YIKES!!!! Live 7 Orchestral library is $800?

[Angstrom]

if they could manage to sample the EIC in tune I would have a bit more confidence in the new Meta-Oboe , but as it is the EIC instruments are all over the place when you dig around inside them.

EG : the EIC guitars Upright Bass, the velocity layers are all out of tune. Play D1 with increasing volume ... listen to the sample go out of tune ? hmm, quality.

ouch!

Upload a sample of that please!!!!

well, I fixed the D up, and saved over the preset - but when I realised all the other keys were out of tune so I didn't do the whole preset as it's a lengthy business tuning all those velocity layers!

So, my local version could be considered 'compromised' , I'd be glad if someone else tried the same test. Play D1 with increasing velocity and see if it goes out of tune.

Well anyway, here for your listening pleasure is the notes D1, C1, B0 next comes an octave of B1 and B0 so you can hear that the octave sounds wrong. Then a three octave B2, B1, B0

Listen to the MP3

When you look at the zones and key layer tunings you can see that they were never sampled in tune at the time. There are all kinds off offsets on the notes to get them 'vaguely' in tune.

I mean - look at these root notes!
Do these look in any way right to you?
you can see that one layer for the note 'C3' has the same root note as G2 , and that root is F#2 ! WTF

[condra]

Shoddy!

[Tone Deft]

they need to change the name to "Drunken Orchestral Library."

[rutgermuller]

E500 still way too much for beginners. This really bums me out.

[jamester]

EG : the EIC guitars Upright Bass, the velocity layers are all out of tune. Play D1 with increasing volume ... listen to the sample go out of tune ? hmm, quality.

Stringed instruments go sharp when played/struck at higher velocities. If this is what's happening, perhaps it is actually being more realistic?

A long shot I'm sure...they're probably going flat with higher velo's, huh? How exactly is it going "out of tune"?

[dmacintyre]

Maybe I missed it on the relevant web page but are these dry or recorded with reverb? Makes a big difference and re the price: they will need to be astonishing samples to justify the premium over Vienna Instruments SE which is the (dry) benchmark at that budget IMHO.

I hope it is good value because the Ableton plugs are beautifully integrated but it's all about the sound quality after all......

[Angstrom]

EG : the EIC guitars Upright Bass, the velocity layers are all out of tune. Play D1 with increasing volume ... listen to the sample go out of tune ? hmm, quality.

Stringed instruments go sharp when played/struck at higher velocities. If this is what's happening, perhaps it is actually being more realistic?

A long shot I'm sure...they're probably going flat with higher velo's, huh? How exactly is it going "out of tune"?

if you see my large post above, there is a link in there marked 'listen to the mp3' you should be able to hear some tuning discrepancies.

Regarding the fact that stringed instruments go sharp when played harder, that's true but I don;t think it is the cause here. Examining the samples in the zone map you can see that velocity layer for one note has come from two different original notes.

To be more clear - they re-use the same samples over and over again and just de-tune them. Although in the great big sample there are all the notes from the upright bass - they played them incorrectly so the person who made the preset had to make the best of a bad job and take samples from all over the place and try and detune them to fit !!
Unfortunately it seems that both the sampling and the preset making was a little too rushed because BOTH are out of tune. The original recording should have been done again .. and so should the presets.
Why on earth have we been shipped a great big wave with the out-takes still in it !?

Here's an example of a re-used wave. One of many.

[jamester]

Very interesting (and disapointing) Angstrom, thanks. I'll check out those mp3's tonight.

It's very curious why Ableton would charge so much for something that (obviously) can't hold up to the competition. I get the feeling quality control at Sonivox is a little lacking...seems this isn't the first incident with flakey samples from them. There should be an update and a price drop, and then Ableton should maybe reconsider their partnership with them.

[friend_kami]

why Abes, why?

word.

[Mesmer]

Ableton Live, The Drug Years ...

[djadonis206]

As it was mentioned before, perhaps they're not marketing it to people who would rather not pay $800 - which would be the majority of this thread

easy

[jamester]

...perhaps they're not marketing it to people who would rather not pay $800 - which would be the majority of this thread

That's a double-negative, meaning it is marketed to people who would pay $800...but everything's marketed to the group of people who are most likely to pay, that's just business (and demographics).

The point of this thread seems more to me that $800 is *overpriced* considering the shoddy workmanship and superiority of the competition in this same price range. Therefore even those who would pay that amount probably won't.

Personally I don't think the Live environment is very conductive towards this type of work. I would much rather have something which allows you to load all your parts in a single dedicated instrument, rather than having a HUGE rack of Simplers to have to muddle through.

