Any news about Disk Streaming implementation

I am impatiently waiting for the Kontakt release
I am still wondering how is the status of disk streaming implementation. I heard there are issues about patents but are there plans to have any similar technology ?
My problem is that I need to use large sample librairies (strings, Piano, bass) and if Kontakt requires to load the banks fully in memory, the host program (Sonar in my case) will be down with few memory

 

How large will your libraries be?, 1GIG of RAM is very affordable these days...

D.Triny

 

its in beta testing now should be out soon... sorry now disk streaming. just go buy some more ram...its cheap.

 

...

I hope disk streaming will appear as a feature soon for Kontakt.
The new (Bitheadz) Unity 3 will be appearing soon and promises disk
stream and native MAS/FreeMIDI support on the Mac side, so it will be
a difficult decision for me which program to go with.

3
--

 

If you've NOT used any Bitheadz products before, I'd proceed with LOTS of caution...

Everyone who uses this stuff has ONE company whose products just do NOT work for them. For some it may even be NI, but for me and others that I've read at other forums, it's Bitheadz hands down!

I had Retro, Unity DS-1, and Phrazer on my hard drive. When I would experience crashes completely unrealted to Bitheadz apps, or even MUSIC apps, but severe enough to do a HARD RESTART, the Bitheadz ENGINE would get corrupted, forcing more and more complete reinstalls. The way envelopes were dealt with in Retro and Unity was clumsy and non-intuitive. The filing system for programs ESPECIALLY in Unity was complicated and time consuming, and worse, Phrazer TOTALLY corrupted a few choice samples in my library by "PHRAZERIZING" them wihtout giving me a heads up that it was gonna REPLACE the original sample data!!!

Needless to say, ALL Bitheadz stuff has been removed!

Unity 3 would HAVE to be SUCH a completely different beast for me to even consider it. As such I've already laid down my $$$ for Kontakt!

CP

 

Re: Re: Any news about Disk Streaming implementation

I have no idea how large my librairies are !! I am so used to Halion disk streaming than I never had to worry about their size !!
This is why I would like to have somekind of similar feature !!

Erik.

 

Re: Poor, confused Bitheadz...

 

Re: Poor, confused Bitheadz...

Whoops... I meant to quote C.P. Roth's post to MY previous post, not the one from Zeno.. C.P. Roth's comments were :

>If you've NOT used any Bitheadz products before, I'd proceed with LOTS of caution...

>Everyone who uses this stuff has ONE company whose products just do NOT work for them. For some it may even be NI, but for me and others that I've read at other forums, it's Bitheadz hands down!

>I had Retro, Unity DS-1, and Phrazer on my hard drive. When I would experience crashes completely unrealted to Bitheadz apps, or even MUSIC apps, but severe enough to do a HARD RESTART, the Bitheadz ENGINE would get corrupted, forcing more and more complete reinstalls. The way envelopes were dealt with in Retro and Unity was clumsy and non-intuitive. The filing system for programs ESPECIALLY in Unity was complicated and time consuming, and worse, Phrazer TOTALLY corrupted a few choice samples in my library by "PHRAZERIZING" them wihtout giving me a heads up that it was gonna REPLACE the original sample data!!!

>Needless to say, ALL Bitheadz stuff has been removed!

>Unity 3 would HAVE to be SUCH a completely different beast for me to even consider it. As such I've already laid down my $$$ for Kontakt!

< end of quote >

JP.

 

Hold on...

Wow, there's a lot of Bitheadz and Unity bashing going on. In my experience I've had some great results with most of their products (even though I admit the learning curve is a bit steep).

In reference to the "RAM is cheap comment" which always seems to come up as a response....yeah, RAM is cheap, but in a Mac the maximum amount you can have is only 1.5gigs. In most PC's it's even less. If you want to convert and run a couple of Gigasampler instruments, you're SOL.

I think disk streaming is here to stay because I don't foresee computers being able to manage 100 gigs of RAM in the near future (and for a relatively low cost).

I hope that Kontakt will address this issue in an upcoming update 'cause I really like their other promised features...but what I really want is Giga on a Mac!

 

streaming issues...

