PavlovsCat

I strongly recommend downloading and creating your own programs/presets with free 1928 Steinway grand piano. That's where I started. I've used KONTAKT for two decades and created a ton of presets but never like I had after the first time I tried with SoundPaint. My KONTAKT presets are mostly tweaks of factory presets. I'd strongly recommend playing around with ADSR, the various effects, the arpeggiator, layer other libraries with your libraries either in the other libraries' factory patches or adjust it to your liking, it's very easy to do. For example, the free piano with Free Angels or another free library. Even though I own a bunch of Rhodes libraries I'm very happy with for KONTAKT, I still bought SP's Mark 1 last year, due to the programming and layering abilities in SoundPaint. I'm going to pick up the flute, but I presently have no free SSD space and need to install a new drive. As a consultant, I've been giving a bunch of credits to buy instruments. Of course, they want me to use the products I'm advising on, but I haven't used any of the credits yet due to my needing to install another SSD. All of the paid SoundPaint libraries I have are ones I've purchased. I would guess that I own around two dozen SoundPaint libraries and probably a bit more 8Dio KONTAKT libraries. I'm not an influencer. I don't get freebies for posting. I get paid an hourly rate when I'm consulting and do not get paid in sample libraries. How's that for a disclosure folks. As I've written about ethics on things like disclosures, I go out of my way to ensure I live what I've written about. I err on the side of TMI. I started delving into programming/ creating my own presets after watching some of their videos by a very talented jazz pianist named Natalie. But they've since been producing videos to show people how to use the sampler. They're largely aimed at beginners, but by the second video, I found I learned some useful things. I thought this video from a KONTAKT developer named Oliver Codd who produced Nashville Scoring Strings going through SoundPaint was really interesting. To learn more about SoundPaint. It starts out super basic, but you can still learn some things that will let you make your own programs/presets:

I'm up too late again. Thanks for all of your hard work. Have a great trip. Make lots of memories!

Wow, thanks for taking the time to share those insights and observations, Carl. This is exactly the kind of honest and objective kind of review posts that are less likely to appear at developer revenue driven forums. I wish we could archive this post in a review section. I realized long ago how important scripting is, especially for strings and guitar libraries. That mapping does sound extremely odd. I hope the developer gets this feedback and listens.

Okay, I love Key and Peele, but I have no idea what that meme means, which makes me feel old! Help me out. I used to think I was clever at one point. I no longer feel that way today with this meme. I promise, once you explain it, I'll start using it too!

@Carl Ewing There's one developer on your list that I have freebies from, but I don't have any of his paid libraries, Audio Ollie. From the quality of his freebies, I'm guessing that he makes excellent libraries, but I've asked friends and I don't know anyone who owns his libraries. As he recently had his Nashville Strings for dirt cheap ($49 USD), I almost bought it, but then I decided not to because I couldn't find anyone I knew who owned his libraries. What are your thoughts on the developer -- and do you own that library?

Ha! I have no disk space for any of the libraries I bought for Black Friday. I don't even know where I put the additional SSD that I need to install to install those libraries! However, I felt better about buying some IK libraries knowing that I'm not time-limited on installing them. Well, as I've publicly shared I'm advising those folks, I'd love to get your feedback once you've tried it -- send me a PM. Like I posted, I've been using SoundPaint for a couple of years, I have ended up buying a bunch of SP libraries that duplicate what I already own in KONTAKT and SampleTank formats (FTR, I started doing that long before I got to know Tawnia; I would guess that I own a total of 50 8Dio and SoundPaint libraries; so I do have this habit of saying to Tawnia -- this is just my perspective as a customer, every so often). I especially love using SoundPaint for anything I can layer, get creative with, do arpeggios and create my own presets. The flute sounds really good and I'm going to pick it up, but I don't really have much use for flutes (that said, my daughter plays the flute -- so I have much love for the instrument). But taking their piano, strings, electric piano and keyboard libraries and playing with effects is a blast. I bought their Rhodes library earlier this year even though I have more Rhodes libraries than I need, simply because I can do things with SoundPaint that I don't know how to do and you can't technically do in KONTAKT. I'm personally, eager for them to bring in more string libraries, including the 8Dio string libraries I have in KONTAKT. It's cool to be able to put effects and go into sound design territory within a sampler instead of outside effects, as you can just save the preset and use it again later. It's been significant for me.

