Craig N

I watched the videos and enjoyed them more than I thought I would! Without actually being able to demo it, it's very hard to be sure whether it's going to offer anything unique or better than what I already have. I'm kinda OK with that at this point; I've accepted that having a collection of really great sounding sampled instruments requires basically buying all the highly regarded stuff and seeing what I like best, because most of the time you can't demo it before buying it. That said, after listening carefully to the 10 songs clip, it can clearly pull off some great tones. I wish it showed the settings used for each song though! I'd like to know how many velocity layers it has. I haven't been able to find that out anywhere yet. Based on the sample size (9gb before compression, 4.5gb after compression) it must be pretty good. The Scarbee A200 is only 850 meg by comparison. Broken Wurli is 4gb and that's split between three sets of samples, broken, good and line out. Whereas the e instruments is offering 2 sets, live and studio so I'm guessing it has more layers. I noticed the SonicState video didn't demonstrate much crunch, but it has a crunch knob, and the 10 song demos had plenty of crunch to them. I came across the link to the user manual. It's surprisingly comprehensive and appears to be well written. https://www.e-instruments.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Session-Keys-Electric-W-Manual-v1.0.pdf If the Wurli is the only one you're after, at $33, it sounds like a no brainer. I think I'm going to bite on it just because at this price you can't really go wrong.

Yep if you haven't bought a lot from IK previously, but qualified for the maxgrade, this is a great deal.

Last year they did 33% off for Black Friday from the 23rd of November https://www.kvraudio.com/news/purgatory-creek-soundware-33-off-black-friday-sale-53373

Just wanted to highlight that I never received any impression you were critical of the AcousticSamples developer, just that you were wishing it was a Kontakt library and not subject to iLok fees & UVI Workstations limitations which have nothing to do with AcousticSamples. I also realised I was pretty much preaching to the choir with regards to the anti-piracy concerns of a developer. 🙂 I came across this thread last night where some people who had the Wurlitzer library and then tried the VReeds one felt that the VReeds one was a step up from the sampled one. It's a short thread but their enthusiasm is infectious. https://forums.musicplayer.com/topic/174999-acousticsamples-vreeds-wurly/ Oh they also talk about a forum member's own offering, Purgatory Creek, sounding very good too. Have you come across this one? Pretty affordable collection of 200A, 140B, Pianet N and Pianet T for $40. Full Kontakt required. Obviously has a different set of priorities WRT piracy 🙂 https://www.purgatorycreek.com/index.php/reed-collection-kontakt/ They also do a Rhodes collection and a Clavinet collection. You can buy the individual instruments separately, but you save on the bundle pricing. Eg $19.95 for each of the two Clavinet instruments, but only $24.95 for the two as a bundle!

What is it about the UVI user experience that you don't like, btw? Is it that you don't have Falcon, so you're stuck with what they give you with the UVI Workstation software? With Falcon, the UVI libraries are loaded in such a powerful playground. Kontakt seems so limited by comparison. I haven't been using Falcon and UVI libraries that long, so it's possible I just haven't dug deep enough to find the annoyances yet.

@PavlovsCat Peter, I totally understand your point about developers not focusing their effort and time and resources on fighting piracy at the expense of marketing and engaging with the community and finding customers, but I can also totally understand how utterly demoralising it must be for a plugin developer or sample library developer to invest the money, time, effort, heart and soul into producing a product only to see it almost immediately listed on all the pirate sites for free. I totally support companies offering their products via iLok and if that successfully prevents pirates from ever getting access to a particular library, then mission accomplished. If that effort preventing piracy results in increased sales, even better for the developer. But at the end of the day, regardless of how much money they make, their going to bed at night knowing that your hard work is not out there being given away for free is probably worth more than any dollar value you could put on it. I could never begrudge them that. So ultimately both you and the piracy-concerned developers are right. They shouldn't have to adopt cheaper anti-piracy copy protection schemes that result in losing the keys to the kingdom. But at the same time, that should not be their primary focus, and sales will have a lot more to do with the quality of the product, and how well it is marketed, rather than the fact that it simply cannot be pirated. When is the last time you resented your house builder or car maker for requiring you to use a set of keys to access your house and your car? Those keys cost money, you have to keep a set of them with you in order to access what you paid for, if you lose them it's a big hassle to get a new set cut or the locks changed... there's quite the parallel. The biggest difference is that if you left your keys in your car, or left your house unlocked, it's YOU who would suffer, not the builder or car manufacturer. When's the last time you went out and left the house open and unlocked, or left your keys in the car when you left it parked somewhere? 🙂

I have been playing with the Wurli's I already own tonight and just discovered that the Sampletekk Tubed Wurli with Abbey Road Saturator adding a bit of grit and (unexpextedly) 3d depth, with IK Fame reverb on room duties, sounds pretty special!

