I'm not sold on GigaXXX.

1) Company must not be confident in their product since there is no demo version and no online manual to peruse before buying.

2) All demo's are mp3's which means there is loss in the compresion and you can't analyze the demo (trusting that it was really generated by Nemesys product)

3) No reputable authority has given it better marks than a dedicated high-end sampler.


So there you have it...believe the hype or not.

Hi digiboy,

Well, IMHO, GigaXXX and a dedicated sampler are slightly different. Buying an Akai, Emu or Kurzweil allows you certain synthesis capabilities not present in Gigasampler. Where Gigasampler kicks butt is that you can load up a 1.5 GB patch (ie with all notes of the scale multi-sampled) and still load up more. This is especially important when dealing with Orchestral libraries.

There are many people who have tons of samplers just to be able to play back something realistic without having to record to hard disk or tape first. Things are changing and those very same people are beginning to use Gigasampler to ease the need for so many samplers.

Anyone who uses GS for playing back drum samples is better off to use something like one of the softsamplers like Emagic's EXS24 which can play back with sample accuracy or a dedicated rackmount like an Akai or Emu.

Just because Nemesys does not have a demo online does *not* mean that they aren't confident in it. Rather, there are so many cracks out there (including for GS) that they don't want to make it so easy for people to download a demo version and then modify the code so that GS thinks it is registered.

GS is a very powerful sampler in terms of the sheer number and size of the samples that can be loaded. It is pretty much for playing back samples as they were recorded so you're not going to be able to do some of the things you could do with an E4XT and z-plane filters. If you want to play back a great piano or load in a high quality horn section with all of the nuances of horn playing (ie blats, falls, shakes, swells, etc.) and don't want to own a rack full of samplers, GS is a great product and quite stable.

In regards to the mp3's, have you listened to them? Most of them are encoded at least at 128 kB. That should give usable results in order to hear how good/lousy Gigasampler sounds. Sure it ain't wav samples but it's not as bad as you say it is.

Furthermore, if it were such a lousy product and the mp3's were not created with GS, you'd have a lot of Nemesys customers smearing their name all over the internet.

Go to www.nemesysmusic.com/news/endorse.html and see what some of the pros are saying about the product for your confirmation about whether GS sucks or not. While not all of the names are familiar to me there are some which are reputable.

I suggest you go to a Nemesys dealer and check it out. It really is a great program. Not for everyone and typically requires its own computer, but particularly for people who do orchestral scoring and whatnot, it is excellent.

fv

There are many interesting points made by all of you. I must first ask why a module? In working with many film composers and doing a few "B" films myself, I have learned that what creates
realism in orchestration is "expression".
Why do you think static samples require
5 CD ROMs? It's because each expression requires a new sample.
If you have a very powerful synth engine that can add expression to high quality samples in "real time" with ribbons and breath controllers and after touch and release control , etc. (I think I made the point)., then you begin to be a "synthesist" rather than one who plays pretty sample from a keyboard. Therein lies the beauty and passion of traditional instruments.

Now racks are great and I suggest them when live performances demand large amounts of polyphony.

One such rack was not mentioned and it has the best dynamic range and 64 notes of polyphony expandable to 128.
This is the PC2R from Kurzweil. the list price is about $1,000.00 US. the Orchestra expansion board will be released very soon and the expression
for real time controllers is already built in.

I use a K2600SX (88 Key w/ sampler) for 99% of all I do. It has 88 real time controllers, It can resample it's self with
FX and has a built in sequencer.

So if I'm in the studio or on the road,
I can write and Play by resampling,
I can have unlimited polyphony and unlimited effects without losing dynamics or clipping because there is 256db of headroom.

My 2 cents. I have had all brands and endorsements from most. Kurzweil is the one product that consistently gets me work and a paycheck