IK Krazy Deals!

[Jason Neudorf]

I seem to have most of the new stuff in Sampletank 4 MAX v2 from a group buy a couple years ago, or from TS3.5. Not beat machine, bionic drums, extraterrestrial saxophone, or the mojo synthesis stuff.  There's probably enough new stuff to make it worth upgrading if you've been away for a couple years though.

Thoughts: the syntronik 2 devices have nice samples, but the SampleTank engine isn't hugely better than a rompler for playing them back ... think UVI, not Arturia. You get nice starting tones, but it is challenging to do anything creative to them ( at least more than putting a rompler through MixBox). Hopefully SampleTank5 will be somehow more intuitive and usable.  (insert shrug emoji). Also, rant, THE SYNTRONIK EDITING PANEL IS WAY TOO DARK (sorry for shouting).

Miroslav is huge, great, but dated.

People have quite nice things to say about Electromagnetik, Cinematik, Clavitube, and the Resonator.

My hope/suspicion is that Sample-Verse (or whatever they call the next sampletank) will expand on using spaces like IK is using in Pianoverse, so you can have banjos on Mars, or haunted Ukuleles in a decaying mansion, without downloading extra terabytes. Hopefully, we'll get a few easy macros like in Pianoverse, but also enough depth that we feel that we can deep-dive if we want to (we probably won't, but the option will make us feel good).

IK should probably also start working on an orchestrator; I assume presets like those in "The Orchestra" could be made, with substantial effort, within SampleTank, but I'm too lazy to do it myself.  I think there's some trickiness in how the arpeggios work.

 

[Heath Row]

3 hours ago, Jason Neudorf said:

Miroslav is huge, great, but dated.

'tis true, although a lot can be done to spruce things up with the use of external FX and such, and with surprisingly little effort. Plus for those of us whose area of 'expertise' may lay elsewhere, and may only be light users, the likes of this and UVI's offerings etc may be more than enough, and you can't argue with the price.  For those the price of the heavy weights may not seem justifiable all things considered.

I scored this ages ago for some ridiculous price, it gets occasional use, which was the intent when I purchased it, and no regrets.

[telecode 101]

5 hours ago, Jason Neudorf said:

..the SampleTank engine ..

I can probably chime in as I am a big ST user. So what I have so far discovered is, i like the fact that its a unified interface. Also if you use individual instances of ST with one instrument per instance, it uses separate cores of the CPU which seems quite handy for working with multiple tracks as i keeps resource usage low. Also, if you are mildly familiar with T-racks, the effects are really straight forward to navigate.  I have also found I seem to like the sampled syntronick synths better than arturias emulations They just seem to have more punch to them and stand out better in a mix -- to my ears anyways. My only beef with it is the dark GU. its sometimes hard to see small fonts. Maybe something IKM folks can address in future update.

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

Okay, after many years of leeching off of IK Multimedia's GENEROUS freebies (at least one of which, their Fairchild 670 emulation, took my mixing to a whole other level), I finally crowbar'd open my wallet for SampleTank 4 MAX.

With JamPoints that I "earned" by simply registering freebies over the years, the total outlay came to $50.

Right now I'm in the process of downloading the 680GB+ sample data. There's no way that will fit on any of my SSD's, so either I figure out how to be selective with what actually gets installed or I pop for yet another SSD to be able to use this powerhouse. I know that there will be instruments, most likely including the sampled grands, that I already have covered.

I've read on here about the Miroslav orchestra samples being kinda old, but the orchestral instruments I'm using now are based on even older libraries. One of the first things I plan on doing is replacing the instruments on one of my orchestral pieces with what I'm about to be getting with SampleTank. We'll see how it goes.

Kudos to those at IK for providing such value over the years. I've had my share of issues with the authorization and installation software, but that seems to have finally been smoothed out in the most recent builds.