If you bought the Skybox Acoustic bundle from APD, login to Skybox and add the full bundle to your cart. Then delete the acoustic package from the cart and it will apply an upgrade from acoustic coupon automatically. It discounts by more than the price we paid for the Acoustic bundle, $135.45 discount. The retail price at the moment of the Skybox bundle is $389 and after the discount it's $251.55, but I believe in the past the whole bundle was offered for 251 or so. So with any luck next time the full bundle is discounted, the upgrade price for owners of Acoustic will be even less again. Then there's the issue of the 145B being offered separately to the bundle... it'd be a lot easier to pay for an upgrade to the full bundle if it was just that.

Sounds like that would have been a lot of fun to grow up with access to that! Unfortunately we didn't have any instruments in the house until I was 15 when my dad first bought a basic electronic performance keyboard. Trying to make up for that with my kids. My daughter has a violin and acoustic guitar and my son a Roland electronic drum kit. They both have ukeleles. But Roblox gets more of their attention haha. I guess I am what you could call a tone junkie through and through. I have a real fondness for electric pianos as I love acid jazz and 70s music generally, being a child of the late 70s / early 80s. Quite enjoyed watching the YouTube comparisons of Wurlis and Rhodes by Adam Monroe. Have you checked out the Spectrasonics Keyscape demonstration by Greg Phillinganes? That man has a real gift. Even though his singing is a bit comical, his solo album Pulse (1984) was fantastic so I know he can actually sing. It is available on streaming services.

I am hopeful that if I get the Pianoteq electric pianos it might satisfy my Wurli cravings for a while. Optimistic? Hehehe

I had imagined MKSensation would have all the sounds from the MKS 20... Maybe the Extreme one does? The Hollow Sun VKS-20 only has a single velocity later I discovered yesterday. So there's that. Lol.

The UI is very cleverly designed although it's so it's a bit small on today's monitors. Sound-wise it satisfied my urge for MKS-20 sounds for the time being, but I do wonder whether MKSensation or VGSG's samples in EP Heaven / Kontakt Gospel Sound Pack / iOS XL Pack (Soundfont) might offer greater fidelity. I can't help but think that VKS-20 would be a step down from MKSensation Xtreme just as a result of its age and the constant march forward in technology. I'm currently contemplating whether to buy Audiolounge's Rhodes Affair 3 Classic Blend which includes the MKS-20 and TX816 sounds. It's on sale at 50% off at the moment so $49.50 for the Classic Blend which doesn't actually include a Rhodes as far as I can tell, despite the name. The DI pack is the one that includes the Rhodes samples. But I've got enough Rhodes for now between Neo Soul Keys, Famous E, Canterbury Suitcase, and Classic EP-88s.

https://pulsar.audio/products/ NB: You better believe they require iLok

I don't think the issue is stealing at all. It's not much different sampling a digital workstation like the Korg Triton (assuming that's what they did with the one above) than it is to sample an analogue drum machine like the TR 808, and I've got plenty of drum libraries. I've also got a gazillion emulations of analog and digital gear, and have recently started acquiring Acustica libraries which are samples of hardware of a different kind. Just recently I bought the Hollow Sun VKS-20 Kontakt library which is based on samples of the Roland MKS-20 digital piano module. It's 322 meg on disk which is fantastically small for a Kontakt library. I almost felt ripped off when I saw how small it was. But conversely, we only have so much storage space. Someone else (Gospel Musicians or VGSG) sampled the MKS-20 module at 96khz in a 50 gigabyte Kontakt library. Do I want to dedicate 50 gigs to an MKS-20 sample set? Not really. I'd love it if Roland Cloud produced a 200 megabyte emulation of the MKS-20. But regardless of the size, I was talking about the quality and the sensibility of what is being sold. There's quality Kontakt libraries that are thoughtfully produced, and there's a whole spectrum below that all the way down to shovelware. I don't own any Muze kontakt libraries but when I see an "Acoustic Pianos" library featuring cheesy sounding workstation presets that have nothing to do with acoustic piano, I start to wonder what degree of quality and sensibility is going to be involved in their other instruments. At 700 gig to download and store such a collection, that's quite an investment. I don't even have that much SSD space!

