Steffan Andrews

Man am I late to this thread. It's too bad I'm so busy these days, sounds like it would be a load of fun.

I checked out the Wallander Instruments and the demos sounded alright.. so I decided to grab the trial version and test it out. There are no words to describe how amazing these are to play. I just laid down the $616 for the brass section. Quite frankly, the possibilities with this are nearly limitless. It blows away absolutely every brass library I've ever used. Because it's based on physical modeling, you can do nearly anything a live player could. The development has come so far now that it sounds absolutely convincing.

More expensive than a Behringer.

JABB is rough around the edges and has a rigidity to it that I just found unplayable. Apart from the technical requirements of manipulating the samples, the obvious comment would be that arranging properly for big band can make a big difference in its believability. The composer I work with is getting SoniVox Big Band in the next month or two and I'm setting it up for him. It will be interesting to use it hands-on and see if it's truly as playable as they claim it to be. For big band stuff currently, I resort to the older libraries from Roland and ones like those. Still classic, they're extremely playable and very realistic. Solo instruments, extensive effects, and multisampled stacks. I have a number of them, can't recall their origins at the moment.

http://www.ocremix.org/remixer/steffanandrews/ But a warning, there's some really old stuff still up from the pioneering days of OCR, which despite being crap, site admin refuses to remove. And only 1 of the 2 tracks I did for VotL is actually on OCR - pity.

Or you could just hire a brass player They're cheap if you feed them cookies. I'm doing an experiment now where I've done a demo up entirely with samples, and then I'm re-recording it with a live symphonic string section to replace the strings with live performance. The funny thing is that at the end of the day when you compare the two, the demo may sound awesome on its own but next to the live recording it withers in comparison, even with the best combination of sample libraries and finessing.

Unfortunately the future of sample libraries and virtual instruments is hardware copy protection. People will have very little alternatives, and the ability to convert between sample formats will become more limited as this is the case. If you just gotta have that "hot new sample library," you'll have to buy into dongles. That being said, there are a large variety of great libraries that employ no protection at all. The big annoyance is with East West's decision to upgrade to their Play engine which requires not only purchasing a USB dongle for every computer you install it on (which coincidentally converts your license from a Kompakt license to a Play license), but an additional $50 fee per computer that you wish to also have the privilege of using the original Kompakt license you bought. In my case, I would have to shell out $500+ just to use the sample libraries I already own with the Play engine.

Well more RAM always helps but it may not be the complete solution. I have a quad-CPU machine with 8GB of RAM and 15krpm SCSI sample drives (running XP 64-bit) - and I've still experienced dropout issues with Kontakt/Kompakt stuff even at very low polyphony. Not as easily, of course, but it still happens. I think the DFD engine is simply not as solid as it should be. I don't like the idea of upgrading to PLAY, but if it solves the DFD issues then I might consider.

It's recommended to go to DFD options and select Expert, then increase the number of voices from 64 to max (256). It may take a bit more memory to load the VST but it might help. Otherwise the entire instance of the VST can only play 64 voices in total, and I've had that issues before. Hope that helps. You can always increase the sample load buffers to avoid dropouts and stuff, if you have enough memory.

I will take Stormdrum off your hands. But only because the Canadian dollar is so good now. I saw the "bundle" - totally insane. I'd get it right now if I didn't already own Gold+ProXP (I paid full price too.. $1200+) No regrets, though. It's wicked, I use it for almost everything. I've worked with Sonic Implants, VSL, etc. and it's really the most playable and vibrant library within its price range. I augment my setup with VSL performance patches.. the legato portamento and gliss patches are off the wall.

I smell a photoshop phriday in the offing.

- I recently won the GCFC (Guild of Canadian Film Composers) apprenticeship competition for western Canada, which sponsors me to work with an established veteran film composer. - Writing music for a weekly cartoon series that airs on YTV and Nickelodeon. - Working on music preparation for a Disney feature film (among many others) - Doing music editing on a cartoon airing on Disney's Jetix. - Working on audio post for several MTV shows. - In the process of composing the score to a video game, being produced by former Electronic Arts development team PowerUp Studios - Doing what I love for a living and actually enjoying it

If he had taken Ice Cap, I don't think anyone would have objected.

Crazy.

You can get a vinyl burner for like $35 these days. You need the 5.25" to 15" drive bay converter though.

Welcome to the fray Last I checked, lossless is lossless. It does not remove any information, it just compresses the file size so as to occupy less disk space. The "compressed" bitrate has absolutely nothing to do with audio quality. It decompresses on the fly as you play it, bit for bit a mirror copy of the wave file. Much like if you ZIP a file, the unzipped version won't be "slightly better quality." With mp3 or other lossy codecs, it actually alters the data reducing its quality.

Kind of struck me that the original track was, too

Thank you for saying what I'd been thinking I'd have killed to work on CT material.

Black Wing Metamorphosis is the title if I recall

It's why I skipped the whole 'artist expression' or 'singer/songwriter' path and dove head first into music for film/tv/videogames. It's music with the explicit end goal of money. And I am extremely satisfied with the choice and I really don't think I've had to sacrifice or compromise much in the way of having music as an artistic outlet. It's as much a hobby as it is a profession for me, and I enjoy it immensely.

I think it's important to keep this project in its proper perspective. It was a collection of musically-inclined video game enthusiasts who were invited to make music for fun, and for the enjoyment of others, without compensation of any kind. In fact most of the remixers on the project had to donate money in order for discs to be burned and packages be put together for dissemination to reviewers. I think at most anyone should take feedback light-heartedly. It's not like we're charging $99.99 for the box set. We're all not professionals, but what we've accomplished I believe is deserving of the recognition it has received, whether it's been over the top or not. You have to consider the target audience for this project. I'm not surprised people make over the top statements, the great majority are fanboys alike. And people like zircon have worked hard to make it work and get it out there.

There is an allusion to it in Black Wing Metamorphosis (OWA) too

We dub thee, Another Revision.

( http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&q=2 )

Things are moving towards the finish date. One Winged Angel is still in production because of extensive collaborations and scheduling between people's holidays/work/schooling/etc, and a few tracks are being worked on.