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.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 28, 2021 3:47 pm
by FriFlo
I was willing to check this out, but all the enthusiasm for this new 8dio tool stopped when the library installer crashed immediately after starting the download. Every time I do it, it crashes again ... anyone else has this problem? Mac OS X Big Sur and I am on a Hackintosh.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 28, 2021 4:45 pm
by TJP
FriFlo wrote: ↑Oct 28, 2021 3:47 pm
I was willing to check this out, but all the enthusiasm for this new 8dio tool stopped when the library installer crashed immediately after starting the download. Every time I do it, it crashes again ... anyone else has this problem? Mac OS X Big Sur and I am on a Hackintosh.
Same here. It's probably just teething issues.
I think it's pretty uninspiring to look at but really intriguing. If it is next gen tech then I can live with the bland UI.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 28, 2021 4:48 pm
by Guy Rowland
It worked here - when it said I had a library to download I cancelled to set up a directory to put it in. I could then start the download.
I'll get my head round the thing tomorrow.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 28, 2021 4:50 pm
by Luciano Storti
This thing could be something, at least once it allows for sample import. Not sure what all the technical stuff means as of yet, but I'll try it later this week. If anyone gets any of the packs, do let us know what you think of it. 8dio seems to have recorded some pretty far out stuff.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 28, 2021 6:14 pm
by woodsdenis
Got it working, there is a new download app that fixes things apparently, bought Palindrome as a tester($25) and this could really be good. Low CPU and loads very quickly.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 29, 2021 3:50 am
by Tobias Escher
Looks nice, I'll definitely check it out!
I had to chuckle at:
"FOR THE LOVE OF WAVEFORMS ... GET THE ALL BUNDLE!"
—TROELS FOLMANN
Isn't he the developer? 8dio...
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 29, 2021 5:11 am
by Guy Rowland
So some very early thoughts / observations.
The player and instruments load blindingly fast, so a great first impression. (All I have to play with at the moment is the free 1928 Steinway)
The UI is reasonably intuitive. The browser is on the left in menu tree form, and switches between Program (instruments), Part (groups of samples), Attack and release samples. Hidden under the search box are tags. The main section has 4 layers at the top to load the parts, and controls for morphing between 1 and 2 or 3 and 4.
There is then a tabbed section. There are two rack tabs of 7 sets of controls which seem to be cover anything from voicing to ADSR, LFOs etc, so it seems to be the main editing section and you can just add the controls you need and ignore everything else, which is presumably a very efficient way to work. Then there's an effects tab which looks very comprehensive, an ARP and a matrix for an overview of assignments. Note - you can right click parameters across the interface to set modulation etc. I'm not super-wild about the overall aesthetic but at a first glance it does seem well thought through.
There's also menu options for stuff like preferences, library locations etc.
So using the piano in action, it seems pretty light on CPU and resources - 100mb RAM for a 1 layer piano patch, double for 2. I experienced no glitches or any odd behaviour. In terms of the specific instrument, it plays pretty well to my undemanding fingers and ears feeling smooth in velocity response (a bit selling point), though perhaps the dynamic range is relatively constrained - there's no ppp. It's bright, definitely a vintage piano, tuning is slightly olde worlde without being too OTT. There are 4 parts included in this library - staccato and sustain patches from main and player perspectives, with the latter featuring more of the room sound (a small attractive space that suits the vintage feel). I'm not sure about the wisdom of having separate mic positions on different layers / parts, but there we have it.
I still have little clue how it works under the hood or what this magical resynthesis is. I don't know if it will ever open up to 3rd parties or to user samples. But overall it feels like a promising start, and well worth downloading. 8dio's reputation is far from great, from my perspective they have a lot of winning-over to do, but I admire this as a serious effort to do something new. It's clearly going to expand in the coming months and years quite fast. I think 84gb synthesizers feels crazy when you can get near-perfect emulations instead at a tiny fraction of the space. It is really as an efficient sample player that can do some new tricks where it is likely to be most at home.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Oct 29, 2021 12:35 pm
by woodsdenis
Digging into this a bit more today and I am really liking it, more of a hybrid sonic sculpting tool than a realistic sample library player. Let's face it all of 8dio libraries will be ported to this if you didn't like them on Kontakt they arent going to be magically better here. However, the key to this is the engine and the ability very quickly to load 4 parts and create new timbres. For what it is and with very reasonably priced libraries/expansions it is great.It is not a Kontakt killer YMMV
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Nov 12, 2021 1:08 pm
by Guy Rowland
A lil' heads up that another freebie has appeared on the Soundpaint website called Free Angels. Mostly vocal based, 8gb, textures and some guitary / pianoey patches.
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Nov 12, 2021 1:31 pm
by FriFlo
With the Piano I was bored to quickly with this plugin. The Piano sound itself was no revelation to me as promised in those videos and neither were the effects special enough to amaze me. I guess the morphing between two different sounds is what could be the most promising aspect, but I didn't find anything spectacular with the piano samples, only ... I totally admit that this could be my mistake, of course!
With those Free Angels I might give it another spin. Let's see ...
Re: 8dio Soundpaint platform launched
Posted: Nov 24, 2021 10:18 am
by retroreel
Never been a great fan of 8Dio, but Soundpaint is interesting. Having downloaded the freebie Piano and Free Angels instruments and then purchased the Jupiter-8 (small version) and 808 instruments I have to say I am quite impressed. The Jupiter sounds quite lovely to my ears. More authentic than Arturia's modelling and Omnisphere's in your face JP8 synth patches imo. However, Soundpaint's programme preset structure is not conducive to finding the sound you want quickly. Really hope they improve on that, with some kind of sound preview in future updates. Will watch with interest.