Points well taken on the RAM IS CHEAP question. Sadly the rumors (and they are JUST THAT, RUMORS) I hear is that the streaming issue with Kontakt has less to do with NI's technichal ABILITY to implement it, and more to do with some sort of copywrite infringement that BITHEADZ is making a stink over. Again, this may be way off base but it's what I've been led to believe. Understandible then why NI has been a bit tongue tied over what they CAN say about it for now.

Of course at the end of the day it'd be really sad if a product, possibly a SUPERIOR product, was comprimised by shenanigans like this.

CP

 

Re: streaming issues...

You know what, though ? Although streaming would be very cool indeed, just to have a VSTi / MAS-based soft-sampler that _really_ worked without a bunch of babysitting and excuses, will be really great... I would forego the streaming aspect of it, if it just worked as advertised.... With NI products, more than most on the market, I feel as though this is a realistic expectation. I am _most_ impressed with their quality control concept, and don't mind waiting for it a bit longer if it means it really will work as advertised, and not just hyped-up in order to get my money...

And who knows ? Perhaps they will eventually figure out a way to implement disk-streaming in a future release without infringing upon the copyrights of Giga / Tascam... Knowing how smart the NI guys obviously are, they will... And I am prepared to wait for that...

Remember - quality over quantity / speed... everytime.

-JP.

 

disk streaming illegal!!???

then why isn't loading a sample into memory a copyright infringement?
or using memory to store a sample?

boy, those lawyers really know how to screw up technological advancement.

good luck to NI!!!

 

Re: disk streaming illegal!!???

Yeah I agree that is stupid... I am sure they can find other ways to not necessarily load all the sample into memory without calling it disk streaming... Anyway even if they implement it, It will be hard for anyone to proove they did or not

 

I saw on the Kontakt product page that NI says the audio engine features dynamic resource allocation !!
I hope this is somekind of streaming !!!!
Does someone have more infos about this dynamic resource allocation ?

 

HI Guys, Just something to think about-> I have been in the industry for quite some time and before being a part of NI I was involved with the production of many high quality sample CDRoms... This whole stream from disk thing (IMO) is not that big of a deal. Everyone likes to talk about it like it has changed their lives. -> I don’t understand this.
You can have an amazing sounding 50MB piano (or any sampled acoustic instrument) with realistic samples, good loop points and proper programming sound just as good as a 1 gig piano or any other instrument. This is fact, and not only does it sound good, but you didn't have to take up gigs and gigs of data/hard drive space.

::chris_borgia::

-- >These options expressed are options of my own and not of Native Instruments

 

I fully agree with you. I have many sounds on my SW1000XG (it is only 16mb ROM) that sounds much better than many sample cds !!
It is only that I find too boring to edit my cd samples programs and sometimes they are being pretty large and I like to do that in the easiest way, just drag/drop things and don't bother much about memory usage.

 

Don't need streaming

of all the libraries I have none of my favorites require streaming. In fact some of the worst libraries are doubly bad because I have 1Gig of junk on my hard drive

Sound design/excellent programming are much more important, and these do not require gobs of disk space. For further info check out the incredible libraries at ILIO, Quparts, Spectrasonics, Sonic Reality etc.

 

I want Disk Streaming!

Sure, RAM is cheap. But think of this. Some piano samples are almost a gig by themselves...so, try running that, with a couple of other samples, some plugins and some audio tracks....why, hello mr. click, mrs. pop. see the problem? i agree that small instruments can sound good, but I find the best, especially for piano, is to allow them to sample every key and allow that key to fall to silence. That sounds the most realistic.

Also, I got an email from NI saying that they were running into some issues but they planned on having Disk Streaming...I think the earlier poster who said that maybe the Dynamic Resource Allocations might be streaming, i think he might be correct. If it was a copyright thing, then changing the name might have fixed it. I hope I hope I hope.....

Maybe NI could shed some light on this?

Darby

 

Dynamic Resource Allocation means that if only a few voices are playing then very little CPU is taken up. It doesn't have anything to do with disk streaming.

Disk Streaming Pros: very little load time, load large instruments into little ram.

Disk Streaming Cons: MUCH worse performance, much fewer disk tracks if used on same computer, potentially evil patent issues.

So Kontakt does not have disk streaming. But it is the most efficient and fastest sampler ever : )

 

So to sum up for Kontakt to be the best sampler ever, it would be great to have such configurable feature in some future release
Is that something you will consider ??