I was making no accusations Magnus, just pointing out this exercise could be construed as such.
I would advise that if you want to take your rig up a level, get some proper high end kit to add to your existing equipment. Have a look at :
http://www.sintefex.com/?targ=products& ... REPLICATOR
and :
http://www.eventide.com/profaud/orvillebro.htm
I don't see how you are going to take your gear up a level by getting an RME.
peace
Is SFP/Creaware still a competitive platform ?? Feedback wan
I'am more sensitive to diversity than quality ...
It's becoming interesting lately ...
With Mod III, I've some wicked and crazy things going that overshadow Reaktor 4, despite it's lower sound quality R4 gives access to other realms so I use it for things hard to obtain elsewhere ( Weedwacker, Carbon ensembles ... etc )
I'am playing with Absynth 2 now !!
68 breakpoints envelopes for ( nearly ) everybody, microtuning editor and hopefully soon import of microtuning scales + of course many other things ...
Of course I won't use it for " squares and saws "
In short I use SFP synths for good sounds but for variety and sick control and flexibility, I use my graphic EG native beasts + wild Z3ta+ and so on ...
But those SFP synths begin to really surprise me in this department ( Vectron, Mod III, Solaris, Python Pro )
It's becoming interesting lately ...
With Mod III, I've some wicked and crazy things going that overshadow Reaktor 4, despite it's lower sound quality R4 gives access to other realms so I use it for things hard to obtain elsewhere ( Weedwacker, Carbon ensembles ... etc )
I'am playing with Absynth 2 now !!
68 breakpoints envelopes for ( nearly ) everybody, microtuning editor and hopefully soon import of microtuning scales + of course many other things ...
Of course I won't use it for " squares and saws "
In short I use SFP synths for good sounds but for variety and sick control and flexibility, I use my graphic EG native beasts + wild Z3ta+ and so on ...
But those SFP synths begin to really surprise me in this department ( Vectron, Mod III, Solaris, Python Pro )
I agree with Magnus that the CW samplers are way past their prime. In fact I regard them as extremely user-unfriendly, slow, and tedious. Kontakt, for all its bugs and problems, is orders of magnitude superior to anything in the STS range.
But synths are a way different matter. Devices which the VSTi crowd pay US$100 for you can easily find better on this platform for free. ( Of course that means you already need to have bought into SFP with a card though ... )
I do use Z3ta+ and Absynth and a couple of others, but mainly because I like to be able to do a simple "bounce" of audio when I'm doing quick web-based pieces when the quality is usually only 32K anyway !
But for anything that requires real fidelity I always try to use the SFP synths. Absynth, which I use quite a bit, is a unique device. It gets some incredible textures and there's no other synth quite like it on any platform, or other native devices.
But it's aliasing can be almost laughable - it's just shockingly bad. Of course you must just need to know whan and how to use it.
Reaktor is a favourite topic of mine. My old studio friend had 2.3, and I've played around a lot with the demo versions.
To be frank I really wanted to buy it. Money was not an issue. I liked the specs. I liked its sequencer controls and interesting modules which Mod-II (or even Mod-III) lacked.
But the sound is really poor. Not just average. Bad. Really bad.
Sure, you can get some good textures and loop-mangling effects going, and it'll sound OK. But then try to integrate it with some SFP sounds and the Reaktor sounds simply wither. To my ears (please note that phrase!) Reaktor is thin and weak.
I just couldn't buy it. I wanted to because of the features. But I couldn't because of the sound. With Reaktor 4 there is also the question of CPU usage (high) and the number of bugs (very high). These are also important issues.
I've also tried Tassman - I was reviewing it. I always try to say something nice in reviews because it is too easy just to slag something off.
But I couldn't find anything nice to say about it other than "it gets good wooden block and gong sounds". This wasn't enough for a decent review so instead of slagging it off I returned it to the distributor.
The Mod II/III system does have weaknesses - everything does. I have long complained about the very fiddly and poorly-designed sequencer modules - they are several years behind the game. It also lacks some of the more extreme mangling and chopping modules you'll find elsewhere, but the sound is vastly superior.
And that's what keeps me coming back to the SFP synths. Apart from the specialised sounds of Absynth, and the convenience of low-fi fast-masters with VSTi, I always know that for the best result I need to use the rich and deep sounds from my SFP synths.
One final example. The free "Kick-Me" device from Red_Muze would make jaws drop if it landed as a free VSTi. But it won't. You check out the VSTi that come close and the comparison is a joke: Fruity's DrumSynth or Kick, Drumatic V1 & 2, various SynthEdit devices, Linplug's Element P
Some of the VSTi devices have the specs, but they just dont have the sound. When they do I'll buy them !
