Ok virtual-folks, I want to share with you that after months working on this topic, I finally have something stable and I had the first real experience playing live with my new PR2008 Virtual Arranger Workstation. and it was awesome. Since that moment in December, I have not stop to make enhancements to my setup, an now it is pretty stable and ready to replace my traditional Ketron SD1.

I hope you don't mind to take a look in my blog for all the details, I have in mind to add more content about my research later:
http://www.pedrorozo.com/web/content/view/47/40/


Thanks,


Pedro.

BTW: Thanks Frank and all of you for your feedback the last months, it was really important to me, to feel that I was not alone in this crazy stuff.

Pedro, it is indeed good to see someone with some 'fire in the belly' taking the software based arranger system forward to a new level. I still get very excited about this subject but I am getting to be 'old and long in the tooth'.

Good work!!!

Pedro. Very good work.
Can you please tell me, does the NNXT sampler
change Banks on the fly if sent
Program Change and Bank Change messages?

Unfortunally that is a limitation of the NNXT sampler ... it doesn't have the bank, patch structure that you find in kontakt or any gm module. I dont; understand, why they properlledhead guys missed that basic feature.

There is a workaround sending a messsages to slect the next or previous patch in a folder, or next or previous combi in a folder. and you can put as many patches or combination as you want.

I select my combis, in that way, remotely from my M-AUDIO 61, buttons.

I hope the propellerhead guys will implement that feature soon, the rest of the features and the performace is unbeatable. I hardly used more than 10% of my CPU and only 400MB of memory. I am using custom samples + a lot of freee sound fonts, and it takes just 20 second from the start everything to be ready (xp + reason + midi + OMB.

However if you are an intensive user of GM midi files or styles with program changes coming from GM or XG stuff, the NNXT won't manage those messages I guess.

Pedro.

That's too bad, but thanks for the clarification.

Have you tried SFZ?
If so, how does it compare to NNXT?

Yes, I tried with SFZ, but still if you buy the professional version that is provided by Cakewalk now, it doesn't have the amazing capabilities for sound fonts that NNXT provides.

The best is not just mapping, and so on, but performance. It loads them really quick at startup (seconds). The difference with Kontakt load time is so much...

Also you can load as many soundfonts as you want, and you browse individual patches inside them quickly, assign them to 4 MIDI busses, create combinations between your samples, plus the sound fonts, route them thru effect units, equalizers, control them with virtual mixers... and control all of them from your MIDI controller.

I created one of my piano sounds in that way, starting from a Roland sound font, and I started to add reverb, compressor, adding some pads (coming from the reason presets), gruoping them in a combi, and controlling the brightness and amount of pad levels with my Axiom, it is really cool.

Before Reason , I also tested the simple SFZ, and although I worked ok for one sound font, the reality was that I needed more that one at the same time, plus a lot of control, that was not available from SFZ.

After spending a good amount of time with Hypersonic 2,0, Sampletank, SonykSynth, Kontakt and reason, i decided to stay with Reason, ans after 2 months doing thing in real time I am happy about it so far.

Pedro.

As you probably already know, I use Bandstand for the styles/midi files and Kontakt for my lead voices. To change voices in Kontakt I set it up such that there is a separate voice for each of the 16 channels. This way you can change voices quickly. Now Kontakt can also accept bank and program changes.

I am still waiting for Garritan's GM wavetable. This has been delayed so they can use their own player, namely, Aria.