Gigasampler/Nemesys Killer!!!

[llllll]

Steinberg VST HALion:
http://www.steinberg.net/infocenter/discoveries/products/halion.phtml?sid=04789935 (\"http://www.steinberg.net/infocenter/discoveries/products/halion.phtml?sid=04789935\")

Apparently, it does BOTH HD and RAM data streaming.

Just do the math, Nemesys:
1) Bad customer support.
2) No longer the only soft sampler with HD streaming.
3) Lots of system crashes and compatibility issues.
4) Slow, and minor updates.
5) Unefficient and ugly user interface.
6) And above all, low level output ...

Steinberg (or Emagic, who knows?) has an opportunity to grab a significant market share. Lets see if they make it a standalone app compatible not only with Cubase, maybe using Cakewalk DXi (a hard one).

About sample formats, there are translators to convert to other formats, there is a new version of one of these translators that does Giga to other formats (have to check the posting from the developer).

And I have seen some of Gigas libraries from EastWest available for the Emagic\'s EXS24 sampler.


[This message has been edited by llllll (edited 01-23-2001).]

[BOBBY T]

ALAS!!!!!!!!
Emagic is offering a similar solution!!!!!!!
http://www.emagic.de/english/namm2001/html/products/exs24vst.html (\"http://www.emagic.de/english/namm2001/html/products/exs24vst.html\")

With Emagic and Steinberg\'s consistent track record of quality products, these just may be the viable alternatives to bug-ridden GigaXXX...

I do not want to lose faith, but after 3 months of crashes, after shelling out a substantial investment for the product, the memory, hard drive(s), and audio hardware needed to operate Giga products with no success, not to mention valuable time, while unable to receive any usable solution(s) from Nemesys...

**sigh**

[This message has been edited by BOBBY T (edited 01-22-2001).]

[BOBBY T]

ALSO...

The URL below offers more information about Emagic\'s EXS24 Sampler (Soon offered in a VST 2.0 Plugin version as well)

Current fellow Logic Audio Gold/Platinum and EXS24 users should rejoice since the soon-to-be-released downloadable Version 4.7 (free)of Logic Audio will provide all of the new features (hard drive streaming, etc.)!!!!
http://www.emagic.de/english/namm2001/html/products/la47_exs24news.html (\"http://www.emagic.de/english/namm2001/html/products/la47_exs24news.html\")

[Saudade]

Well you excited GS rebels! http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/grin.gif

Though I read with curiosity these innovations, I feel they can\'t be elevated to \"killer\" status because they forgot the most important feature: the ability to import GS format libraries!!! With the number of GS format libraries sprouting out every now and then, who is ready to purchase a EX24 format library even if it is available? Besides, those early adopters will become lone rangers since it will be sometime before a user forum like this develops for their platform!

Just like Logic Audio stays ahead in the competition by offering compatibilty with VST plug-ins, these market challengers must offer the same compatibility to encourage existing GS users to make the switch early on.

There is no other way they can bite a significant chunk off from the GS market share and user base.

[Paul George Webb]

OK, I figured it out. Thanks, gigaDiga. The direct from disk streaming is only mentioned in the NAMM news announcements. They haven\'t put it in the regular product description pages because it hasn\'t been released yet. (They say it will be available in February.) It looks like it will only be available from within Logic Audio (at least initially.) I do my midi/digital audio recording and editing on a Mac TDM system, so Logic on a PC isn\'t really an option for me. I will continue to watch for new developments.

Paul

[Bill]

Emagic\'s web site is as dificult to read as Logic\'s interface! (at 1280x1024 anyway)

[This message has been edited by Bill (edited 01-23-2001).]

[Paul George Webb]

I checked out Emagic\'s website regarding the EXS24. Among its features is:
\"Sample memory only limited by computer RAM\"
In other words, it does not stream samples from the hard drive as the Gigasampler does. That means that to have a hope of loading the Gigapiano into the EXS24, your computer would have to have close to a gigabyte of ram; and that\'s just for the one instrument! I can load multiple instruments the size of the gigapiano into my gigasampler, and my computer only has 128 meg of ram.
Yes, there are problems with the gigasampler and with Nemesys\'s tech support. It\'s obvious from these forums that there are gigasampler users who can\'t get theirs work at all. I don\'t know what fraction of giga users they represent. There are those of use who have a working system, but have some problems (I have a Gigastudio 96, but can only get 64 voices, for no apparent reason.) One the other hand, I know someone who has a Gigastudio 160 and is getting 160 voices of polyphony.
I think that if someone can\'t get the giga to work at all, Nemesys should give him his money back. I also think they should offer a downloadable demo, so that people could make sure they can get it to work before they buy it.
Nevertheless, there is no way I am going to switch to the EXS24 and give up my gigapiano and gigaharp! I suggest that if you have the time for it, keep trying to get your giga to work - it\'s worth it.

Good luck!
Paul

[gigaDiga]

Sorry to be so quick off the mark Paul...

but you should check out the links provided, especially the second emagic one. It seems that, at last, Nemesys does have some serious competition as both of these plug-ins provide direct-from-disk sample access.

I personally don\'t care who I buy a decent working soft sampler solution from.... as long as it does what Nemesys always promised their Giga** products would. i.e. replace my, now sold, hardware sampler.

Both Steinberg and E-magic are not exactly one-man shows and they are bound to provide both an excellent upgrade path and an excellent customer support.

Of course, as a legitimate Gigastudio user, I am hoping (perhaps naively) that Nemesys will respond to this threat. Or perhaps Steinberg or E-magic should buy them out.

Whatever benefits the user.

gigaDiga

[Paul George Webb]

Am I missing something? My quote \"Sample memory only limited by computer RAM\" was copied and pasted directly from Emagic\'s website. I have been unable to find reference on that site to any version of the EXS24 streaming samples from the hard drive. If you have found something different, could you point out the specific page you found it on? I would be happy to see a product that competes with Gigasampler in this sense.

Thanks.
Paul

[gigaDiga]

\"Direct from Disc Streaming

The new Direct from Disc Streaming option allows samples to also be played directly from the hard drive. This means that the sample instrument size is only limited by the capability of the hard drive. An intelligent use of the cache permits a level of performance that was previously the preserve of RAM based computers - not only extremly short latency, but even Direct from
Disc Streaming for looped samples and samples in reverse mode.\"

[BOBBY T]

Paul and Bill,

The information you seek is attainable if you read both URL\'s supplied for Emagic.

After fully reading, you shall see that not only is \"direct from disk streaming\" offered as an option to ram-based samples, the EXS24 will be available in 3 \"flavors\":

Emagic Native
VST
TDM

Later, gentlemen...

[Paul George Webb]

elle,

I don\'t see what Nemesys could really have patented: the streaming of audio from a hard drive has been around a while and has been used in many different applications. All they did is find a way to make it work with a soft sampler. I can\'t imagine that Emagic or Steinberg have copied any to Nemesys\' programming code.

I think Gigasampler is about to face some very stiff competetion; and that\'s good news for all of us, at least in the long run.

Paul

[Bill]

To achieve low latency, real time sample streaming from disk GS has to bypass the OS and communicate with the hardware at a low level. That makes it sensitive to every possible hardware/software conflict.

Anyone else developing stream-from-disk sample players are going to face the same challenge. At this point, it’s all vaporware anyway.

I’d also note that a few years back, Seinberg’s reputation for stability was not so great…

[elle]

And Conexant, who\'s patented Endless Wave technology Nemesys exclusively licensed, is ....euh ...patented.

[Paul George Webb]

elle,
I see your point about the Endless Wave patent, I\'m just saying that there is no reason someone couldn\'t come up with a different way of doing the same thing. I am sure that any company with a stake in the sampler market is knocking its brains out trying to make direct-from-disk work, so I think it\'s only a matter of time. Also, are you sure the Nemesys licence is exclusive?

I also have to agree with Bill\'s point about vaporware. Well, I guess we\'ll just have to wait and see. I just glad that my Giga is working fairly well.

Paul

[BOBBY T]

Tell you what I\'ll do, Paul...

I already own Logic Audio Platinum and the EXS24 Soft/Sampler for PC. The version 4.7 upgrade (free to 4.x users, due to be released in February)will provide the \"direct-from-disk\" streaming feature, as well as all other new features.

As soon as it is posted on Emagic\'s website for download, I shall do so and provide an update.

Perhaps other Logic Audio/EXS24 users will do the same. Emagic has been rather timely with their announced software releases. Only their hardware releases fall short of announced dates.

I presently experience extremely tight timing with NO latency while running several instances of the EXS24 (768 MB of ram-Pentium 850), all of which provide 64 note polyphony.

With the announced disk-streaming, noteworthy on-disk sample categorizing and recall, as well as support of major sample libraries, I am rather excited at the upcoming release.

Emagic was smart to create a TDM and VST version of this sampler as well!!!!

[Paul George Webb]

Thanks, Bobby T.

I look forward to hearing from you, and anyone else, about this new upgrade.

Paul

[Kenn159]

Hi All
In the manual that comes with gigasampler[I never got a manual with giga studio]It goes into specifics about Endless wave hard disc steaming technology being exclusively patented by Nemesys in conjuction with Rockwell.
But like previous mention Im sure that sampler competetors are feverishly tring to come up with a way to compete with Nemesys and offer the same disc streaming capability to there samplers.

Personally in my own experiances I have not found giga sampler/giga studio to be any less reliable than other music apps like Cakewalk , the sequencer that I am currently running on same computer with giga studio.

Actually I think I get blue screens and glitches more often in cakewalk 9.3 that I do in giga studio .
Which leads me to believe that it\'s more of a operating system[ windows 98-2] problem ,than a problem with gigastudio.
Am believe me ive spend hours ironing out problems with software and hardware conflicts in my system , so thats all taken care of , I know thats not the problem.

Anyway competing sampler programs will still have to run on the shacky unstable windows 98 and will only be as stable as the OP system.
Unless they come out on windows 2000,but then again Nemesys will be coming out with giga studio in win 2000 too.

I guess time will tell how stable win 2000 will be for music apps .
I just want a op system that is as stable as my friend Mac G4-400 MHZ system .

He\'s running Protools on it and it never crashes .

[Paul George Webb]

Yep, Bobby T, you\'re right, I did finally find all the info.
And Bill, you\'re right, Emagic\'s website is very confusing.

The world of samplers is definitely going to get very interesting...

Paul

[elle]

This discussion which so far has not been very deep, touches the essence of GS\'s existence:

Is the Connexant idea/patent been cloned/worked-around by Cubase/Emagic or not?
If yes then this will defintely shake the GS community. Any light from Nemesys maybe?

[astrt4]

I really don\'t think that companies would have to steal techniques from Conexant and Nemesys in order to achieve a similar result. The question is where the bottleneck lies for streaming audio. Is it in the sustained transfer of numerous samples or is it in the access time? I really think it\'s the latter. I mean, I get over 30 voices just coming from my 32X CD-ROM drive, and the full 160 on a 5400 rpm, 11ms, 13GB HDD (not to mention using direct sound drivers). So why then is this fast enough for me to run with no noticeable delay? I think the answer is simply that GigaStudio is using RAM to cover the gap. And so if Emagic and Steinberg are unable to achieve the amazingly fast HDD access time that Nemesys has, they should be able to just increase the amount of each sample that is loaded into the RAM to make up for it.
Now that I think about it, it doesn\'t seem like a bad idea for Giga Studio to include the option to use more RAM (if its available on a given system). Since the HDD is a DMA device, it\'s using its \"authority\" to in a sense override the rest of the system. If we were maximizing the use of our memory, it seems like the system would run more smoothly (especially along side other software).

[gigaDiga]

By \"vapourware\" I presume your saying that if we forget about it it will probably go away.

Quite frankly if I were nemesys I\'d be pretty worried about this. With a forum stretching to bulging point with complaints and errors, and now two new soft samplers which are having R&D money thrown at them. The quaint idea of \"vapourware\" seems to profoundly underestimate the desperate situation which Nemesys are likely to find themselves in very quickly if they don\'t actually throw some serious money and man-power at developing their Giga* products and stablising them.

Lets hope Nemesys don\'t write the threat off as \"vapourware\" or else they might find themselves out of a market in a years time.

I can remember a list which was compiled on the wish list page about a year ago, cataloging all the short fallings of Gigasampler. Most of these short fallings are still apparent in Gigastudio to this day. Of course 2.2 is coming. Lets hope its a miracle update. If not I know there\'s going to be a lot of people thinking about abandoning ship and buying chiken systems \"translator\", not to make gigs but to convert their gigs to another format.

gigaDiga

(still kicking his system because he can\'t get enough polyphony to play a couple of chords on it and still saving his pennies for a hardware upgrade which, even then, might not fix the problem)

[Bill]

SCARBEE\'s post in the Libraries thead is very much to the point, and prety much says it all...

[Jamieh]

>By \"vapourware\" I presume your saying that if we forget about it it will probably go away.

No, by \"vapourware\" he means that the software is currently just a bunch of empty promises and until we actually see a released version, it could be a bunch of BS. The computer industry has many many examples of companies that announced fantastic products only to never deliver on those promises, or take 3 times longer than they said they would.

[capt_stubing]

yeah, emagic has been saying \"hard disk sampler\" for well over a year, and where is it? the steinberg model is about the same \"look at our cool new vst sampler that streams samples from the hard drive\", well where is it? i would just chalk this up to corporate posturing. and...uh...yes, the hard disk streaming technology is patented by nemesys/rockwell, and i don\'t think that rockwell and nemesys are going to be easy on anyone infringing on their patent. i\'m glad to see that so many steinberg and emagic execs are reading and posting to this site. as for this forum being filled with complaints...well yes, if you try to run gigasampler, cubase, some vst instruments, netscape, icq, and your porn viewer all on a 200mhz computer with 64megs of ram you\'re going to run into a few snags. something tells me that it\'s not just because of gigasampler. if i was nemesys, looking for constructive criticism and user feedback, i would have stopped reading this newsgroup a long time ago. sorry, but i think they probably have better things to do than listen to a bunch of home studio crybabies who wonder why their \'top-of-the-line\' computer that they bought in \'95 is choking when they run their pirated versions of gigasampler, cubase, and sound forge.

[OH]

Please be a bit more polite... will you??? I don\'T know why you all cry so much because somebody is critisizing a product that has its bugs.In my opinion: Each & every firm should take a CLOSE look at what EVERYBODY\'s got to say and as it looks like, they do:
Take a look at the library discussion forum:
The topic is like: NAMM 2001 or something...

We ALL should be happy that there is concurrence announced as it ALWAYS is good for a quantum leap... now Nemesys is pushed to working harder. If they are not, everybody can be happy with a better product from Steinberg or Emagic (Gigastudio will only get obsolete when the others are better, NOT BEFORE... if you get what I mean). With regard to patents: I honestly don\'T know how much an American patent counts in the rest of the world. You remember that Boris Becker thing recently: Their German marriage-contract/agreement didn\'t count in USA either... just food for thought (and: Steinberg or Emagic might have bought the technology...)

[Mr. Chance]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Jamieh:
>By \"vapourware\" I presume your saying that if we forget about it it will probably go away.

No, by \"vapourware\" he means that the software is currently just a bunch of empty promises and until we actually see a released version, it could be a bunch of BS.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Exactly right. I\'m sure Nemesys are looking over their shoulder, Emagic and Steinberg could provide them w/ serious competition. But Nemesys has a good headstart and hopefully now they will press forward w/ new innovations and greater stability.