John K Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 Have not tried this. Still downloading the 8.2 GB offering. Demo's sound good. Can't beat the price. https://www.muze.shop/en/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=58 John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cclarry Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 Page says $99 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cclarry Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 Ah...there is a "lite" demo version that is free at the bottom of the page Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 11, 2020 Author Share Posted January 11, 2020 The machine should be the same in all the tiers. The 8.2 GB free version is about all I have the patience to download. Will report back later if it was worth the effort. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cclarry Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 I thought I remembered this...posted it a while back... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 Requires Kontakt Retail 5.6 or newer. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitekrazy Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 The GUI reminds me of Omnisphere. I'm done with glutenous libraries. I think it's great they offer a demo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.L.I.P. Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 I was going to buy it, but it says it is designed for professionals... 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitekrazy Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 13 minutes ago, S.L.I.P. said: I was going to buy it, but it says it is designed for professionals... I've finally found that cure for GAS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 11, 2020 Author Share Posted January 11, 2020 (edited) Well, good news and bad news. Good news is that grapes are on sale for a dollar a pound at your local Thriftway grocery store. Bad news (at least here) is that Kontakt in Reaper froze solid. Aquamarine loaded very slowly to begin and played maybe 4 presets before the big crash. 8 GB of RAM to 97%. Screen went black. Oh wait, screen is coming back but still frozen. Use at your own risk, I guess. Sounds are okay but the program like a wrecking ball on my rig. John I guess they mean for professional computer repairmen... Edited January 11, 2020 by John K no good reason 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bohlen Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 The interface looks nice. Out of the 4 demos that they have, I could only watch the first 2. The presets sound too similar. Nothing really jumps out and I own a lot of this type of instruments. It's a shame. I'm pretty sure a lot of work went into making it. On the other hand, for another $60 you can get the MAX bundle which includes this and 9 other instruments: https://www.muze.shop/en/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=83 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 12, 2020 Author Share Posted January 12, 2020 Think you are right. Limited number of sounds and already got lots of similar instruments. Plenty of presets but many sound too much the same. Raspy quality which I guess is meant to be there. The pointer in the circle allows a lot of modulation so it isn't that good sounds can't be gotten. Problem is it is an unacceptable resource hog that builds up over a few minutes until it locks up the computer. RAM is the issue, not so much CPU. My rig an i5 windows 10 with 8 GB RAM. Not the fastest toy on the block, but should be able to handle a single track with a single instance of Kontakt. One can wait several minutes until things settle down long enough to close the program. My system can't handle it but maybe others can. For me, not worth the 9-10 GB of space, but had to try it. John 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mánibranðr Studios Posted January 12, 2020 Share Posted January 12, 2020 The icons in that website is a bit familiar. Is this the return of Sonex? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patrick Derbidge Posted January 12, 2020 Share Posted January 12, 2020 First off, thanks for sharing. Regarding the memory and CPU usage I didn't notice any issues loading the library. I also have 64GB of ram and a library like this where it's morphing between samples is probably more memory intensive so you'd probably want at least 16GB of ram. It loads waaay faster than my 8dio Adagio (the new one) and Intimate Strings libraries. It is for the full version of Kontakt and since I own KU12 ultimate that is not an issue for me. It is a more ambient sound focused library which is why many have commented on it sounding the same from the video but for the purpose of having different flavors of those ambient and cinematic evolving sounds this free version is really good. I used to be the camp that these kinds of textures all sounded the same until I started experimenting with them in my tracks and now I can see the need for as many flavors of these sounds just as much as needing different flavored Guitar Sims. I find that these sounds work really great for layering in any genre (rock, pop, cinematic, etc...) so it's hard to get too much of these kinds of sounds to add some background texture. I haven't played with it too much yet but I'm impressed at what it is being a freebie. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZincT Posted January 12, 2020 Share Posted January 12, 2020 (edited) Thanks Larry for the original post and John K for the reminder. It seems to run fine on my PC (I7-3770 with 16Gb RAM). With the demo version loaded in Kontakt (in CbB) and very little else running 4.6Gb of my 16Gb of RAM is in use. CPU utilisation is between 15 to 20% across all cores (in Task Manager, CbB showed much lower) but I did notice the odd spike on individual cores. That said it ran without any glitches, freezes or crashes for me. It's worth noting that the snapshots are installed separately... Quote INSTALLATION 1. Place folder «Muze Aquamarine Demo» anywhere on your hard drive. 2. Unzip file «Snapshots.zip» with snapshots. 3. Move unzipped folder «05 PD - Maldives» on Mac OS to: /Users/"username"/Documents/Native Instruments/User Content/Kontakt/ on Windows to: C:\Users\<your username>\Documents\Native Instruments\User Content\Kontakt\ This creates a list of 150 snapshots although they are unimaginatively named Maldives 1 to 150. This gives a lot more variety in sound although, as expected, they are still in the same genre of evolving cinematic sounds. Overall I really like the demo but I already have so many similar libraries that the full library is not worth it for me but YMMV so try the demo if you are wondering. UPDATE: I just closed everything and ran the test again and this time the RAM usage jumped straight to 12.7Gb! Removing Kontakt in CbB caused the RAM usage to drop to 3.4Gb. Not sure what's happening there as it was definitely 4.6Gb the first time I ran it and that may explain the results John K got with 8Gb of RAM. So It looks like there may be an issue with how it allocates RAM. UPDATE2: I just ran a few memory usage tests starting with Windows 10 running and then adding CbB, Kontakt, Muze Demo and then snapshots. Win 10 -- 3.6Gb RAM used CbB blank project -- 3.8Gb CbB Kontakt 6 added to a track -- 4.1Gb Muze demo added to Kontakt -- 4.4GbSelect snapshot in Muze demo -- 12.8Gb!! Edited January 12, 2020 by ZincT 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 13, 2020 Author Share Posted January 13, 2020 Revisiting this for a minute. Indirectly off topic, but have used Iobit's Advanced Windows Care free version for a long time. About as good as any of the generic windows tuneup programs available. Can review it here: https://www.iobit.com/ The freebie tries to download other stuff and there are the annoying popups to fire up the plastic card, but if you watch the installation carefully, worth getting. Focus here is on the "Speed Up" panel. Four or so sub menus to increase efficiency, critical one aimed at gaming mode to turn off wasted processes and free up needed resources. Turning on the machomatic default, I was able to get another 5 minutes out of Aquamarine before the terminal crash. Got to say that there are a lot of excellent possibilities, especially when digging into the deeper menus. Got to reverse course and say IMHO that it is worth the download and disc space if you have the power to use it. According to Zinc's good benchmarks, if you got 16 GB RAM, you should be able to handle Aquamarine. Another observation is that if you purge all samples (Kontakt tab) before loading the next preset, less likely that you will deplete all your RAM. If you are a peon like me with 8 GB in the arsenal, don't bother. More grief than it's worth. John 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now