But synths are a way different matter. Devices which the VSTi crowd pay US$100 for you can easily find better on this platform for free. ( Of course that means you already need to have bought into SFP with a card though ... )
I do use Z3ta+ and Absynth and a couple of others, but mainly because I like to be able to do a simple "bounce" of audio when I'm doing quick web-based pieces when the quality is usually only 32K anyway !
But for anything that requires real fidelity I always try to use the SFP synths. Absynth, which I use quite a bit, is a unique device. It gets some incredible textures and there's no other synth quite like it on any platform, or other native devices.
But it's aliasing can be almost laughable - it's just shockingly bad. Of course you must just need to know whan and how to use it.
Reaktor is a favourite topic of mine. My old studio friend had 2.3, and I've played around a lot with the demo versions.
To be frank I really wanted to buy it. Money was not an issue. I liked the specs. I liked its sequencer controls and interesting modules which Mod-II (or even Mod-III) lacked.
But the sound is really poor. Not just average. Bad. Really bad.
Sure, you can get some good textures and loop-mangling effects going, and it'll sound OK. But then try to integrate it with some SFP sounds and the Reaktor sounds simply wither. To my ears (please note that phrase!) Reaktor is thin and weak.
I just couldn't buy it. I wanted to because of the features. But I couldn't because of the sound. With Reaktor 4 there is also the question of CPU usage (high) and the number of bugs (very high). These are also important issues.
I've also tried Tassman - I was reviewing it. I always try to say something nice in reviews because it is too easy just to slag something off.
But I couldn't find anything nice to say about it other than "it gets good wooden block and gong sounds". This wasn't enough for a decent review so instead of slagging it off I returned it to the distributor.
The Mod II/III system does have weaknesses - everything does. I have long complained about the very fiddly and poorly-designed sequencer modules - they are several years behind the game. It also lacks some of the more extreme mangling and chopping modules you'll find elsewhere, but the sound is vastly superior.
And that's what keeps me coming back to the SFP synths. Apart from the specialised sounds of Absynth, and the convenience of low-fi fast-masters with VSTi, I always know that for the best result I need to use the rich and deep sounds from my SFP synths.
One final example. The free "Kick-Me" device from Red_Muze would make jaws drop if it landed as a free VSTi. But it won't. You check out the VSTi that come close and the comparison is a joke: Fruity's DrumSynth or Kick, Drumatic V1 & 2, various SynthEdit devices, Linplug's Element P
Some of the VSTi devices have the specs, but they just dont have the sound. When they do I'll buy them !
Thank you Decimator & Spirit for some useful feedback !
Regarding Absynth & Reaktor, I never bought the products until the latest releases (Absynth 2 & Reaktor 4), which I simply couldn't resist. Absynth is truly wicked if you're after textures & evolving soundscapes. Reaktor is real evil in terms of all possible customizations.
One thing that I've heard is that in these latest two releases, NI rewrote the complete audio-engine for the products. It would be interesting to know if those who did not like the "NI sound" was referring to the new versions or the previous generation?
I will try to dive as deep as I can into ModV2 tonight and tomorrow. I'll check for a demo copy of the v3 upgrade as well.
/Magnus
Regarding Absynth & Reaktor, I never bought the products until the latest releases (Absynth 2 & Reaktor 4), which I simply couldn't resist. Absynth is truly wicked if you're after textures & evolving soundscapes. Reaktor is real evil in terms of all possible customizations.
One thing that I've heard is that in these latest two releases, NI rewrote the complete audio-engine for the products. It would be interesting to know if those who did not like the "NI sound" was referring to the new versions or the previous generation?
I will try to dive as deep as I can into ModV2 tonight and tomorrow. I'll check for a demo copy of the v3 upgrade as well.
/Magnus
I love mega possiblities synths ( Absynth, Rhino, FM7, Zeta+ ) since they can generate thousands of various presets and I'am always looking for new soundscapes ...
And since I'am deeply entrenched in industrial : lofi, aliasing, glitches, low quality sounds are not rejected at all ! ( that explains !! )
As a side effect, usually 90 % of the presets don't fit the bill and I have to dig in ...
That depends what you're on but sometimes it needs real efforts to make a synth or FX yours
The Mod 2, I know I had to work hard to create some mayhems !
But Mod III and soon Flexor modules ... hmmm
Concerning R4, I swim in confusion since initially it should've been the FM7 oscillators, then Pro53 and I heard it's still the old oscillators in R4 ; whatever I didn't noticed a significant difference ...
However I didn't use it a lot due to the massive crashes I had in 4.0 and 4.01 ; will try 4.02 hoping not to have blue screens in Win XP ...
