IK Multimedia: Total Studio 3.5 MAX ($199.99 @ JRRShop | RRP $999.99)

[Cecelius2]

I was on the fence about this, and planned on waiting for TS4 to arrive, BUT then I saw that it allowed the use of Jampoints.  This brought my total down to $69.99.   I already had most of the products, but never had MixBox, Lurssen Mastering Console, ARC3 (already had Arc 2.5), Sampletron 2, and Modo Drums, plus Fame Studio Reverb and a few other T-Racks effects.  So this became a no brainer to get these for only $69.99.

Now comes the dilemma noted by others above about how to download and store such a large library.

Thanks to others here for posting this.   $69.99 was a great deal.

C2

Edited November 15, 2022 by Cecelius2

[abacab]

27 minutes ago, Cecelius2 said:

never had MixBox, Lurssen Mastering Console, ARC3 (already had Arc 2.5), Sampletron 2, and Modo Drums, plus Fame Studio Reverb and a few other T-Racks effects. 

I would say that you got a good deal! The only things that I am lacking now are Sampletron and Fame Studio, so I'm willing to wait until TS adds the upgrades to the MODOs, and maybe some other newly released things.

[abacab]

On 11/13/2022 at 2:03 PM, Reid Rosefelt said:

I did think about making a video, but it was a big PITA to do.  I also didn't mention that there was one library I wanted to put in that I couldn't.  I think it was Orchestral Percussion.    As I couldn't make it work completely, I didn't feel comfortable giving advice. 

Anyway, now I've forgotten exactly how I did it.  ?

But I'm happy to not have a hard drive filled up with stuff I'll never use.  I don't know about all of you, but I find IK installation so convoluted that I often end up with duplicate installations.  This took care of that. 

I suppose that if I get Total Studio 4, I mad have to go through the whole exercise again.

Well I reclaimed 34 GB of disk space by dumping the ST4 Synths and Acoustic Drums that I no longer needed!!!

You simply need to go to your [1] ST4 content path and delete the selected sample category [SampleTank 4\Samples\SampleTank 4], and then [2] delete the respective instrument category [D:\SampleTank 4\Instruments\SampleTank 4]. Then [3] "Rescan All" in ST4 settings, and it's gone! This clears the category from the instrument browser. If you only delete the samples, the instruments will still show in the browser, but your samples will be missing.

*Note: if you delete certain instrument categories that ST4 factory Multis are built on, many ST4 factory Multi parts will fail to load. In my case, deleting "Synths" killed most of the factory Multis, but not really a problem here because I rarely touched them.

Edited November 15, 2022 by abacab

[Reid Rosefelt]

2 hours ago, abacab said:

*Note: if you delete certain instrument categories that ST4 factory Multis are built on, many ST4 factory Multi parts will fail to load. In my case, deleting "Synths" killed most of the factory Multis, but not really a problem here because I rarely touched them.

Well done!  

I definitely got into multis and made it more complicated than I needed to.   I just wanted everything that was available to  click on to work. 

[Grem]

1 hour ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

everything that was available to  click on to work. 

Yep.

[abacab]

4 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Well done!  

I definitely got into multis and made it more complicated than I needed to.   I just wanted everything that was available to  click on to work. 

Well if they are Multis that you created, it shouldn't ever be a problem unless you deleted instruments that you used.

The factory multis are another story. I think it borders on ridiculous that so many of the ST4 factory Multis are dependent on the Synth sounds category, when there are so many other good instruments available.  The IK product manager must have said "build a showcase groove workstation".

[Craig N]

Just out of curiosity, Sampletank 4 has never been stable for me, and I know I'm meant to go via IK support but no other high quality software on my Pc requires extensive interactions with support to get working. 

Does anyone else find Sampletank to work flawlessly, or are crashes while browsing presets par for the course? 

I was demoing piano sounds yesterday and it crashed twice within 5 minutes. Bitwig handles it like a champ thankfully.

[abacab]

12 minutes ago, Craig N said:

Just out of curiosity, Sampletank 4 has never been stable for me, and I know I'm meant to go via IK support but no other high quality software on my Pc requires extensive interactions with support to get working. 

Does anyone else find Sampletank to work flawlessly, or are crashes while browsing presets par for the course? 

I was demoing piano sounds yesterday and it crashed twice within 5 minutes. Bitwig handles it like a champ thankfully.

