https://soundpaint.com
I still don't quite know technically what this is exactly, but it does now appear to exist. And it's clearly different from everything else, so that alone has piqued my interest.
Soundpaint is a new platform for 8dio instruments. Instrument prices seem modest, the free player comes bundled with their 1928 Steinway piano. They promise "no sales, ever".
It's a sort of sampler, but resynthesises... that's about as much as I've grasped to date. Here's what they say:
Soundpaint™ is a free music instrument technology that offers you the ability to play completely realistic music instruments. Soundpaint also comes with a free Vintage Steinway Grand Piano, so you can feel the touch of real-time rendered piano.
The Soundpaint Engine renders all instruments, dynamically in real-time. Resulting in a truly realistic feel, playability and behavior compared to conventional sample technologies. Soundpaint is also backed by the most extensively deeep-sampled instrument catalogue in the world by Academy, TEC, and Emmy Award Winning Producers.
New instruments. Every week. Never on sale.
TECHNOLOGY
Soundpaint™ is a free and advanced software technology designed to offer the highest degree of fidelity and realism possible for digital music instruments. Soundpaint renders all instruments by morphing velocity layers and generating new velocities and samples from them.
The technology has taken 8 years to develop. Everything is built from the ground up, including a new proprietary algorithmic audio format that allows us to render instruments in real-time. The Soundpaint™ engine uses all the natural (im) perfections of instruments and can sound completely realistic or synthetic. It also has analog behaviors built-in.
The Soundpaint engine is designed for fast and intuitive music making. Overall workflow is approximately 40% faster than competing technologies. Load-speeds are up to 10X faster with super-optimization for SSD.
We spent years usability testing the engine and ensuring that every action is the most logical possible. Want to assign something to your controller? Right click, wiggle your controller and you are set. Want to reorganize your effects chain? Just drag'n'drop each effects module. Want to morph a piano and a water drop? Just click morph. Soundpaint is simple on the surface. Complex underneath.
The User Interface is based on a modern, modular, minimalistic design scheme. Everything is easily configurable. The ultra-fast browser let’s you find any of your instruments in seconds. The UI is super optimized for a minimal amount of clicking. We employed deep classification principles from classic library science for the fastest and most logical way of saving and retrieving instruments.
The search engine is highly optimized for compositional workflow and instruments can be found both by name, emotions, playing techniques, genres and articulations.
The effects suite contains dozens of different analog models to augment your instruments. True modeled algorithmic reverbs based on the world's most famous vintage reverbs. Analog style filters with natural variation. 12 Distortion Models. Granular verb and delays. True vintage modeled BBD delays and delays modeled on the falling of rain. Infinitely large shimmer reverbs with pitch-shifting capabilities. Industry leading EQ designs both parametric and dynamic. True modeled vintage chorus effects (used by the Weeknd). The meanest retro modeled bit-crusher with adjustable bit-resolution. The ultimate cinematic gate tool and dozen others.
EDIT - curious - the 1975 Soul Guitar (based on a Gibson) is a svelte 942mb. The Juniper 8 UDS (a Jupiter 8) is a gargantuan 84.4gb.
