I would like to try sampling some of my real instruments into virtual ones. Kontakt is not my favorite because it’s too buggy, the graphics suck and even worse, Native Instruments is not doing too well, so I could be doing a lot of work (which as I’ve seen on a couple of videos involves programming code), to end up with something obsolete.
There’s Decent Sampler, which I like, but it’s a rather small company, so who knows how long it’s going to last. A couple of years ago I had done some sampling of my violin in Soundpaint, and I liked quite a lot, the process was very easy and didn’t require any coding at all. But the publisher also seems like a rather small company, so ideally I want to find one that if I put a lot of work into the instrument, that 10 years down the road I can still open it, and the engine will be compatible with whatever OS I’m using then, hopefully Linux.
Cubase.
I once sampled myself playing power chords on my Les Paul. A full octave of E-shapes and another of A-shapes. Recorded with no FX so that I could add them in a project.
Then I used HALion to turn them into an “instrument”.
But that was dead simple.
I’ve never coded an instrument for HALion, but if you already have it, (and you’re young enough to put in the time!) I’d give it a go.
Thanks, but without knowing how simple or hard building an instrument in HALion is, it has a fundamental problem for me. The GUI doesn’t scale up, and it’s too small for me as it is. Even though I just had great computer glasses made, and I can read the text in the HALion interface, I prefer any engine with a zoomable GUI, even Kontakt, which looks blurry when zoomed up, but I can easily read the text and the graphics, as long as the publisher has some sense of proper graphic design guidelines, and thankfully, most of them do.
But my goal is to use an engine where if at some point I’m happy with the virtual instrument, I can give it away and they only need to install a simple engine that installs fast and loads very fast. Soundpaint is just that, but I just don’t see a lot of people using it, and do I know for sure if it will exist ten years down the road? I truly hope it will, because it’s an exceptional engine and has amazing instruments for it (many of them free, the rest very inexpensive), but it’s not a huge company, so I’m not sure. I want to take the time to build for a sure thing rather than the hopeful thing.
UVI Falcon could also be an option (haven’t personally used it though), has been around for a long time.
If you really want to be independent of a company and a product, I think Decent Sampler is probably still a good option, the reason being that the file format of the presets is simply XML, open and documented, so it is rather easy to write a converter to other sampler formats (they already exist).
SFZ is another option for a vendor independent file format, several sample players can import them or there are dedicated players for it.
Well, to me it’s not a matter of independence, but rather a matter of, will the engine be around ten years from now, hopefully more? And while I didn’t mention this, is the engine free? I don’t want to give away a virtual instrument that few people will be able to use.
There’s a new very promising sampler under development, not ready yet though, called Koda:
It is going to do automatic delay compensation (shifting notes “back in time” so they land on the beat to compensate for delay) as well as many other functions that Kontakt requires scripting for, with no scripting needed (although there is still a scripting engine).
There’s a more detailed talk about it and demo here:
Well, that of course is something you will never know… even with the bigger companies you cannot be sure, see the current Native Instruments situation. That is why think having a vendor independent format, or at least a sampler that can save/export to an open, documented format can be an advantage.
Halion e.g. has a proprietary format that is afaik not documented (would be unusual for Steinberg) and from a quick glance at the manual I don’t see that you can export into another file format. So effectively you are stuck, and if for some reason Halion ceases to exists, all your work was for nothing.
Now if you use say DecentSampler and prepare your Libraries in that, you can e.g. use a converter like this to convert to other formats like Logic EXS, Ableton Sampler or SFZ, which many other Sampleplayers can load (disclaimer: I don’t know how good the quality of the conversion with that tool is, it is just given as an example)
I hadn’t had a chance to see this, and I just did. It’s great to know that finally I will be able to use HALion and all the great instruments it has. For those reading this and wondering where the setting is, here’s a screenshot:
