VSampler 2 FAQ
The distribution of VSampler 2 has been officially ceased in october 2003 in
favour of VSampler 3.
The FAQ will stay online for VSampler 2 users.
1. Why no native SB Live / Audigy hardware support? That would be cool, we could use the great EAX effects for selected Splits or instruments and we would have no CPU load due to the hardware sampler of the SB Live / Audigy!
2. What's the advantage of using VSampler over the SB Live / Audigy?
3. Why would I save my soundbanks in the proprietary VSampler .VSB format and not in the more common SF2 format?
4. The import of Terratec instruments (.TTI) doesn't work as good as the other import types, is there a workaround?
| 1. Why no native SB Live / Audigy hardware support? That would be cool, we could use the great EAX effects for selected Splits or instruments and we would have no CPU load due to the hardware sampler of the SB Live / Audigy! |
You can
not apply different EAX environments to separate Splits, that's not
possible with the SB Live / Audigy hardware, sorry, and this is one of the main reasons why to use VSampler instead of your SB Live hardware.
The SB Live does not support more than one effect combination at a time! You can
setup your effect in the SB Live control panel and that's it - everything uses
the same effect combination (environment). The only thing you can adjust are the effect
parameters for different sounds, but you can
not use different effects for different instruments or Splits.
If you want to use your VSampler banks with the SB Live / Audigy hardware
just export them as SF2 and load them into the SB Live / Audigy hardware -
simple :)
As some of you might know, VSampler started in 1998 without having an own
soundengine, it was just a wrapper for the soundcard hardware of the TerraTec
EWS 64 and a bit later of the SB Live as well. We loved those cards, but not the
included soundbank editors. But then we dropped the native hardware support in
version 2, because we were limited to the features of those two soundcard
families, and this became more and more a chock, while the power of a typical PC
grow every day. So in summer 1999 we decided to not longer care about the limits
of any soundcard hardware but to start writing a software sampler from the
scratch - the VST instrument "VSampler 2.0" was born, and has been
released in May 2000 as the worlds first VST sampler instrument - welcome to the
freedom and power of software sampling!
But to not give up the SB Live completely we added SF2 export to the new
VSampler as well, the TerraTec file format description wasn't available to 3rd
party developers (and still isn't), so an EWS fileformat export could not be
added, sorry. We don't see the SB Live / Audigy as competitor for VSampler, but
as a great addition. That's the actual reason why VSampler not only imports
SF2, as most other software samplers do as well, but VSampler also exports
SF2, in opposition to all other popular software samplers.
So you can create and edit your soundbanks in VSampler, using all of it's
comfortable tools and powerful helpers, such as drag'n'drop for samples and
Splits, the easy "next free key" import for drumsamples, the graphical envelope
displays, the graphical key- & velocity-zones editor, the template feature to
clone complex instruments with a single click ...and more. If you ever created
SF2's in Creative's Vienna you know what I mean, VSampler is just faster and way
more comfortable for the creation of instruments. So you still can use VSampler
to create/edit your SF2's and then load them into the "hardware sampler" of the
SB Live / Audigy and play them back without any CPU load. In worst case you would have to finetune the SF2 in
Vienna, but that's still way better than having to create a complex instrument
in Vienna from the scratch. |
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| 2. What's the advantage of using VSampler over the SB Live / Audigy? |
| First the good things about the SB Live / Audigy: they
still use your system RAM and PCI bus, but they are true "hardware" samplers, their onboard chip EMU10K1/2
does all of the sampler tasks without using your CPU, so it works fine on slow
computers too. But the sampler part of the EMU chip didn't change much since the
origial AWE32 in 1994, and VSampler can do much more than the sampler part of
the SB Live / Audigy hardware! Check the feature-list in
the next question. The list is about missing features of the SF2 format, but
since the SF2 format 1:1 describes the sampler features of the SB Live / Audigy
all those limits apply to the cards as well. And if those missing sampler
features are not enough already, another big drawback with the SB Live solution:
it can't be used as VSTi or DXi inside the sequencer, it's a plain
external MIDI device running outside of the sequencer. So you loose all
of the advantages of the fast and intelligent sequencer-internal VSTi/DXi plugin
interface, such as the perfect sample-precise timing and the full integration
into the sequencerm which would mean "total recall", i.e. after re-opening a
song all settings are restored. You also don't have 16 individual outputs
connected to 16 separate mixer channels of the host sequencers mixer, you
can't add different insert effects to the 16 mixer channels, in fact you can't
apply all those great DirectX and VST effect plugins at all. And the EAX effects
section of the SB Live doesn't allow more than one effect combination for the
complete output of the card - everything shares the same effect. You can adjust
the effect amount for different sounds, but that's all.. You simply
loose a lot of control and the complete comfort of the VSTi/DXi plugin system.
And since the SB Live and Audigy are locked to 48 kHz internally you can't
record or mixdown to WAV straight to 44 kHz even with the "what you hear"
recording option of the Creative mixer, the audio signal will always be
converted between 44 and 48, which of course is a loss in quality, although not
much. |
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| 3. Why would I save my soundbanks in the proprietary VSampler .VSB format and not in the more common SF2 format? |
Imagine you convert a color image into grayscale - the colors are lost
forever. And no, they won't come back by converting your image back into a color
format. The same with converting a VSampler bank into an SF2. VSampler can do
much more than the SB Live hardware and it's SF2
fileformat, which therefore can't store all of VSamplers settings. Both formats got their
sense, and they can be converted into
each other at any time, but not without loss. The SF2 format is limited to the technical features
of the AWE / SB Live / Audigy family, which are great cards as a basic "hardware sampler",
with a great
interpolation quality, but the sampler part of the included EMU chip didn't
change much since the origial AWE32 in 1994, that's why an SF2 file still got
the following "natural" limitations:
- no way to store some sample settings, e.g. disc streaming on/off (the SB
Live always loads all samples into RAM)
- no way to store some bank settings, e.g. "load current current Preset +
Multi only" (the SB Live always loads all instruments of a soundbank into RAM)
- no way to store 24 bit samples
- no way to store linked samples, they will always be embedded into the SF2
file
- no way to store the filter type, since the SB Live got just one filter,
the 8 dB lowpass (same since 1994), no hipass or bandpass as VSampler
- no way to store the advanced filter settings, e.g. velocity controlled
filter, filter-LFO
- no way to store the 2nd filter
- no way to store a 5 stage volume envelope with either linear or logarithmic
envelope sections
- no way to store effects and to have different effect types and settings at different
instruments or Splits
- no way to handle external VST plugins, assign them to Splits and store
their settings
- no way to store the Multi settings, i.e. which MIDI channel maps to which
sound
- no way to store the output device settings, i.e. which sound plays at
which output device or mixer channel
- no way to store the content of the pattern sequencer
- no way to store VSampler's mixer settings
- no way to store groups and their polyphony
- no way to store all keyboard scaling data (how does the note number affect
the single volume envelope parameters)
- no way to store the controller mapping and settings
Bottom line: always keep a backup of the VSampler bank as VSB file. |
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| 4. The import of Terratec instruments (.TTI) doesn't work as good as the other import types, is there a workaround? |
| Yes, there is an TTI to SF2 converter, the converted SF2 can then be loaded
into VSampler. Sometimes the converter gives better results than VSampler's own
TTI import. Here's the direct download link:
ftp://www.ews64.com/download/Tticonv2.zip |
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