I love both sides of the border but the Sound is definitely on the SFP side.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: decimator on 2003-07-26 13:05 ]</font>
just to wade in again,as far as gladiator goes,it's not just mr.zimmer who has cw cards in that production,it's also the production company.(also skywalker ranch)
as i said,use what works for you.the sfp platform works.if you like it,it will almost always work even if it's in an old,obsolete computer.whether or not it's useful depends not on what new things are out,but how helpful it is to you,what your budget is and what you want to accomplish.there is no "best".
also,the reason i compared this rpoduct to various vintage pieces was just to show that just because a newer,slicker product may come out(reactor?),doesn't make the older product useless.
as i said,use what works for you.the sfp platform works.if you like it,it will almost always work even if it's in an old,obsolete computer.whether or not it's useful depends not on what new things are out,but how helpful it is to you,what your budget is and what you want to accomplish.there is no "best".
also,the reason i compared this rpoduct to various vintage pieces was just to show that just because a newer,slicker product may come out(reactor?),doesn't make the older product useless.
Cool Gary ! Do you have any links where I can read more about it ?? It's nice to see how others have set up their stuff, so one can dream for a little while...
I understand your comparison to the vintage gear, and I think we just talked "passed" each other. What I meant was that the I/O part of the boards - something that is purely technical and not really related to music as an art - needs to follow the development like all digital gear do, in order to match the needs of what we as users try to squeeze through. Something completely different that the musical capabilities of the platform and its instruments etc.
Anyway, I had a few minutes with ModV2 right now, and I'm both impressed but also annoyed:
1) Sounds - very nice (the things I've heard so far)
2) GUI performance - I must say it sucks... Even on my 2.8 Ghz P4, the SFP GUI (especially while using Modular) stumbles around in extreme pain it seems
I feel a rewrite of the GUI is needed to make it feel as fresh as other applications we are used to.
3) Stability - I though SFP 3.1c where supposed to be quite stable, but it only took me maybe 5 minutes clikcing around in Modular V2 to get a killer Blue Screen...
Is it just my system who needs a reinstall or do others suffer from this ?
/Magnus
I understand your comparison to the vintage gear, and I think we just talked "passed" each other. What I meant was that the I/O part of the boards - something that is purely technical and not really related to music as an art - needs to follow the development like all digital gear do, in order to match the needs of what we as users try to squeeze through. Something completely different that the musical capabilities of the platform and its instruments etc.
Anyway, I had a few minutes with ModV2 right now, and I'm both impressed but also annoyed:
1) Sounds - very nice (the things I've heard so far)
2) GUI performance - I must say it sucks... Even on my 2.8 Ghz P4, the SFP GUI (especially while using Modular) stumbles around in extreme pain it seems
I feel a rewrite of the GUI is needed to make it feel as fresh as other applications we are used to.3) Stability - I though SFP 3.1c where supposed to be quite stable, but it only took me maybe 5 minutes clikcing around in Modular V2 to get a killer Blue Screen...
Is it just my system who needs a reinstall or do others suffer from this ?
/Magnus
I don't get the blue screen much since I upgraded to XP, but I agree with you on the GUI issue.
The explanation is, that the graphics are being calculated by the CPU and not your graphicscard! Trouble is that (I have been told) that if you were to rewrite and optimize the GUI, you would have to rewrite all the plugins too. This is propably why CW havn't looked into this issue yet, but I feel that they should address this "problem" soon, cause it's just plain annoying to work with a slow GUI allthough I have all most gotten used to it
If you want to know more about the GUI on the SFP-platform, the do a search here on Planetz, it has been addressed before - otherwise Astroman seems to be the guy with the good explanation on this topic .... (He was the one that told me )
Interesting topicssss by the way.
Cheers!
Thomas
The explanation is, that the graphics are being calculated by the CPU and not your graphicscard! Trouble is that (I have been told) that if you were to rewrite and optimize the GUI, you would have to rewrite all the plugins too. This is propably why CW havn't looked into this issue yet, but I feel that they should address this "problem" soon, cause it's just plain annoying to work with a slow GUI allthough I have all most gotten used to it
If you want to know more about the GUI on the SFP-platform, the do a search here on Planetz, it has been addressed before - otherwise Astroman seems to be the guy with the good explanation on this topic .... (He was the one that told me
)Interesting topicssss by the way.
Cheers!
Thomas
In my productions, the synth quality is most important. Whenever I try a host based or hardware synth the sound sticks out like a sore thumb(in a bad way). I'm not all software though. My Motif rack sounds pretty incredible but it's obviosly a completely different animal. When it comes to NI stuff, I think that the only synth thats worth mention is Absynth. As far as synths as a whole I think it's one of the forward thinking out there. The difference I think most of us are hearing in CW is DSP. All that our lovely Sharcs are doing are SFP related actions. We all know he burdens our CPUs face. Processing all of these extra actions make HB synth processing inacurate. In turn the sound suffers. I would rather use the BlueSynth than go native(which I do frequently). One thing creamware lacks is HD audio. I do think it's probably a couple of years away from really mattering though.
