Metropolis Ark on sale

[bryla]

50% on individual and 63% on bundles

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... b3c0c913ed

Is this still a valuable workhorse library?

[Guy Rowland]

Jeepers. I really like Orchestral Tools, but DAYAMN.

Their RRPs are so high.

I only have Ark 1 and it is really solid - workhorse is a good description.

[Piet De Ridder]

I have most of the Arks — three complete volumes and selections from the two others (the first two volumes in Kontakt, the rest in Sine) — and, yes, I suppose you could call them workhorses. Not quite a Belgian Draft type of workhorse (something like Symphobia would qualify more for that description, in my opinion), but useful nonetheless. On occasion very useful. They all feel a bit undersampled to me though. Just a bit. If Orchestral Tools can skimp anywhere on velocity layers, they’ll usually do it.

And I’ve given up on Sine. Totally. I have no other software on my computer I dislike more. (Spitfire’s Player comes second.) I’ll use Sine, but only under the most extreme duress and when I have absolutely no alternatives for what I want to do. Big shame really, because Orchestral Tools has some good samples.

Software like Sine and Spitfire’s Player (and the getting-worse-with-every-new-version Kontakt) are, as a matter of fact, part of the reason why I stopped doing mock-orchestral work. Not the entire reason, not even the biggest part of it, but they’ve definitely contributed in a major way to my by now deep-rooted disenchantment with the mock-orchestral idiom. Sine, for me, takes all the fun out of working with orchestral samples (inasmuch as there is any fun in it to begin with). And I positively hate its interface as well.

You might ask: if you don’t like Sine why do you have so many libraries in that format? Well, a couple because they’re only available in the Sine format — Miroire, for example (some of its contents which I really like) — and all the others because I’ve always hoped that, over time, I would learn to like Sine. Or, at least, get comfortable with it. But it doesn’t happen. It is, in fact, getting worse.

Even my DAW doesn’t like Sine: 8 times out of 10, when I try to load Sine, Logic shies like a startled horse, shuts down immediately and then gives me the notification: “Logic Pro X quit unexpectedly while using the cryptocppdx64.dylib plug-in.” Might have nothing to do with Sine as such, I don’t know, but those type of crashes *only* happen when trying to load Sine. At the next attempt, it might load just fine though. I have no idea why that is.
(I’ve searched for “cryptocppdx64.dylib” on my computer, but it’s nowhere to be found.)

As you can read: Sine (even just thinking or talking about it) makes me grumpy and whiney. And I’m not grumpy and whiney by nature. Au contraire. Reasons enough to have as little to do with that software as I can. A real pity.

Sorry for the derailment. If you don’t share my misgivings about Sine, the Arks have a lot to offer.

_

[FriFlo]

Wait ... they are offering the Kontakt versions? By the looks of the advertisement they do! This is how Capsule looks and that design is not to be found in Sine. Could that be the first step of moving back to Kontakt?

Oh, and I must say, Piet, I completely share your resentment towards Sine. The only exception is, I hate the Spitfire player even a tiny bit more. :-)

I am currently building a new template and have made a list of problems I find, thing I cannot do with the two players, things that are incredibly stupid and cost precious time for no good reason ... let's say, this list is growing every day.

Just about the only positive thing I can say is this: I have created a disabled template with pretty much the whole Berlin series disabled in VEpro. Only those instruments that are not available in Sine are in Kontakt. I have set the buffer in Sine to 50 ms. When I enable ALL instruments, VEpro uses barely 64Gb of RAM. The next step is testing how many voices I can stream like that in a realistic scenario. But this is a good sign (or Sine?), as that would definitely mean, a 128Gb Mac Studio would do it for me without an additional slave PC.

I don't know wether SF-Player is that good with saving resources, because I haven't got enough instruments in that format to compare. I haven't made direct comparisons with any other players, but I can say that on Kontakt, the whole Berlin Series fully loaded definitively needed more RAM (more than 128Gb). However, this time the whole library is on NVME cards, that is why I am not certain how much Sine is to praise for that and how much the hardware ...

[Guy Rowland]

FriFlo - yes, since this is Native Instruments cross-promotion, I guess it can only be the Kontakt version.

Out of interest, can you run your instruments enabled but no samples? I can't remember if Sine does on-the-fly background loading.

[FriFlo]

FriFlo - yes, since this is Native Instruments cross-promotion, I guess it can only be the Kontakt version.

Out of interest, can you run your instruments enabled but no samples? I can't remember if Sine does on-the-fly background loading.

I know you can purge samples per articulation. It just works a little different (and not as good as with Kontakt, I believe), cause it will not only load the samples played, but rather all of that articulation as soon as you play a note. I don't use that function and therefore haven't tested it, though.

To me, the footprint is small enough to just enable the full instances I need. Would I ever need ALL Berlin Series (including expansions) for one piece (which is rather unlikely), I would still have enough headroom to load further instruments for doubling and other stuff. No reason left for me to look any further in regards to saving RAM!

The only uncertainty I have at this point is how many voices will I get on my current i9 9900k Hackintosh. But in case I run out of voices, I will just kick the slave back to live. I am pretty confident, however, that my next Mac will not need any slaves. It is about time to end colonialism, anyway.

[bryla]

Thanks for the insights! Having all of the Symphobias (and lets face it: not really an urgent need for new tools) I think I'll pass this time again.

[mcalis]

Even my DAW doesn’t like Sine: 8 times out of 10, when I try to load Sine, Logic shies like a startled horse, shuts down immediately and then gives me the notification: “Logic Pro X quit unexpectedly while using the cryptocppdx64.dylib plug-in.” Might have nothing to do with Sine as such, I don’t know, but those type of crashes *only* happen when trying to load Sine. At the next attempt, it might load just fine though. I have no idea why that is.
(I’ve searched for “cryptocppdx64.dylib” on my computer, but it’s nowhere to be found.)

.dylib files are dynamically linked libraries, there are similar to DLL files on Windows.

These files simply contain a library of common pieces of code that another piece of software (in this case logic or sine) can call into. So rather than having to write complicated math operations anew everytime someone creates and ships new software, they simply reference files that are already on the user's system (because they were shipped with the OS).

In this particular case it looks like it's referencing a cryptographic library so that means the crash is likely related to a step during license verification or something that happens when SINE is decrypting samples. I don't have SINE currently installed so I can't check, but I'm fairly certain it creates a logging file which may contain more information pertaining to these crashes.

[Piet De Ridder]

Thanks very much, Matthias. Most informative.

I have to add however that I haven’t installed the latest SINE-update which was released last week (and which might solve the dylib-problem, I don't know), and I don’t plan to do so on my current MacPro because the Mac Studio will be arriving next month and then I’ll have to completely re-install everything anyway. (Have ceased all updating, upgrading, fine-tuning and maintenance on my current Mac since I placed an order for the new machine.)

Thanks again!

_