Does it crash running standalone? ST4 is a very heavy resource user and eats CPU, RAM, and Disk throughput like nobody's business. Browsing/loading presets is going to stress all of those. But it really shouldn't crash when just browsing presets. IMO the software is stable now, so probably best to get with IK support to narrow it down.

I haven't had any crash issues since the initial product release 3 years ago. It was a CPU hog on the desktop PC I had at the time, and I've been running a seriously upgraded PC since then and it runs very smooth now.

Desktop PC: Core i5-9600K, 6-cores 3.7 GHz turbo to 4.6 GHz, 32 GB RAM, OS on 500GB M.2 SSD, samples on 2GB SATA internal drive. Audio on Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 with stable ASIO driver and Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU.

 

[Craig N]

37 minutes ago, abacab said:

Does it crash running standalone? ST4 is a very heavy resource user and eats CPU, RAM, and Disk throughput like nobody's business. Browsing/loading presets is going to stress all of those. But it really shouldn't crash when just browsing presets. IMO the software is stable now, so probably best to get with IK support to narrow it down.

I haven't had any crash issues since the initial product release 3 years ago. It was a CPU hog on the desktop PC I had at the time, and I've been running a seriously upgraded PC since then and it runs very smooth now.

Desktop PC: Core i5-9600K, 6-cores 3.7 GHz turbo to 4.6 GHz, 32 GB RAM, OS on 500GB M.2 SSD, samples on 2GB SATA internal drive. Audio on Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 with stable ASIO driver and Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU.

 

I haven't tried running it standalone recently, I'll check that out. It's while loading a new sound that it frequently crashes. 

[Bad Penguin]

If I "had" to, could I install this (how many GBs for full install?) on to a 1TB sdxc card, with ~200MB/s read speed?

Better off installing on a 14TB spinner (~140MB/s read)?

Painful ?

Edited December 3, 2022 by Bad Penguin

[TW5011]

Ideally IK would improve their installer to let you choose only what you want.  I get why they do it how they do, but it annoys so many people that it may not be worth it.  (i.e., it wouldn't surprise me if they lose sales because of it.)

In the meantime, I wrote a script that keeps only what I own from T-Racks (which is just 4 items) and deletes the rest.  I have to run it after an update, but it takes just a second to run.  I'd be glad to share it if anyone is interested.  It would need modifications to work for SampleTank and the other instruments, but it could be done.  The scripting is actually really easy (it's a DOS script, basically), but you just need to know the paths of what to delete.

[abacab]

4 hours ago, Bad Penguin said:

If I "had" to, could I install this (how many GBs for full install?) on to a 1TB sdxc card, with ~200MB/s read speed?

Better off installing on a 14TB spinner (~140MB/s read)?

Painful ?

I've got 322GB of IK content installed here on my SATA SSD Data drive. Plus have another 4GB for IK program files on my M.2 Windows Boot SSD. And the plugin .dll/.vst3 files are scattered across across a couple of plugin folders, but the individual plugin files are not very large.

[Jason Neudorf]

Gah. Spent yesterday installing, decrapifying,  reinstalling Total Studio 3.5, including Syntronik, Miroslav, and SampleTank Max.  459GB of stuff.  But I think I've figured things out.  The downloader grabs a bunch of zip files, and puts them in a directory per product. Which is bad if you had sampletank, then got sampletank max during the sale, because all of the zip files from "sampletank" are now redundant. But still take up umpty gigabytes.  You can delete them (or I suppose move them to the sampletank MAX folder). The IK product manager can download, unzip and re-install them for you only WHILE THEY'RE NOT EXPIRED (grrrrrrrr).  The right-click "install to" seems to work ONCE, but if you've ever used it before, seems to default to the "C" drive. Or something. There's some bug. I hate it.

If you unzip any of the .zip files, they will produce a single directory like "Sampletank 3 Sound Content" or "SampleTank 4 Sound Content", with sub-directories for instruments, library info, library resources, and samples.  The installer doesn't seem to do much more than move the files around.

To re-install syntronik, you can create some directory "Foo" (or whatever), unzip all the SYN_*.zip files (to put all the SampleTank 3 sound content in one place), unzip all the SYN2_*zip files (to put all the Syntronik 2 Sound Content in once place), then add "Foo/SampleTank 3 Sound Content" and "Foo/Syntronik 2 Sound Content" to the directory path in the SampleTank 4, Syntronik, and Syntronik 2 programs.  There'll be a 5 megabyte copy of "Install Syntronik 2 Sound Content.exe" in every single zip (gag), which you can ignore/overwrite. All of the *Update.zip files contain data which overwrite files, so they need to be installed last.

