Cold Truth
IllMuzik Moderator
first off, let me just give props to IK Multimedia for an excellent product..i just got it monday and made first track with it last night (tuesday). it isnt finished yet, but it is pretty close. heres what i think.....
this is the best vst product i have seen yet, and that includes kontakt. ease of use is far more intuitive and the effects it gives you are head and shoulders above kontakts limited effects section. whats more, everything is readily available at the push of a button for any and all effects parameters. it comes with 30 effects from their T-Racks effect module, and they are excellent.
for the money, you get your 1500 sounds... and they are the highlite of the product if you ask me. consider that for about $40 bucks less, you get the 6 disks in kontakt of good sounds (especially guitars) and decent effects and very in depth editing abilities, which before this came out was the best.
Sampletank 2 gives you 8 gigs of hardware quality sounds (think motif, people!) and they are more than useable. every major category is represented, and it even comes with things like indian flutes and sitars, and your bread-and-butter pianos, strings,organs, guitars and the like are excellent. the orchestral sounds are good, not the VERY best, but good, but the horns are absolutely amazing.....
it also has a Stylus-like loop sync feature, take any looped sample and you can fit it to any tempo... i took a 122 bpm shaker loop and fit it perfectly into 85 bpms.... and it does this much more intuitively than the stylus does.
oh yeah, lets not forget the 5 insert effects per channel... try getting that on a trition studio or motif.... even the motif es "boasts" 6 insert effects.... total. plus it has a very convincing "lo-fi" effect...
the drums are breathtaking.....seriously. the one big problem is the same problem all these manufaturers have, and its that they have the same old stereotyped hip hop drums, and it seems every kit is made to make 808 sounding tracks...... but thats alright because of the wealth of acoustic kits, which are grade A++++ if you ask me.... and given the ability to tweak whatever kits you already have into another world entirely, it more then makes up for its lack of "hip hop" drums.
the beauty of this is that for us software guys (i am STILL a hardware guy at heart... but these products are making me more and more a believer..) this is still the beginning! things are only going to get better as timegoes on, and if you have a pc based studio, this is your triton, your motif, your fantom... .and remember that it takes various formats, most notably the akai s1000/3000 disks, which is a near-universal format as it is.
there are many features that i have yet to use, and i have done all this without looking at the manual once. all of this so far is done on one screen, so there arent a zillion floating point windows, and it flows seemlessly together with cubase sx. i will post my first track (if its eligable for the beat this! comp, then you wil lhave to wait until then!) and show you the quality of this first hand. so for those of you looking for a software sampler/sound module, THIS IS THE ONE! your search is over......
so, leave whatever feedback or questions you may have here....