@Brian Lawler I used to spend a lot of time at KVR, it was my favorite forum for a long time but could get toxic at times. So I switched to this one. I couldn't find any of the threads. Would you mind sharing a link? I'm super curious and might forward it over to Tawnia (8Dio's CEO). Thanks.

Must visit KVR ! People are actually unhappy to get 10 bucks knocked off? From the dev's POV, it's a customer loyalty reward. But it's no surprise that a lot of people will consider it a sale. When they price things that low, all it takes is some re-downloads for a profit to be erased. This is what's behind the war that's taken place on this developer, for anyone wondering why -- the concern that it's going to be very difficult for a small developer who only sells in small numbers to compete with a developer selling higher quantities for a lot less. That this kind of pricing resets buyer's expectations. It's the same concern small plugin effects developers had when Waves started their always on $29/39 USD sales. Hopefully, I won't get in trouble for saying this, but my take -- and why I did the poll here -- was to make the case to charge a little more and do small percentage sales to get people talking about your brand regularly. It's especially noticeable around Black Friday when everyone's choosing to buy the sales stuff over stuff they can buy at the same price all year. 99% of what people to start threads in forums and social media in this business are sales and freebies. If you want to keep your name out there regularly, you should be seriously looking at doing both. Freebies give people a no-risk taste of a developer's work. But sales create a sense of urgency with a time limitation and FOMO. It's also fun (unless you're broke; then I've created to curated lists for you). Yes, these are very simple observations when you lay them out logically. There are a lot of other factors, but the basics can be pretty simple. But when you sell a pro library created in a quality studio with serious engineers, and it's a 21.47 GB library that you're selling for 10 or 20 bucks, it's a lot more challenging to make a profit. Some competitors are pretty uncomfortable that this is the game changer, the disruption that will result in sample users no longer accepting paying high costs for similar sample libraries. I totally get that concern. But, unless your ethics are based on organized crime, your response should be a competitive response -- you give consumers reasons to pay more for your product, you lower your prices, etc. That's the ethical approach to business strategy.

That's right. SoundPaint is a sampler plugin that plays libraries made for SoundPaint as well imports your own samples. Like 8Dio libraries, SoundPaint libraries are highly detailed, consequently, the file sizes can be pretty substantial. Unlike 8Dio and just about every other developer, SoundPaint libraries never go on sale. Their regular prices are really cheap, that's part of the concept, to have razor thin profit margins so everyday prices are really low. I'll share that the poll I did the other week was related to SoundPaint (it was completely done on my own, related to some recommendations I wanted to make). I've been using SoundPaint for 2 years, and was recently been called in for advice from the developer. I'm a huge KONTAKT user. Just about every project of mine uses KONTAKT. What I find SoundPaint excels at is the quality of the effects -- they're far better than those in KONTAKT, the ease of use to delve into editing and programming and make your own presets for SoundPaint is superior to any other sampler Ive used. I've had a KONTAKT developer friend explain to me why the 127 velocity layers is such a big deal, which candidly, I never fully understood until he explained it to me. SoundPaint is the first sampler where I've created my own presets from scratch that go really deep and it's super easy and actually a lot of fun to experiment with. Two KONTAKT developers I know compared SoundPaint to Omnisphere, which I don't use, but clearly, these developers like a lot. Quoting one of them, "It's like a next-generation version of Omnisphere," that's from a very well-respected KONTAKT developer well known in this forum.

