neewbie to sampling

Hello to the NI crew!

I'm a newbie to computer music. I just invested in some computer music gear and software. I have Cubasis VST 3.0 as my sequencer and i am now looking to get a versatile soft-synth and sampler.

NI products always get good reviews. Can someone give me advice which NI products would suit me most? I got my eyes on Abysynth & FM7. Also, how much better is the NI Kontact sampler compared to Halion? Does Kontact support gigasampler files as i have some .GIG files that came with the Audiophile 2496? I only have 512RAM and can't add more ram because all the slots are used up. If I had a gigasampler file that is 700Mb in size, would it then be impossible to load it into Kontact? since Kontact doesn't have disk streaming?

Thanks in advance.

 

hello noodells,
i too am a relative newbie to sampling and am using cubase (5.0). i tried out a couple of freeware/shareware samplers to get an introduction to sampling/midi concepts, and my instincts quickly led me to NI. i purchased Battery around 6 months ago and found it easy to learn, in fact, i would say it has very little learning curve to get started. i have never used a hardware sampler, and have had no trouble getting into the soft sampling and soft sequencing world. i have not used many products but i feel confident that NI is the cutting edge of technology, with the greatest usability.

battery's power is in its incrediby usable interface and its innovative functions such as loop fx. and kontakt is definitely the next step. i'm not sure if it will totally replace battery or not. anyway, if you'd like to chat, email me at johntopp2@rogers.com.

john.e