I eventually did things on the BASH command line of WSL. Something like:

for i in f:/ik_download/Syntronik\ 2?[A-Z]*/*zip; do unzip "$i"; done

Arturia V Collection is looking better and better in comparison.

DOH, TLDR: In retrospect, perhaps I could manually select a group of zips, right-click and select "extract all"? Documenting my stupidity to maybe save someone some time.

[abacab]

The IK download user experience can be challenging for those that may already own SampleTank, Miroslav, or Syntronik and have sample libraries installed. Probably easier to uninstall and start from a clean slate! I got started with this IK install mess a few years ago prior to the release of the IK Product Manager, when it was all a manual download, unzip, & install process for everything.

In the end, I have all IK sample-based content available from my SampleTank 4 browser, with all IK "content" installed in these 3 paths: "D:\SampleTank 3", "D:\SampleTank 4", and "D:\Syntronik 2".

SampleTank 4 can handle these multiple paths, so all of the SampleTank content is available from the ST4 browser.  Miroslav and all of the other legacy ST3 sound content expansions are located in the SampleTank 3 path.

For Syntronik, I have all Syntronik content installed in the Syntronik 2 path.

In the process I have culled all duplicate files/folders, and as far as I can tell, it's all working. But this has been a work in progress for some time to get it organized and "decrapified".

[Jason Neudorf]

My first thought WAS to delete everything and start over. Which I did. Then I went "oops", because the new Syntronik MAX content is *not* part of TS3.5. I bought it during the group buy just a little more than 180 days ago. And my downloads have expired.  I needed to reinstall it separately after refreshing my content. Luckily, I hadn't deleted my download directory. And I do grant that the usual experience is much better than even a couple years ago, before the product manager. It's just reinstall that sucks.

120GB in 52 zip files for Syntronik CATO, Syntronik GS-V, Syntronik KW-8000, Syntronik M-12, Syntronik Megawave, Syntronik Obie One, Syntronik OSC-V, Syntronik Pro-VS, Syntronik Sorcerer, Syntronik Syner-V, Syntronik Triptych. (There's also the Resonator, Synth-X and the new Mojo stuff which I don't own).

And of course, it wasn't plain which stuff in the download folder could be moved or deleted. But now that I look I can move a lot of zip files into the SampleTank MAX download folder (ie, Alan Parson Piano, Spaceport 77), in case I need to reinstall.

[fret_man]

Tell me again, why do I need to keep Sampletank 3 around? I don't need it for legacy projects. 

[Craig N]

33 minutes ago, fret_man said:

Tell me again, why do I need to keep Sampletank 3 around? I don't need it for legacy projects. 

Just remove the folder for it from your Sampletank configuration so sampletank can't find the content and rename the folder so any hidden references in other plugins (eg Syntronik maybe) can't find it, and see how you go. 

If after a couple of months you haven't missed it, then it is probably safe to delete. But maybe best to backup first rather than pay to download again later.

[abacab]

1 hour ago, fret_man said:

Tell me again, why do I need to keep Sampletank 3 around? I don't need it for legacy projects. 

I ditched the SampleTank 3 app because it was redundant.

But you DO want to keep any original ST3 content intact so that SampleTank 4 can load it.

[fret_man]

31 minutes ago, abacab said:

I ditched the SampleTank 3 app because it was redundant.

But you DO want to keep any original ST3 content intact so that SampleTank 4 can load it.

Thanks, it was the content I was hoping to delete (but I'm keeping a copy of the downloads) in order to reclaim space for samples I think I'd actually use.

[abacab]

10 hours ago, fret_man said:

Thanks, it was the content I was hoping to delete (but I'm keeping a copy of the downloads) in order to reclaim space for samples I think I'd actually use.

The thing with the SampleTank 3 content is that most of it was not duplicated with SampleTank 4 MAX, as it was not "upgraded" to ST4 libraries. The legacy content was just included along with the new ST4 instruments.

Delete what you wish, as long as you understand that ST3 is not redundant content, except for whatever you don't need.

If you delete sample folders, you will also need to delete the associated instrument folders, else they will continue to appear in the browser, but with "missing samples" if you try to load them.

Hope this helps!