I have their Loft Piano and have interacted with the developer and found him to be very pleasant. Loft Piano isn't a deep sampled upright, but I think for a 10 buck Piano or whatever it is, it's really pretty nice. I'd say if anyone listens to the demos and likes it, it delivers. It's not going to go head to head with a great library from Skybox Audio, but it's good and works well for certain pop genres.

Same, except I feel a bit bad for Roland. These guys invented it. I was a huge Roland fan back in the day, with their synths, drum machine, multiple Roland electronic drum kits (I even bought their first model in the 80s and incorporated it with my acoustic drums and used the brain for triggers on my acoustic kit. I think Roland's plugins sound very good, but to your point, they came very late to the party and some exceptional sample developers have come along and done great things with their instruments. It's ironic that they have to fight their way into this market's heart when you consider their amazing history.

I love the demos, but I need to install an SSD drive to install the library and I doubt I'll get that done until maybe next weekend. But I've found Toontrack libraries are extremely high quality and am confident that it will deliver what I heard in the drum preset demos (listen to those on Toontrack's site if you haven't already). To my ears, it sounds perfect for that indie singer/songwriter acoustic based folk rock sound of the last decade or so with artists like Mumford and Sons, Sufjian Stevens, Damien Rice, Ray LaMontagne, etc. If you look through the first or second Toontrack BF thread cclarry made, one of the regulars posted that he has it and it's one of his favorite SDXs. I got it from Best Service -- Thomann had a slightly lower price, but I had Best Coins that brought the price down to something like $47.50 USD, which seemed like a great deal to me, considering its regular price.

UPDATE. I think I'm now finished for the year. It was a modest bounty. SD Indiependent EZ Custom Shop Quick Muse 8Dio Deep Quintet Strings IK Cinekinetik: Fractured Piano IK Clavitube (I blame @Patrick Wichrowski for this! He could play this well, I'll play it terribly.) I'd planned on buying Indiependent the next time it went on a deep discount. I never heard Custom Shop before this sale, but once I did, I loved it, and for $27 USD, I couldn't pass it up. I planned on getting a solo cello and stumbled across 8Dio Deep Quintet, which I always thought was the same as the Deep Solo strings I already own in a different configuration. When a huge discount on it caused me to look at it and listen to the demos, it was apparent it was a different library and I love the sound of it. I'll still be watching for that Sonixinema Contemporary Solo Cello to have a deeper discount, it sounds incredible to my ears, but I can't get myself to buy it until there's a bigger discount. So many developers deep discounting and even Sonixinema deep discounting its other libraries has caused me to wait. The funny part of all this, I still need to install a new SSD -- which I have in a box -- before I can download anything beyond Quick Muse. I simply don't have the disk space.

Every freebie from this developer has been good, but their Electric Keys electric piano is one of my all time favorite freebies. Superb.

Same. As I'm just a hobbyist, and not a pro with a time sensitive project, considering that Toontrack's regular prices are not exactly low, the only time I pick up expansions are flash sales and BF sales. It's great stuff, but I hope they get some serious competition that causes them to bring prices down.

My quick / hot take review of Ink Pads: The download transfer was sluggish. On the upside, it was an excuse to grab a cup of coffee. The user interface, as you can see in the walkthough video, is interesting, but I think it could be more user-friendly. The sounds of the instruments reminds me a lot of the sounds from a developer I own a few libraries from, Beautiful Void Audio. The developer's landing page for the library states: "There are forty five unique pads across five Kontakt instruments." That set my expectations for 45 presets or snapshots. If that's what you're thinking too, let me clear that up. There are a total of five (5) presets (NKIs) and no snapshots. I think the website copy could be clearer on this point to ensure that visitors don't think that they're getting 45 presets. Each instrument uses 9 layered pads. You can remove any of them or adjust various settings for each layered pad. A note that hanged in KONTAKT 7 (latest version) when using the Feedback instrument. I had to re-load the library to stop the sound. The library is 4.78GB for five instruments / layered synth patches. It does seem that the library could have been better optimized. That's not an expert opinion, it's based on what I have come to expect from similar libraries for 5 patches. The file size just seems very excessive for what it is. TBH, I could end up deleting this from my hard drive over that issue. If you like the sounds in the video walkthough, aren't expecting more presets, and are okay with the large file size, I think you'll be happy with this library for $5 -- a buck per instrument. Would I be satisfied with this library for $20 USD? I'm not really sure. I think the file size is the only issue I have with the library. But I would say that a price of $10 - $15 USD and a smaller file size, would make this a satisfying purchase for me.

