PavlovsCat

I'd suggest that you spend time listening to the tone and character of the demos to make a decision that's right for you. We can all tell you about technical aspects and our subjective opinions, only you can decide if you love the sound of a certain sample library and the reality is, even when developers sample the same piano model, there are so many other factors, that they may sound and play very differently. One basic fact about Sampletekk pianos is that they don't include a bunch of patches or snapshots, like you get with the NI pianos. I wish they did. But they are good quality libraries and at this price, they're a great value.

Agreed. SampleTank pianos are nowhere near the same league as good KONTAKT piano libraries. Even the NI piano libraries that come with KOMPLETE Standard are far superior to the ones for SampleTank. NI's Noir, included with KOMPLETE Standard, is my go to acoustic grand piano and I own a good deal of piano libraries from various KONTAKT developers, but Noire is just gorgeous to my ears. It was actually made for NI by Galaxy Instruments, FTR.

I have Flow Motion and I agree that it's pretty good. As much as most of us -- including me -- are not fans of Waves practices (like WUP and their failed attempt to switch to full subscription overnight), Waves does have some very good to excellent plugins (I still love their Abbey Roads plugins). Their synths never received much attention, but this is still a cool little synth, IMO. I may even buy this edition of Beats just to stay one up on WUP. I'm sure the $8 USD or whatever the cost of Beats is, is worth it. Besides, Beats is a fun magazine and deserves our support. Funny, I used to buy it before the English version and would ask my wife -- who reads and speaks some German -- and a musician friend of mine who is from Germany, to translate stuff for me back before Google Translate was able to do a good job with non-HTML. Now that it's in English it's a lot more fun to get a copy and be able to read everything!

Cool! Sound design and creating your own programs/patches, is where I find SoundPaint excels. Except for Bazantar, I really haven't loved SoundPaint for acoustic instruments. It just doesn't do realistic simulations of acoustic instruments as well as KONTAKT, IMO. But I can alter sounds and do things with SoundPaint that I can't do with KONTAKT (maybe someone else can through scripting, but it's beyond my abilities). So there is definitely a place for SoundPaint among my creative tools. I wouldn't recommend it for realistic pianos, guitars or strings, but I would recommend it for sound design stuff and especially for Bazantar. If they could just create more instruments as good as Bazanatar, I'd happily get my credit card out.

I have at least a dozen music box libraries, mostly for KONTAKT -- a lot of them were free. This one is worth keeping. It has some nice some design patches.

Sounds really nice, but I have a bunch of very nice Rhodes. A number of developers have been giving away nice Rhodes libraries lately. So please, all of you KONTAKT sample developers, please start giving away really nice free Wurli or Valente sample libraries instead!

Yes!!! Yes!!! Yes!!! IK is announcing that they're sinking their $10USD fee to redownload libraries! Peter was successful! Hooray!!! I kid. I kid. I realize that's setting expectations way too high.

True disco related story [related tangent]... Remember the days when it was cool for rock fans to hate disco? I admit it -- while I was a huge rock, blues, singer/songwriter, R&B, jazz and classical music fan as a kid I also liked some disco music -- Chic, Donna Summer, Bee Gees, The Gap Band... But my childhood best friend was a HUGE anti-disco guy. He went to an infamous Chicago anti-disco rally when we were teenagers where they blew up disco records. So a couple of years ago, I put up a post up in Facebook about a hit song from a band one of my childhood drum teachers played with (I think it was a performance on "Soul Train") -- and it was a disco song. I commented how I really enjoyed the guitar playing on there. So, my old drum teacher, who earned a gold record with this band, comments about playing with the band and the guitarist from the song chimes in and gives some insights on the part based on my praise of the playing -- which I thought was pretty cool. My old friend Dave -- I assume not realizing that these guys were the musicians from the song I shared -- then posts, "Disco sucks!" Priceless. I guess the moral of the story is that my old friends can be kind of savage. But disco didn't suck. The best of it was actually pretty fun music, IMO.

This is a talented developer who's worked on KONTAKT libraries for a bunch of other developers like Impact Soundworks, Wavesfactory, etc. I wish he was still making KONTAKT libraries instead of moving to his own plugin. But, in my experience, he makes good quality libraries and is very nice to deal with.

Haha! I'm even worse than that. I've had years of piano lessons ages ago that I can't even remember and have a physical issue that ensures that I'll never play well again-- and I don''t. It still doesn't change the fact that this arpeggiator sounds incredibly stiff and over-quantized when used for piano parts. When I was listening to the video, I recalled my (piano teacher) mother telling her students when we played something really stiff, "Try that once more, with feeling (or emotion)." Feel is everything and on piano, when you use 100% quantization on a piano part, there's no feel at all in that and even non musicians can hear that doesn't sound like a real pianist played it. It sounds mechanical. You can get away with that for synth sounds, but not piano sounds. Know that when I post a critical opinion like that, I don't do it easily. It's easy to make positive, happy posts praising everything -- and I'm a people pleaser, so I enjoy that too. But I think we add more value to the community when he have balance and don't hold back the critical opinions, so I'm trying to push myself to not withhold the more critical posts, even though they're often not well received. Because I think that's often what's missing in most forums. Or when you do see negative posts, they come from people who tend to be very negative -- and that's definitely not me. The problem is, if we only shower praise on everything, well-balanced (non-negative) people are hesitant to post criticisms and people researching don't get balanced insights. @jngnz can be pretty brutal with his critiques, but he has the guts to share his honest opinions and I deeply respect that and his habit of sharing his opinions candidly have inspired me to be less hesitant to share opinions that aren't just praise. Lord knows, influencers aren't going to be honest, so we should be.

