doctoremmet wrote: ↑Apr 13, 2023 10:00 am
My pleasure Guy. You have no idea how much I have enjoyed your video presentations and solid advices over the years, so THANKS for that. I hope you’ll enjoy the trial! Do let us know.
Oh thank you!
Yes, will definitely report back. I know what's there now will be greatly expanded on, so it might be tricky to assess. I have had experience of these punts working out well - I jumped in early on VIR Harmonic on their promise of free updates for Bohemian Violin and they were as good as their word. Saved a fortune. And personally I've had good experiences of CineSamples too.
I think so too. So far I’ve just downloaded it from the Musio “portal” website onto my little laptop mobile setup. I didn’t encounter any (explicit or implicit) DRM / licensing shenanigans, so my guess is one can install a second time. I have not tested this yet though.
You can use Musio on multiple computers at the same time. However, you do need to download the samples on each computer. For example, you couldn't install Musio on multiple computers, download the samples you want on one computer, move that external drive to another and have the samples work. But as long as you download the samples you want on each computer, you can use it on multiple computers!
Had a few spare moments this morning to start the trial. All went smoothly except changing the sample location, which required a few attempts before it agreed with me and got on with it.
All I've done so far is download a few instruments from Century Bass. First, the good - it works, quickly, smoothly. They sound great too, if very similar really to CineBrass, but since CB's 6 horn legato is notoriously poor, this is welcome - very smooth across the dynamic range. It's a single mic position, but that equates to the standard orchestral staging and - for now - is fine by me. The file sizes are a joy - 4 brass legatos are 1.5gb combined.
The less good - there's no controls for almost anything. Not even keyswitches, let alone fine tweaks. Also every articulation has to be manually downloaded which is a bore - you'd think they had the option to just download a whole library.
So this feels like a leap of faith. In the coming months we should get mic-mixers and keyswitches to get this into the basic minimum standard. With that proviso - the basic minimum is all I need really - I like very much. I love the notion of having a small lite version on the laptop with just a main mix, and then the full monty for the desktop. I've been bitching about this for years. Yes, I realise Sine does this and more besides, but Sine cannot begin to compete with $499 for life for the entire catalogue now, can it?
Speaking of which, I see CineStrings Pro is coming next month (among many other things). Not many details yet, but the website says "Articulations for both ensemble and individual string sections including appassionata, con sordino, sul ponticello, sul tasto and more".
Well gee. With the quarter's PRS money in, someone's gonna have to talk me out of this pretty fast. Orch-wise, it's almost all I'd put on a mobile rig. The biggest drawback is of course the fear of the unknown, the notion it could all vanish tomorrow. It is a bit of a punt. The scale of their "coming soon" over such a short time period is terribly inviting and suggests they have a serious infrastructure to back this up. Economically the deal is so good for the consumer that it is actually quite worrying, on the face of it I don't quite see how this would be sustainable for them over the long term. I get the feeling that so far Musio has been very loss-leading, it's not been that compelling a proposition. But the switch from subs to lifetime, plus the huge expansion could and should be a game-changer.
Cinesamples added four more libraries as per their schedule - CineBrass Monster Low Brass, CineBrass Pro, CineWinds Pro and CinePiano. Note the lifetime licenses are still available, but increased to their RRP of $999.
Also perhaps worth mentioning they updated the EULA to include eventualities of discontinuation of service for lifetime subscribers:
Note that Lifetime are subject to the same terms and conditions as other Subscriptions, with the exception of Billing Cycle and Automatic Renewal. This means that all new sounds and instruments included in the Service are made available to Lifetime. In the event of termination of the Service, Lifetime will receive instructions on how to download all sounds and instruments included in the Service at the time of termination.
At termination of Service, Lifetime will receive a perpetual license to use all content in Service at no charge.
The player loads samples pretty fast, so +1 from me.
To me the biggest bummer about functionality so far is lack of mic mixes and synth legato (this has also been true for Spitfire's in-house player, but how in the world are you going to play lead synths without mono legato?). It looks like mic mixes are coming though.
I think it is a bit early to hurry and jump in for the player's quite-a-bit limited functionality, but not a bad start at all given the roadmap.
