Muze: Xylophone Kontak Instrument (free instead of $99 at Audio Plugin Deals)

[MusicMan]

Muze: Xylophone Kontak Instrument (free instead of $99 at Audio Plugin Deals)

https://audioplugin.deals/free-audio-production-plugins/

[marcL]

7.61 GB for a Xylophone? Is that free? 😆

[MusicMan]

6 minutes ago, marled said:

7.61 GB for a Xylophone? Is that free? 😆

It's not uncommon for a Kontakt library to be that size, (or larger!) but I was surprised to see that as well 🤣 Haha..

[TracingArcs]

Not for Muze libraries it isn't 🙄 (see many previous discussion here and elsewhere ad nausem regarding Muze)

[bitflipper]

That comes out to an average of 1.2 MB per sample, which may seem high for a 4-octave  instrument without a lot of articulations. Most of my piano libraries are smaller than that, but then pianos (usually) don't have the option of banging them with different kinds of hammers. Plus this library has 45 other sound sources beyond the xylophone. So yeh, the size is probably justified.

 

 

[Stefan Lang]

Out of curiosity I downloaded a classical Bass library some years ago. I think it was Pizz only. In Kontakt I looked at the samples...they had a length of 14 seconds or so... That's why the library size was so huge. So, maybe expect similar magic on the xylophone.

[kitekrazy]

This is one of those that are not good at making sample libraries.  

[bitflipper]

I downloaded this library - 'cause why not - and gave it a test drive.

Yikes. Not only is it big, the .nki loads damn near everything by default. 6.11 GB loaded, took several minutes. At first I couldn't figure out why only one mic position (there are 6) was working, then noticed in the Kontakt header that samples were still loading. I had already composed a test melody in less time than it took to fully load.

Looks like I'd been overly generous before, assuming there must be many velocity layers. Wrong, most groups have only 1 layer. I'd also been overly generous in assuming there was no pitch stretching. Again, wrong. Most samples are stretched over 5 notes. I'd been overly optimistic in assuming there'd be multiple mallet types. There aren't. 

But what about those 45 audio sources that can be blended in? To be honest, I still haven't figured those out. Every one I've tried added an atonal layer that was not pleasing. 

I'll give it another hour to prove itself, then I'm reclaiming 7.61 GB of disk space back.

[Fleer]

Thanks for being the one to try it

[PavlovsCat]

I downloaded and tried it so you won't have to, fully realizing that this developer is probably the most loathed developer I've seen at this forum, VI Control and KVR, regularly accused of pirating other developers' libraries and producing low quality libraries.

As  bitflipper shared above, this is NOT a sophisticated, detailed sample library; it's one patch that reminds me of a patch you might find on a 1990s synth workstation or a SoundFont library. Is it worth  7.61 GB for a single patch? I'd say absolutely not. There are much better xylophone freebies out there. I'll start with sharing this free wooden xylophone from Splash Sounds. It includes both mallets and sticks patches. 

https://www.splashsound.org/woodenxylophone.html

Edited August 23, 2022 by PavlovsCat