[db]

Hi,

It seems this discussion is mixing unrelated topics and contributes false facts, so I'd like to help clarify:


1) EIC Upright Bass
Angstrom's findings about the tuning of the Upright Bass are correct. The tuning issues are known and we are working on it. Various other EIC presets already received an update, the Upright Bass is next on the list. As Angstrom points out, it's a time consuming process. If you find other problems, please don't hesitate to send us an email.

The Upright Bass is a preset of the EIC, not OIC (nevertheless, this is not an excuse for its shortcomings!).

As for the Orchestral Instrument Collection, there has been great effort to fine-tune presets before releasing it. If you do find presets with tuning problems in the OIC, please let us know as well.


2) Samples

To be more clear - they re-use the same samples over and over again and just de-tune them. Although in the great big sample there are all the notes from the upright bass - they played them incorrectly so the person who made the preset had to make the best of a bad job and take samples from all over the place and try and detune them to fit !!
Unfortunately it seems that both the sampling and the preset making was a little too rushed because BOTH are out of tune. The original recording should have been done again .. and so should the presets.
Why on earth have we been shipped a great big wave with the out-takes still in it !?

This statement lacks accuracy. Ableton uses internal tools to ensure that there are no unused audio files delivered with any sample library. What you are looking at in Angstrom's screenshot is similar to what you see in a drum rack with slices: a single audio file containing multiple notes of an instrument. This is done for the purpose of better performance and faster preset loading. Some samples are used more than once. There is no "out-take" left in the sample material.

3) Pricing: The complete Orchestral Instrument Collection is €499/$599 as you can read on the Ableton website.


It seems contributions to this thread have only been made based on expectations -- the feedback from Live users who actually purchased the OIC is quite the opposite in regards to both quality and pricing. If you work with the OIC and have reasons to be unhappy with its quality, please let us know why.


Cheers,
Daniel Büttner

[Angstrom]

To be more clear - they re-use the same samples over and over again and just de-tune them. Although in the great big sample there are all the notes from the upright bass - they played them incorrectly so the person who made the preset had to make the best of a bad job and take samples from all over the place and try and detune them to fit !!
Unfortunately it seems that both the sampling and the preset making was a little too rushed because BOTH are out of tune. The original recording should have been done again .. and so should the presets.
Why on earth have we been shipped a great big wave with the out-takes still in it !?

This statement lacks accuracy. Ableton uses internal tools to ensure that there are no unused audio files delivered with any sample library. What you are looking at in Angstrom's screenshot is similar to what you see in a drum rack with slices: a single audio file containing multiple notes of an instrument. This is done for the purpose of better performance and faster preset loading. Some samples are used more than once. There is no "out-take" left in the sample material.

Thanks Daniel,
I checked and you are right - it was hard to tell which samples were used or unused in the EIC preset I mentioned so I did a quick test and you are correct that all of the wave is used.

I came to the conclusion that there were out-takes because when I was trying to fix the preset and was looking for the correct notes (rather than the ones shifted several semitones)all the candidates for replacement I found were out of tune. What I realise now is that it is simply that the sample segments are out of tune - so the ones I was hearing as 'out-takes' were actually used elsewhere.

Apart from the tuning errors in the recording there is a strange choice of samples which you have kept . There are a couple of samples of high velocity which might have worked well in a large multi sampled set, but don't work well in a small set like this. EG : some notes have very obvious fingerboard buzz - which is great sounding off a real bass, but not in a small sample set so that every C2 > 60 velocity is buzzy.

when sampling a small set like this I would expect a tuner to be used and to aim for as clean a tone as possible. The samples which have fingerboard buzz would be fine if we had 4 samples per key, but here we only have 22 samples over two octaves - so the 'noisy' fingerboard samples really stand out on repetition and make the whole preset very difficult to sit in a track realistically.

I wouldn't complain, but UprightBass is one of the main instruments I would use from the EIC. So it's disappointing that it is so short on samples and was sampled so oddly.

I should say that I don't have the OIC and am sorry if anyone assumed I was talking about that product.

My point was that the EIC still has some problems after more than a year and so I would personally need a lot of convincing that the OIC was better. It may have more samples - but is it in tune? are the samples well selected for articulation that works within songs?

[elxicano]

This has been a very informative post... I have to agree Angstrom, that I too am not convinced that purchasing OIC will be worth the money, and that feeling is also based purely on the experience of using EIC2.

It would be very helpful if there were more demonstrations available of OIC as well as the testimonials of users who have purchased OIC. I have been searching for just one user review of OIC without any luck in finding one.

I do know that the pricing does seem fair in comparison to similar products available on the market, however the question remains… Is OIC the better choice?

Ableton… Please help resolve this question since I do not appear to be the only in search of this answer.