DX7 Piano

On the contrary: The inability of Kontakt Player's to play a naked set of wav files, made me check out "sfz", and here I found that there in fact great stuff is around - players, content and content generating software: community driven, open source and completely (for) free. E.g. a really good Grand Piano and called "SalamanderGrandPianoV3". This does make me think whether it really is a good idea to tie myself to Kontakt (and thus Windows or -worse - Apple).

To survive on a long term, a (software) product needs to provide a decent benefit to the customer, and not restrictions pushed on him through the back door. In fact, right now, NI software does provide a really good benefit, but I feel they need to pay attention to stay on that track.

E.g. the products made by the company I work for, are expensive, but better than those of the competitors, so our sales go up every year since 20 years. But the competitors learn and thus get better and better. So we do need to improve to keep offering a benefit. And hence we invest in Research And Development, try to sell the stuff as cheap as possible and - most if all - offer the best possible service to our customers.

I will happily buy Konakt when I will be ready to create my own sample library that makes use of the great effects and script features Kontakt offers. Before that I would agree to pay an additional fee to NI for libraries I buy, if those make use of these outstanding effects and script features. Needing to pay for the full Library that comes with Kontakt if I don't want all these instruments does not make sense at all. NI does offer great "stand alone" sample instrument Libraries and I happily bought some of those.

-Michael

 

That's easy. Not a big enough market - Win and OSX drive the audio world.

Here's where you're wrong. You're not paying for Kontakt's factory library AT ALL. The price is for the program itself, the library is completely optional and you don't even have to install it. It's a bonus of sorts. Use it, don't use it, NI doesn't care - it's there. But the price of full version of Kontakt is exactly for that - a full version of Kontakt.

 

I see. (It seems like a really great donation ! )


BTW.: Regarding the sample instruments that are available for free and for free Players like sfz:

As said I tried "SalamanderGrandPianoV3" and was really astonished that you can get a thing like this for free these days. Of course there is no doubt that the Pianos by NI are a lot more advanced and that this is empowered by the advanced features of Kontakt. I own one of the NI Grand Pianos (plus one E-piano and other libraries) and really love the sound and playability.

But being a hobby musician thriving just for a public performance now and then, I am not sure if I really need that much software excellence (and maybe better would buy cheaper stuff and invest in piano lessons .

-Michael

 

NI customer service and general attitude towards customers is lacking, that's where you're right. They're not losing money though when you look into free programs from others. People or companies that provide programs for free are the ones that are losing money (time/bandwidth), unless the free program is part of a good business plan

 

Isn't that the chicken and egg story? Don't Win and OSX drive the audio world because so few companies make Linux versions of their software? I'd love to look into an alternative to Microsoft and Apple but all the software I use is written for Win/OSX.

 

It sure is, but there's little incentive to change anything about that... Linux is just too hacky, even today. Hardware is also a problem. There's just too many variants of Linux, and I'm not sure if one set of drivers for one audio interface (for example) can support them all and provide the same performance on all of them.

 

Any Android device runs on Linux (those are more than iOS devices), I very happily run Linux on several Desktop PCs. No problem at all with the usual stuff (Mail, Browser Office, ...). In the "pure" music world Receptor runs on Linux. AFAIK it's more secure for stage usage than Mac or Windows based devices.

Not "hacky" at all.

I do admit this it sometimes does need some expertize to make a Linux desktop do certain special tricks. But if you do have the expertize, you can make it do those tricks better than any other system can.

It is correct that nowadays the main problem of (Desktop-) Linux is the lack of specialized software provided by 3rd parties.

-Michael

 

Don't forget that Receptor has a very customized Linux and back-end software (also utilizing WINE, I suspect?) that makes it compatible with Windows binaries.

 

That is not correct technically.

In correct terms "Linux" is just the OS and not anything that runs on same (such as a graphical User interface, a system to install software, or even a program to copy a file, ...). (Using the same paradigme the name of the Apple OS in fact is "BSD Unix".)

What you mean is a Linux distribution. and here of course Muse does not use a (pure) standard thingy (like SUSE, DEBIAN, or ... (-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution ) ) but did their own distribution that in fact utilizes the Wine library (which is sometimes considered to be a GPL license fraud).

I suppose they also did some Kernel driver modules for supporting the audio hardware they build into the boxes. (Also considered a license fraud if he source code is not delivered with the box.)

-Michael

 

Yeah, that's what I meant, distribution.

 

OK I did some tests with Sforzando. Works great with appropriate Sample instruments (such as "SalamanderGrandPianoV3"), but of corse not really comparable to Kontakt.

To run it side by side with Kontakt, I would need to (at least) assign a midi channel to the active Kontakt intrument and another to Sforzando. Unfortunately I did not yet find out how to make Sforzando run in non-omni mode (or modify the Soundfont script to use just a single midi channel).

Does anybody know ?

Thanks,
-Michael

 

Even more interesting seems the "LinuxSampler", that in fact is available for Linux, PC and Mac and can play Gigasampler, fs2 and fsz libraries. It even uses Disk-Streaming to allow for huge samples with limited RAM resources.

see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHnHwz2wNH8 (German).

I am going to test is ASAP

-Michael

 

I tested it (in Win 64).

Seems great. The stand alone version does easily run side by site with the Kontakt player, as it can be set to use only one MIDI channel (even though the sfz libraries seemingly can be multi-timbral in a single slot).

Nice plus for software nerds: 2Linux Sampler" is done as a set of indeptendent backend and a frontend programs. The two communicate vie TCP/IP (hence they even can run on different PCs if appropriate). This is why (supposedly) you can do your own software (e.g. a Midi filter) and make use of the unmodified backend to render the samples to an audio stream.

Decent modularization is a nice effect of community driven way to do projects.

-Michael

 

It does work perfectly with my monitor-less sample player box !

Kontakt Player and LinuxSampler run side by side and both automatically start and load the appropriate instrument sets, when the system boots.

They are set to listen to different midi channels, so I can access them separately from my Master Keyboard.

I was able to creaste an sfz script that tells LinuxSamplte how to handle the 305 wav files I got for the DX7 Piano sound.

(If anybody is interested in that file, I can happily provide it. You can buy the wave files for some € 7.- on EBay -> "df65-DX Rhodes legendary" .)

-Michael

 

Hurray !!!!

Finally somebody created a virtual DX7 VST-plugin.
It's not a sample set but a very simple version of FM8, even less versatile than what FM7 had been, restricted to just the features of the original DX7. But (optionally) working on 24 Bit arithmetic, it (for my ears) sounds better than the original. It perfectly loads and plays my old DX7 sounds.

It's provides it for free:
https://github.com/asb2m10/dexed/

-Michael