More stuff added in the past few days - CineBrass Horns of the Deep, Orchestral Chords (was CineOrch), and a Piccolo and Oboe 2 added to CineWinds Core. All sound and play very nicely. Next month comes CineStrings Pro, which is brand new.
So far I’m pretty happy. I’ve used several instruments from CineWinds Pro that were notably better than anything else I had on a recent project. I’m not a tinkerer - I just want the thing to work properly without me doing anything, so I’m not missing any under-the-hood tweaks. That said, I’m not adding anything to the template yet as I am waiting for the coming keyswitch patches.
I don’t know if it’s because of this, but I’ve found myself leaning on CineStrings and CineBrass in the template again more than normal. I do like the sound, and by now they’ve compensated for nearly all the gremlins I used to encounter, either with updates or new recordings. The $499 lifetime license really is an excellent deal if you aren’t already fully loaded and can work with the player’s limited functionality. Were I starting from scratch, I’d probably start here.
And three more -- CineHarpsichord (which sounds as inoffensive as I've ever heard a harpsichord, to me a good thing) , CineWinds Monster Low Winds (doesn't seem entirely smooth to me, better at lower dynamics) and the cream of the crop CineBrass Sonore. I've teetered on the edge of buying this for years, and I have to say they are gorgeous. It's a warm and rich tone for horn and trumpet ensemble that doesn't go full nose-bleed, and they play beautifully - very smooth in terms of transitions and tone. There's a shortage of short articulations, but the Seccos should work most of the time.
They did a very long livestream the other day which I half listened to. I guess the main thing for me is to see the entire team highly engaged and responding to user feedback. It sounds like keyswitches are on the way but aren't imminent - I'm waiting on that until I put everything into the template. But they're not holding back, that's for sure.
Oops I missed a big release yesterday - Industry Brass Pro, a hefty expansion to their Fox scoring stage series. Conceptually, I'm not entirely sure why this series exists - tonally it's not very different from CineBrass, even the rooms don't sound massively different. But I guess it was a chance to put into practice everything they have learned over the years in a new library.
New instruments here are 3 Piccolo trumpets, 3 bass trombones (and a single sustain patch of 2 trombones, 1 bass trombone), 3 Cimbasso, 3 Euphonium, 3 Wagner Tuba and a full brass ensemble. Of these, only the trumpets, euphonium and Wagner Tuba have legato patches however. These seem smooth and playable - though I noticed one or two little bumps in the euphonium.
Articulation-wise it's pretty basic it has to be said - just two or three per instrument except the full brass which has a large array of choice. The basic sustain / short patches are your classic sketching tools, smooth across the pitch and velocity range and the shorts have good bite. I didn't care for the octaves patches so much, for some reason it sounds a bit pipe-organ. There's chord patches, but only major and minor so missing the magic of Cinesample's own celebrated Low Chords patch of yesteryear (re-badged Orchestral Chords, also in Musio). There's various atonal clusters.
So overall I'm rather scratching my head over Industry Brass. It's nice to have these options, and quite remarkable that all within Musio there is so much high quality choice. But imo their time and money would have been better spent recording a pop brass series, covering new ground.
There’s a slightly counter-intuitive deal on at the moment with Cinesamples. They have a 60% off sale on their Kontakt libraries (not sure if the previous hack works where things got silly cheap). If you buy something, you get Musio for 3 months for free. I’m guessing that means they are confident that keyswitching and multi-mic will be up and running in that time frame to entice people over.
Of course it raises the question of why you’d want a regular Kontakt library on top of Musio, once those features are in place. I think what makes most sense would be to use any library that uses timestretching, such as Hollywoodwinds or Impact Designer. The latter is pretty useless in Musio, and I understand those features are some way off.
Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jul 06, 2023 2:56 pm
Of course it raises the question of why you’d want a regular Kontakt library on top of Musio, once those features are in place.
One reason might be Noteperformer which has an engine for the complete Kontakt based Cinesamples orchestra.
at least for now, Kontakt offers a little more flexibility for those that like to peek under the hood?
I think it will be interesting to see, for now I have all the Cinesamples libraries that interest me, well, except for Solo Strings, which I am thinking about.