Kirean, I've never heard of this developer before, but I'm with TheSteven. I'm hoping someone will chime in and tell me this is an instabuy, because it sounds like it to me. Beyond Ink Vocal -- which I'm also intereted in, InkPads, which clearly is using Mellotron sounds along with some synths and sound design is one I'm going to buy no matter what (I'm a total sucker when it comes to Wurli and Tron sounds, forget it with this demo, it's too late to stop me; even if someone chimes in and says the dev is just meh, it's too late; it's not even the price of a Venti Soy Latte...). https://ink-audio.com/collections/frontpage/products/ink-pads Please, I second Kirean and TheSteven, I'm probably going to buy this stuff anyhow at this point. I wouldn't spend time at this forum if I had great self control, but it would be great to hear from anyone who knows this developer and has bought/used their libraries. Otherwise, if you wait a bit guys, that person -- I predict --- who is going to give you feedback on this developer's work is me.

100%. You can do a lot more with them than the presets or even Cory's presets might lead one to realize. If you have solid mixing skills -- (FTR, I don't; I was a musician, not a sound engineer; I relied on sound engineers back in the day) -- the raw samples in say NI Abbey Road Modern Drummer and Session Drummer can cover a lot of ground, far beyond the factory presets or even Cory's presets (which are really just tweaks of the factory presets). If I were just getting my start with sample libraries today and looking for an acoustic drum kit library, I think I could just buy SD3 with its factory kits (alternatively ezDrummer) and be able to accomplish a heck of a lot by creating my own presets using the various drums, layering drums, swapping cymbals, applying effects like the internal compressor, transient designer, reverb, etc. and save the resulting presets for furture use and for future tweaking to make even more kits. Because I don't have sound engineering and design skills, I do tend to rely on presets and tweak those -- and in my case -- I have a developer friend who's shared a bunch of AD2 presets he's made and he goes deep and some of his presets are so substantial that it's like buying a new drum library/expansion pack, because he does sample development and makes presets for his own libraries for a living. I think a lot of what Toontrack and other acoustic drum plugin makers sell is the expert-created presets, as they sell many libraries/expansions that, very candidly, aren't substantially that different from one another that you one could get pretty close to if you just have mixing expertise. I would love it if Toontrack sold additional presets for each drum expansion. $15 - $20 USD for 30 new very different expertly made presets for an SDx that sound good to my ears -- I'd buy that in a heartbeat and it would be a high profit margin item for them. Someone who knows their CEO, please go pitch the idea to him!

The one thing that is a bummer with the Abbey Road Drummer series and the NI Studio Drummer library as compared to SD3, EzDrummer3, AD2 and BFD3, is that all of those players let you swap and layer drums and cymbals between libraries and the NI libraries do not permit that. Other than that, I think the NI stuff is great to have (NI Studio Drummer, Abbey Road 60s Drummer and Abbey Road Modern Drummer are my favorites of the NI acoustic drum libraries; I play rock and singer/songwriter music).

I don't own it, but I know a bunch of people that do and every one of them has highly praised it.

Why? I think using a robot is a great way to achieve consistency in velocity layers. I know of a few sample developers that use robots for hitting the piano keys. Skybox Audio comes to mind and I think their results speak for themselves (they make superb libraries).