Honestly, from the video, the piano arpeggiated part, although it's incredibly simple -- it sounds like something a kid would play for their first piano lesson -- it sounds incredibly over-quantized, extremely mechanical. Hard pass. Surely the developer could have done a better job than that.

I bought Funkmasters probably a decade ago and I don't ever recall there being an SDX version of it.

While it doesn't look like this plugin was well-tested upfront -- which leaves room for improvement -- I am, nonetheless, impressed by the developer's responsiveness to reported issues. And he's consistently been very responsive in my experience. Yes, maybe he could have gotten this right in the first place, I can't really say, however, when he was made aware of a problem he was very quick to fix it and that kind of responsiveness is noteworthy and not something I take for granted. I have maybe a dozen or so of his plugins and bought them all super cheap and don't recall ever having any issues with any of them. But it's great to know that if any of his plugins do have issues, he's likely to be on top of it quickly. Here's to indie developers who work their tails off to provide the best software and service they can deliver.

I have Analog Lab Intro, which is very cool, but I never end up using it. Is anyone here a big fan of Analog Lab Intro that thinks it's an important part of your synth plugins that can make a case for the upgrade. I have been impressed with everything I have from Aturia. They clearly hold themselves to a very high standard.

That's my favorite quote of the day!

I've used the free planner (RP Pan?) and like it.

I just saw an ad for this EQ on sale and was wondering if anyone has an opinion on it? Sound on Sound and Music Tech have both given it excellent reviews. For only $34 USD, it is pretty interesting. Thoughts?

If you're trying not to spend money, this forum is a terrible place to visit. FTR, I'm not judging -- I'm in the same situation.

I hope you have the stamina to wait that one out. I'm sure it's as much as a week away.

I really like this developer. He's really creative. I own several of his libraries and all of them are very good.

Good point! I always use that!

It sounds great. Orchestra Tools has some really beautiful libraries, IMO. I picked up the cello in last week's sale and am looking forward to future sales. For those who don't own KONTAKT, Orchestra Tools has its own player that comes with their libraries.

And that, my friends, is a superb example of how to respectfully disagree with someone in a forum or IRL . Nothing but respect for you, @TheSteven.

I don't own AAS Strum, but it uses physical modeling and isn't going to fool anyone that it's a real guitar (I probably own 20 AAS synth packs, but that's not one of them). That said, I suspect that IK is going to introduce a physically modeled guitar library at some point, and based on MODO Bass, which I own, I bet it will be pretty good. The two Italian developers that do modeling that specialize in orchestral instruments, one is Sample Modeling, I forget the other's company name, are excellent at what they do and if they decide to do guitars, I bet they would do a very good job in the near future. I don't have the Melda library and it wasn't on my radar. Years ago I tried their piano library and didn't love it, so I didn't go the Melda sampler/samples route. I own IK's SampleTank 4 Max, but candidly, rarely use it. However, the recording quality of the individual samples from IK are always excellent. Their sampler format/libraries aren't as sophisticated as better KONTAKT or UVI libraries in terms of velocity layers, round robins or scripting,, but the individual samples are excellent. I do own an acoustic guitar library from SampleTank and it's pretty nice. The tone of the recorded samples is beautiful, IMO. Of course, it's not as sophisticated as Orange Tree Samples libraries, but I got it as a freebie with a purchase and it's nice. It doesn't sound fake like the Papen stuff. But I'm not aware of an IK recorded electric guitar strum library. Once again, all of this is just my personal opinion and others may have very different opinions.

Dissenting opinion from a long time virtual guitar user. I thought some of the demos sounded kind of okay and others sounded pretty bad. The recordings of guitar sounded badly recorded -- or the effects made it sound that way -- and some of the strumming sounded very unauthentic, even though it claimed to use recordings of a real guitar some of the strumming sounded very poor and clunky. I would suggest that if anyone is looking for sampled strumming, NI's Session Guitarist line is a far better choice and goes on sake for around $50 USD during NI'S major sales. If you're willing to put in the time, you can do any kind of strum you want with Orange Tree Samples Evolution libraries (disclosure: I've consulted to them and had a good deal of input on the initial Evolution line). Even though I'm not crazy about their design, UJAM's series is also far superior to this as is a strummer from Wavesfactory (I can't recall the name, but it may be strum) or Pettinhouse libraries. When I listened to some of the demos, the recording quality of the guitar reminded me of the first version of Music Lab's RealGuitar, which significantly improved the sample quality since then (this was two decades ago) and would also be a far superior alternative to this plugin, IMO. Anyhow, there are a good deal of superior alternatives to this. Not necessarily at the $17 USD price point, but candidly, I don't think what I've heard would make that worth it either. It's better to spend more to get something that actually sounds good.