Recording - August 2012 - 24

The Player’s The Thing
The main emphasis here is on a pretty simple idea: The customer pays for the sounds he or she wants, and with those sounds comes the software the customer needs to play the sounds; it’s a part of the package, with no extra fuss. We’ll spend the rest of this article skimming over a variety of products of this type that we’ve talked about in recent years, just so you can get a feel for what’s out there. Powers behind the throne I just mentioned the idea of a content provider working with a third-party developer to build a free player platform, so let’s start by talking about a couple of successful examples. You may never have heard of the French software developer Univers Sons, also called UVI (uvi.net), but you’ve heard of their products. The UVI Engine is the heart of plug-ins ranging from early Spectrasonics instruments to MOTU’s sample-based products like MachFive (latest version reviewed June 2012) and Ethno (reviewed March 2008). MusePlayer, the embedded sample player in the Peavey MuseBox reviewed in this issue, is a UVI product. UVI also has a freely downloadable sample playback engine called the UVI Workstation. It offers support not only for fairly basic sound libraries, but also has a scripting language that lets users access complex control of articulation and other useful sound tweaks. The UVI folks sell sound libraries based on the UVI Workstation, and also offer a nice starter collection of free sounds to help new users get a feel for how the UVI Workstation operates and hopefully entice them to purchase UVI libraries. The German firm Yellow Tools (yellow tools.com) isn’t very well known in the USA, but in Europe its Independence software sampler garners a lot of respect. There’s a free version of Independence that comes with a 2.5 GB sound library, but Yellow Tools’ software is at the heart of some products that are far better known—the sound libraries of Best Service (bestservice.de) like Desert Winds and Epic World (reviewed June 2012). The Best Service libraries are based on the very powerful ENGINE sample player that’s an outgrowth of Independence, and there are freebie versions of many of the Best Service products that you can try out in ENGINE for yourself. Look for the “free demo download” link on product pages for ENGINE-based
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libraries. The latest rev of ENGINE is available at bestservice.de/service.asp/downloads/en as a free download. And while we’re in Europe, let’s not forget the Italians! IK Multimedia (ikmultimedia.com) has a wide variety of software instruments such as SampleMoog and SampleTron (reviewed April 2008 and May 2009) that are based on the SampleTank engine but with a streamlined, player-friendly user interface. There’s even a free version of SampleTank you can play with. Play it our way An early example of a product that fully integrated the sounds and the player of those sounds was MTron, a virtual Mellotron from British firm GMedia (now GForce Software, gforcesoftware.com). The MTron samples came in a data block that could only be read by the player, and

Some of the most complicated and detailed sample libraries in the world come from Austrian firm Vienna Symphonic Library (vsl.co.at). These libraries have been much loved by orchestral arrangers and composers since their release; when VSL came out with Vienna Instruments, a completely proprietary and focused player engine, it hugely increased playability and transparency of the nuances in the sounds. Gary Eskow discussed the latest Vienna Instruments Pro advances in our September 2011 issue. And in the USA, one of the most talkedabout moves from a third-party solution to a proprietary format was carried out by the folks at EASTWEST (soundsonline.com), when a new generation of sound libraries and virtual instruments were released using the PLAY sample playback architecture. Like the other engines we’ve talked about, the PLAY engine can be customized with specialized ‘skins’ for particular products and has a growing set of user-friendly features that provide flexibility and ease of use. Most recently, we’ve looked at Quantum Leap Silk (August 2009), and PLAY has evolved and grown considerably since then. Synthogy (synthogy.com) has its own playback engine optimized for acoustic piano, and its line of Ivory virtual instruments (most recently reviewed in April 2011) benefits from this highly specialized engine. On the other side of the coin, SONiVOX (sonivoxmi.com) offers the DVI platform, a unified and consistent engine and interface for a huge variety of affordable virtual instruments from keyboards to drums, guitars, world instruments, and more. Bang a (virtual) drum A keyboard-based software sampler is not a good fit for drum playback. Instead, a much more successful paradigm is that of a virtual recording session: a very detailed set of samples with multiple mic positions and room ambience, fed into a virtual mixer for each drum in a kit, and combined with software that loads MIDI grooves and loops. In effect, the user acts as a virtual engineer and mixes various kit elements and miking perspectives to taste. Add-on packs let you customize both drum kit elements and grooves to follow the playing of particular players or the sound of famous session engineers. Many companies have come out with their own ideas and approaches to this paradigm, which was pioneered and championed by Toontrack (toontrack.com) with products such as Superior Drummer (see the Walking Tour in our July 2010 issue for a detailed look at the latest version). Newer offerings include BFD from FXpansion (fxpansion.com, most recently

which were organized in a way that made sense to the program. You could buy addon libraries in similar format; pointed to them, the player would simply add them to its list of presets. After this humble beginning, many companies have started providing mated sets of proprietary sound format data with specialized players. The principle behind MTron was expanded upon with the G:Sampler sample playback engine that is used in many GForce products today; it was first seen in Virtual String Machine (reviewed March 2009) and then in M-Tron Pro (reviewed December 2009). This engine offers some easy-to-use controls like envelopes and splits/layers, adds effects, and generally provides a simple and useful shell over the sound libraries. New libraries like those reviewed in June 2012 for M-Tron Pro can simply be added to the preset list, as before.

http://vsl.co.at http://www.bestservice.de/service.asp/downloads/en http://www.ikmultimedia.com http://www.soundsonline.com http://www.uvi.net http://www.gforcesoftware.com http://www.synthogy.com http://www.sonivoxmi.com http://www.yellowtools.com http://www.yellowtools.com http://www.bestservice.de http://www.toontrack.com http://www.fxpansion.com

Recording - August 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2012