Well, I probably know a little bit about the GUI issues because in the early 90s of the last century (how pathetic ) I had the exactly same problem as CW:
I needed a GUI lib with true cross platform capabilities between Mac and Windows and I spent a lot of time checking the (not so numerous though) packages available.
In those years almost everything was CPU based, graphic accelerators were extremely expensive.
CW choose a product based on some Open Source project and that stuff isn't the fastest usually, but it was probably the only choice left for them.
What many users don't see is the close relation between control information and it's graphic representation. The SFP routing window is like a graphic programming language and as such very closely related to the actual data the devices process. In pre SFP versions I had some errors occasionally where parts of this information got visible - there's a hell going on under the hood.
The biggest problem was certainly the fundamental difference between the 'classical' Mac graphics and the M$ Windows system, but since Apple cancelled support in favour of OSX this is past now. The programming gets certainly much more similiar now that they use the same graphic chipsets in both worlds.
On the other hand I use SFP on a Celeron 1 GHZ and don't find it too slow in Modular, but that may be related to the speed of my grey matter
Magnus, if you are after endless textures you should have a close look on the Vectron -not the player. I dunno how many stages you can draw in it's envelopes and those don't look as funky as Absynth's, which wins clearly on the UI side, but in versatility and sound it seems rather pale (imho).
I've mentioned it numerous times that one can only compare the pure sound without FX because what's not present in the sound can't be added later.
Something may be emphasized or filtered, but without substance it simply doesn't get there. And in SFP you have almost endless possibilities for FXs, you could even use a Modular just for that purpose
cheers, Tom
) I had the exactly same problem as CW:I needed a GUI lib with true cross platform capabilities between Mac and Windows and I spent a lot of time checking the (not so numerous though) packages available.
In those years almost everything was CPU based, graphic accelerators were extremely expensive.
CW choose a product based on some Open Source project and that stuff isn't the fastest usually, but it was probably the only choice left for them.
What many users don't see is the close relation between control information and it's graphic representation. The SFP routing window is like a graphic programming language and as such very closely related to the actual data the devices process. In pre SFP versions I had some errors occasionally where parts of this information got visible - there's a hell going on under the hood.
The biggest problem was certainly the fundamental difference between the 'classical' Mac graphics and the M$ Windows system, but since Apple cancelled support in favour of OSX this is past now. The programming gets certainly much more similiar now that they use the same graphic chipsets in both worlds.
On the other hand I use SFP on a Celeron 1 GHZ and don't find it too slow in Modular, but that may be related to the speed of my grey matter
Magnus, if you are after endless textures you should have a close look on the Vectron -not the player. I dunno how many stages you can draw in it's envelopes and those don't look as funky as Absynth's, which wins clearly on the UI side, but in versatility and sound it seems rather pale (imho).
I've mentioned it numerous times that one can only compare the pure sound without FX because what's not present in the sound can't be added later.
Something may be emphasized or filtered, but without substance it simply doesn't get there. And in SFP you have almost endless possibilities for FXs, you could even use a Modular just for that purpose
cheers, Tom
Concerning the sluggish GUI
I moved from a TNT2 I was dragging since many years to a Gforce4 + 64 MB, nearly the cheapest card I could find !
And now I have a decent behaviour but before it was a big pain, native apps had no problems though so I thought it was purely a SFP annoyance and see no need for a graphic card upgrade
Too bad about the blue screen, knock on wood, never had one with SFP 3.1c ...
I moved from a TNT2 I was dragging since many years to a Gforce4 + 64 MB, nearly the cheapest card I could find !
And now I have a decent behaviour but before it was a big pain, native apps had no problems though so I thought it was purely a SFP annoyance and see no need for a graphic card upgrade
Too bad about the blue screen, knock on wood, never had one with SFP 3.1c ...
Hmm, about GUI... wasn't there some setting in SFP (starting with v3.x) to have the "classic" gui rather than the new livebar & routing window ?
I'm not at my studio now, so can't check...
Maybe that would solve some of the lagging.
Thanks for the hint of Vectron Tom, I'll check it out.
BTW, with the risk of stepping on someones toes... Who the **** created the MP3-samples for gear like the Vectron ???!??!??!? They dont show off **** about the product, now do they ? Grrrr that makes me angry...
/Magnus
I'm not at my studio now, so can't check...
Maybe that would solve some of the lagging.
Thanks for the hint of Vectron Tom, I'll check it out.
BTW, with the risk of stepping on someones toes... Who the **** created the MP3-samples for gear like the Vectron ???!??!??!? They dont show off **** about the product, now do they ? Grrrr that makes me angry...
/Magnus