Nick, you clearly don't have a kid in college. For those of us who do, we have a much more modest list! Also, as Carl was asking about Conduit, I vote for a video of you playing including Conduit. I think most people here would be into your playing and gear. For those who haven't seen it, Nick makes some very cool videos of him playing a ton of cool synths and drum machines with enough cool gear it will make most of us envious (me included in that group).

I agree, and I never see anyone posting anything about Abbey Road Drummer when people discuss sampled drums. I also like NI's Studio Drummer too, as one of the kits reminds me a lot of how I used to tune my own drums. If you anyone wants a really nice set of additional presets, my late, very talented friend Cory Pelazzari made presets for the entire Abbey Road Drummer series and Studio Drummer that you can find along with his related video (sorry, I'd link to them, but I'm running out the door) .

"Considers themselves a former semi-pro drummer?" First, no one -- absolutely no one -- is impressed by anyone who was a semi-pro anything, especially in the distant past. But I still have the posters somewhere in my basement, I think. And all of my old drums and cymbals. I recently found that a snare I bought right before my injury is a collector's item and in mint condition and will soon be selling that stuff. I have witnesses to Jimmy Chamberlin (Smashing Pumpkins) walking up to me at one of his shows and telling me I was one of his favorite drummers and named two bands I played in over several years (okay, he did say, "one of my favorite drummers on the Chicago scene" not just "favorite drummers" but I prefer to remember the first part before he limited the scope down a bit; but he didn't say like, in the 60804 area code, he said Chicago, and that's pretty big, right???). But I digress... Seriously, I think you've misunderstood my point. My advice was to someone comparing 3 drum plugins, and not knowing the genres they played in, I tried to give the best advice I could. And, as I explained, I haven't used BFD3 myself, so I realize that my recommendation is less solid due to that fact. I was basing my understanding on what a friend who is a pro developer and very knowledgeable on mixing told me, that he wasn't crazy about the capabilities in BFD and was sending everything out to external effects and thought it was too big of a hassle compared to what he could do with alternatives. My personal go to drum plugin is SD3, but I also use AD2 and KONTAKT. I don't use SSD5, but I did try to the demo. I think for someone looking for ready to go, production ready presets for high energy hard rock, SSD5 for it's current sale price, is a really good deal. I absolutely prefer the sound of real drums, and so I was comparing what I know about BFD3 and what a developer friend told me about it -- and considering that, I was comparing it to what I know as a SD3 user and former ezDrummer user (version 1). I recommended that instead, as it has a lot of the great capabilities of SD3, but more simplified, with less customization available, it's rock solid software and I love the drum kits. I think for many users, ezDrummer 3 is a great fit. Personally, as I wrote earlier in the Toontrack BF sales thread, I'm a huge fan of SD3 and love the SD3 ecosystem. I love having high quality effects like a compressor, transient designer, reverb, etc, in the plugin so that I can save everything as presets and reuse them in other projects. I love and regularly use the ability to swap and layer drums and cymbals. For me personally, if I had to rank what I like the best and considering BFD3's history of software problems (that's enough to make me uncomfortable with it) I'd rank ezDrummer3 first, then BFD3, then SSD5.

Do you have SD3 or ezDrummer? I don't know if ezDrummer allows you to swap drums and cymbals, I think it does, but aren't sure. That is the feature that really hooks me deep into the SD3 ecosystem. As a former drummer, I had all sorts of physical cymbals and snares and loved to be able to swap snares for different songs. I'd generally have two or three snares for bigger shows and different bass drum beaters, even different size sticks based on the songs. So I LOVE being able to switch out the various drums and cymbals in SD3. It has made it harder for me to buy drum kits in say, KONTAKT format, where that's not a possibility. Plus, having so many effects inside the plugin where you can apply them and save the presets to use in the future, is awesome (as opposed to having to use external effects where you can't just save them as a user preset). For this sale, I loved the kits in Custom Shop and I've been thinking about Indiependent for a long time. So this sale was pretty much perfect for me. I should be good until next Black Friday!