If anyone has nice things to say about Muze though, please feel free to dispel any false assertions in that VI thread. But here's an example of how wacky it all seems. A video by Muze themselves, with comments turned off, showing their Acoustic Pianos library. If you want a chuckle, check out the included sounds of this "Acoustic Piano" library. The first 30 seconds is a very basic piano sound, and after that... well, you be the judge. I can't help but wonder if they have found an appealing graphical GUI will deliver sales, regardless of what it sounds like! My guess is they have just diligently sampled various patches on a keyboard Workstation at various velocity levels by creating a midi file that plays every note in the range at various velocities, and then wrote a tool that turns those samples into separate wavs, then load them up into Kontakt with a pretty but random UI. The piano at the start of this video is definitely no better than the piano sounds in the Korg Triton. In fact it sounds remarkably like the default piano patch that loads up with the Triton Extreme, just with a little bit more reverb on it.

This is what I ended up reading before deciding not to invest in Muze last time I came across them https://vi-control.net/community/threads/im-seeing-muze-instruments-everywhere.124426/

I am geeking out over pianos of all kinds at the moment. Probably don't really need anything but I'd like pianoteq and keyscape and key suite and the acoustic samples modelled electric pianos but I only have enough money for one or two of those... I'm probably happy waiting for a Komplete upgrade in the summer of sound. I want some Xils synths and the Plug N Mix VIP bundle but they're on sale until January so no rush. I feel like I don't have the perfect delay yet but I'm not sure it even exists haha. I kinda want D16 repeater and the rest of their silverline plugins. Why they don't do an upgrade to the bundle I don't know. I own about 5 silverline plugins and the only way to complete the set is one by one. I was thinking about V Collection upgrade but I think I might wait until the next version. Ultimately I'm probably better using my money upgrading to a new PC. My i7 4790k is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Since it's a plugin boutique product they know whether you own v1 or not. I don't and the upgrade page says I am not eligible to purchase this product.

The new ambience reverb sounds really good, just make sure it's set to stereo. I liked the 12m size. A lovely roomy ambience.

If you're into digital pianos, Digital Synsations is pretty good btw. Had never installed it until just recently when going on an MKS-20 and Crystal Rhodes kick. Found a bunch of great sounds inside.

I know one way in which they're similar. I haven't heard either of them in real life 🙂 At $260k for the 280VC I'm pretty sure they're never going to go on sale to the point that it's within my budget. Might have to content myself with how they compare in all their sampled glory.

It depends what you are after. I've been thinking about both of these lately. There is more in Key Suite but what's in Keyscape is widely regarded as being of higher quality eg mix ready, more velocity layers. But as a case in point it only has one grand piano, the Yamaha C7. So if you want one of all the major grand pianos, just getting Keyscape isn't going to scratch that itch. But you will have a high quality grand piano. And the MKS 20, the JD 800 Crystal Rhodes, a Wurly 140B (mellow tone like that new 145B Kontakt library) as well as the 200A etc... A pretty impressive collection all told. I'll probably get both, eventually.

@daveiv I just wanted to say, even though the deal wasn't the way it looked when you first posted it, it would have been an epic deal at $49 and I appreciate that you tried to share it with us. That's what makes this place great, people helping each other and sharing the things we find so that others can enjoy the benefits.

Before everyone gets too excited

I can confirm it is a free upgrade if you already own LX480 -- it continues to work with my existing iLok license with no upgrade fee required. There was an email from Relab back in June 2021 about migrating your account from the old system to the new. I assume it still works. You just fill in the form to migrate. The form still works, so I assume the migration function still works. I have copy pasted from the email below: Our Checkout System Is Changing - You'll Need To Migrate Your Relab Account... Hey everyone! We've been working hard at Relab to improve our customer experience. One of those improvements includes a new Relab checkout system that will help us bring all our Relab products and offers "under one roof" If you have recently grabbed a copy of LX480 Essentials (in the last 4 weeks) - you already have an account on this new system. You may have noticed that your past purchases are not yet in this new account. Not to fear, as we now have a solution to automatically import your past purchases. If you'd like to import your past purchases into this new account, click the link to start an onboarding flow so you can import your past license history. Don't yet have a new account on this system? No problem, you will be prompted to create a new account if one does not yet exist. Start your account migration here: https://shop.relabdevelopment.com/legacy PLEASE NOTE: · Your past purchases will show in the new systems as a "prepaid" order for $0 under "Legacy" on your account page. · It will not show past or current Gobbler subscription purchases (Yet) but it will import your past single product and bundle purchases. · Goldplate will NOT import at this time - this is technically a Kush product and makes for some hoops we need to jump through - so we'll look at that later. · Migrating your account will not affect any licenses or subscriptions - this is merely importing your history to our new system. Should you encounter any issues during your account migration - please start a ticket at support and someone will be happy to help. https://shop.relabdevelopment.com/legacy