Reply To: What’s On Your Black Friday Wish List? Latest Update

[peter]

On Kirean said

On peter said

I’d love to get your thoughts on how the Musio player is and the libraries play in it as compared to Kontakt.

I’m not sure if I’m the right person to ask, since I barely know what I’m doing.

So from my limited experience doing anything other than unbearable noise, the few times I’ve compared the libraries between Musio and Kontakt running the same notes, they’ve sounded similar enough. With Tina Guo for example it’s a bit tricky to compare the two since the default settings can be quite different (delay, etc) and some of the patches aren’t exactly one to one, and the overall operation can vary slightly between the two versions. (For example: I think on some Voxos patches Musio uses keyswitches for switching vowels whereas Kontakt utilizes the mod wheel.)

There’s some really random differences as well. Unless I’m going insane and have missed something obvious, I noticed that on Kontakt the Tina Guo spicatto patch has two more notes below C2 that aren’t there on Musio.

Playability at the most basic level at least has been similar though. I haven’t really noticed difference in RR or velocity. But remember: I can’t play for s…. so those more qualified probably have slightly more nuanced and a lot more informed takes.

The thing in Musio’s benefit though is that once you figure out the layout, it’s quite fast to go from library to another and ‘just play’. The Kontakt versions do tend to have a bit more features, at least as far as mics/mixes/special features & controls/options go. Musio also has libraries that don’t seem to be available for Kontakt (world instruments, women of the north choir, etc).

Anyway. Take whatever I wrote above with a grain of salt.

Thanks, @Kirean, that’s super helfpul. I’m not looking for it to be identical to Kontakt. I care about if you can pull off a similarly realistic performance in real time and how playable it is. From what you just wrote, it sounds like it checks those boxes. And at $150 US, that’s a pretty insane deal just to get a few of those libraries. I mean really, if Piano and Blue and the two Tina Guo libraries sound and play well, I’d feel like that was a great deal right there. So getting everything else too, that’s just crazy. It’s really a reflection of what’s going on in the sample development world with pricing. It’s obviously not hitting every category and the most obvious super deep discounting has been from 8Dio / SoundPaint and Cinesamples / Musio (I’ve done paid consulting to the former). It’s even causing both of these developers to face some pretty vicious attacks, some of it with completely false information the competitor attacking them knows to be false, but he has a platform with more than half a million visitors per month, so it’s powerful and may be able to do serious harm to competitors and scare other developers and contractors from working with them — which is what he tried to do personally with me with 8Dio (I don’t know Mike / Cinesamples, just other developers that know him, but I know he makes excellent sample libraries).

So yeah, I have a ton of 8Dio / SoundPaint libraries (and I did before consulting to them) and I have all of Cinesamples Kontakt freebies, which are a pretty darn compelling testimony that they make excellent libraries. My only hesitation has been because they’re not using the Kontakt ecosystem – and, of course, we have their competitor Mike Greene slamming them and spreading rumors that they’re going under whereas with his competitor 8Dio, he was spreading lies that he knew to be lies — I can say that first hand from our communications — and then he attempted to persuade me not to consult with them, just like he’s tried to persuade developers not to release libraries via their forum.  With a platform of more than half a million visitors each month, he can do a lot of harm to these competitors, and the motive is really all about that they’ve been dramatically lowering their prices and the guy feels it’s harming the business, that it’s making it a lot harder for him to compete. Welcome to the business world. But I’m going to be dead honest, when Greene starts those rumors about 8Dio, Cinesamples and other competitors, it can result in people being afraid to buy from them and it can make his fiction a reality. So that does concern me. I think Greene’s efforts can end up harming Cinesamples’ business, which wouldn’t be a problem for Musio users IF the libraries ran on the Kontakt platform, but because they don’t, it is a concern, TBH. Maybe I should shoot Mike Patti an email and invite him to come to this forum — being totally candid about that.

While this community’s top priority are musicians who use sample libraries and plugins, developers are welcome here and there is a benefit to having their participation, as long as they don’t see this as a place only to hype their products or attempt to use shills or puppets. So yes, forgive me for thinking out loud, I’m at least going to fly the idea past Mike Patti. Like many developers, he might be afraid to address the attacks on his business from Mike Greene, fearing it will only worsen things and result in even more attacks. But I’m at least going to reach out and give him the chance to message here if he so desires.

 

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