamental functionality of a good VI player is there, all I really care about is its efficiency vs. Kontakt, not dozens of under-the-hood things.

Anything that makes the process smoother, simpler, and more about the music itself, is welcome for me. Kontakt doesn't *usually* get in my way, but it's mostly a huge hunk of stuff that I just do not use. If I could move everything I have out of it, I wouldn't miss it.
 
Spitfire player in its current state does not beat Kontakt overall, for sure. But I like to assume that features like Time Machine, Multi-Timbral support, individual mic output routing, etc, are all tick-boxes on a nice long list they've been working through from the beginning. They're important features for us, but there were probably 89 other features that were more important to another group of people.
But also it doesn't make sense to me to have a development team create a "v1" of a new program/sampler, and then say "Rightio i think that'll do it."
They'll obviously keep updating it, just as Play and others have done.

I see Spitfire as a business who works in stages, and are always looking long-term. Such as their recent trend of releasing fairly substantial updates to products a few months after release (new sample content, new legatos, supposedly some more planned updates for BBC already, etc). Like, they already know this stuff is coming before they even release the v1. "Releasing an unfinished product" you say? No no no... it's extra content for FREE!

Anyway, they won't be dedicating all of their resources to the Player, but I'm sure it's one of a dozen concurrent projects being chiseled away at behind the scenes.

Just to repeat the exact sentiment I expressed with PLAY back in the day....Sure all these features might be coming one day, but as it is right now we are having to pay a premium price for less features than had they released it in Kontakt (I use many Spitfire libraries in Kontakt happily!). Usually when I share that sentiment its followed by responses saying 'but its a full orchestra thats why its expensive' to which I can point at Albion, Cinesymphony lite, Jaeger, Nucleus, Orchestral Essentials etc. Its possible to run amazing full featured all encompassing orchestral libraries in Kontakt (with all its extra features) for sometimes more than half the cost.

So I repeat, I still don't see the benefit for the end user, just saying 'its coming at some point' doesn't help users now, when they are still paying top dollar for less features. All I can see from a user perspective is - does less, costs more.

Again, just to clarify, I am a happy user of many Spitfire libraries in Kontakt (before the accusations of ulterior motives and Spitfire hating happen again).

-DJ
 
I should add, I do love how it looks and I especially LOVE how it's resizable. That floors Kontakt in that respect. To be honest, the only problems I personally have with Kontakt at this point is that it's GUI isn't resizable and the buttons at the top being hidden yet all that space being wasted... I guess I'll have to keep on soldiering on through all this pain and suffering.
 
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