Re: SoundFont/DLS2/Gig (was Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] testing of linuxsampler and cvs activity)

[<be...@ga...>]

Scrive Mark Knecht <mar...@co...>:

 
> Hi,
>    In a private email to Benno earlier, I had asked the question "What
> sort of sampler do you want LS to be?" (I have no opinion formed today) 
> 
>    I see GSt and Kontakt as the two leaders today, and they really are
> different sorts of animals. GSt is pretty much a playback engine. You do
> all the editing in GigaEdit to set up samples, filters, envelopes, etc.,
> to do what you want, but primarily the wave files just get played in
> digital bit order. Nothing much happens in GSt. The *current* version of
> GSt doesn't do a lot to modify sounds.

This is true about GSt but it's one of it's major strenghts:
most natural instruments do not need any processing at all.
piano, guitars, orchestral stuff, it is all played as recorded and as you
see it sounds so great that film composers can use it in film scores
often by completely replacing real orchestras without the listeners noticing
that the song is played by a sampler and not by humans.
Ok nothing is perfect, the pros will always notice a difference but
since in many case the monetary budget is limited one has to do some
tradeoffs and streaming samplers seem to do quite well in certain areas.

> 
>    Kontakt seems more oriented toward allowing you to mangle the sounds
> in strange and interesting ways. It will chop samples, play parts out of
> order, play them in reverse, etc., so you can get more wild stuff.

Yes this is certainly a strenght of Kontakt and we would like LS
being able to mangle the samples too.
But for now let's focus on standard high performance streaming playback.

> 
>    What does this team want LS to be? I expect that LS will *need* to
> have some wild capabilities or users of GST, Kontakt and others will
> find it sort of boring. 

It could be that it will be boring but I guess even if it provides only
decent GIG playback it will be appealing to some users because it is 
stable, can be tweaked, can be made run on 64 bit CPUs allowing to
precache dozen of gigabytes of RAM (possibly saving quite a few bucks
 over those multi-machine installations), streaming over ethernet
can be added too so LS clusters would provide unlimited scalability
using off the shelf hardware without the need of equipping each machine
with expensive 24bit digital audio cards, midi interfaces and the like.
I think the community feedback loop will help us to identify quickly waht
90% of users want. If we can achieve that the ball will start rolling
and will become unstoppable :-)
 (we will put a discussion forum on the LS site to ease communication
with non technical users)


> GSt 3.0 will be out some day. It will likely go
> beyond where Kontakt is today.

I'll believe that when I'll see it. :-)
I think GSt's biggest strenght (low latency streaming thanks to
kernel level programming) is one of its biggest disadvantages too.
They have big problems when interoperating with other applications
because frankly said putting a sampler in a kernel modules is a bad
hack but probably on Windows the only way to get out the maximum
of the iron (the hardware, disks, RAM, latencies etc).

People want VST integration and I see it hard for GSt achieving
perfect VST integration without giving up its performance lead.
If GSt 3.0 performance level drops to Kontakt then users will probably
have no reason of choosing GSt over Kontakt, even if it will provide
some advanced features. NI has built up a nice knowledge in the
DSP area and I think it is hard for competitors to bring out softsamplers that
offer a considerably more DSP features without investing quite some resources
in R&D. 

> By that measure, LS would seem boring wo
> many without some interesting ways to twist the sounds around.

It could be but for orchestral and natural instrument stuff it would
already be a very appealing because of its ability to adapt to hardware,
CPUs, platforms, etc.

> 
>    Personally, I agree with you. I'll probably just use the standard
> model where LS looks like GSt most of the time. However, like the
> difference between Reaktor and Reaktor Session, should some interesting
> person take LS and mangle it into an interesting new configuration, I'll
> probably use the compiled version of that also.

You already know that I fully agree on this.
I originally wanted to go the "Reaktor" -> "Reaktor Session" route but
it turned out to be a too big task for now. People want to make music
with softsamplers on Linux today and not in several months/years and
probably 90% of users are quite happy with the features that the
first production release of LS will have.
This is why we inverted course and will go the "Reaktor Session" -> "Reaktor"
way. :-)

> 
> I somehow doubt I will ever wire together pieces and compile them
> myself, but it would be fun to see what others dream up.

Yes this is true, never undersestimate the creativity of people.
Sometimes people use a tool and do things that go beyond the wildest dreams
of the original creators of a tool itself.
Let's work hard building such a tool and sit back watching what
those crazy users will do with it :-)

Benno
http://www.linuxsampler.org


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