For a good example is the new piano sampled by Wavesfactory. the Mercury piano. After having a close look at how its put together you really start scratching your head. It loads the Main configuration using 1.38GB of memory and the samples take up 34GB compressed on HDD. I'm thinking how have they inflated it so much, its just a piano, and you learn in the setting menu. Its for the microphones Ultraclose, Close, Mono, Mid, Far. They use 5 separate samples on most for each key, now for the a full sound it will playback 5 sounds for that mix. I find it plainly stupid to do this, all you need is a well designed mixed close sound and a good mid to far that can be altered in software. Most people would want them to be mixed to get the best sound they can get, and get it down to two options, this will save space and processing. I downloaded the Mercury Piano and stripped out all unnecessary elements and got it down to 12GB. If I had time to re-mix down the 5 microphones to two you would be looking at 6GB total. I'm thinking its marketing, larger sized equals better sound, when really it means larger HDD and more memory with no improvement in sound quality.

 

It is in part marketing hype, that's correct. Size doesn't equal quality in most cases, take SM for example. As for having 5 mic sets, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sure for a piano, that's a bit redundant, but when there's more than one player in the room, extra mics do help.
There are other ways to reduce size, bit-reduction for example. I did some conversions to 20bit in the past with good results. Normalized samples can be reduced even further, but rarely any library feature normalized samples.
I find it interesting that for most part, you'll see only "wet" libraries in this saturated market. "Dry" ones (small, with no more than 1 mic set to offer) somewhat faded away, apart from few exceptions.

 

I agree for orchestral maybe an extra microphone is of use but its getting out of hand how large some libraries are getting, with no real improvements.

 

Bear in mind that for large orchestral libs you have to account for surround mixdown (usually 5.1 or 7.1), not just stereo.
"Wet" libraries should come with 3-4 mic mixes - perspectives Close, Mid, Far and Wide (optional). 2 mics for stereo-only use.
There are extremes, Spitfire HZ range got it out of hand a bit, I agree, but 3 is about optimal.

 

Right, I’m asking the same question: why they unnecessarily bloat releases?
in libraries, I often find 4 verions of the same files: wav, acd wave file, aiff and kontakt vers. with samples folder
what’s the point?
Yes, maybe is a marketing strategy: bigger is better, or maybe they act like this to justify their bloated price

 

After downloading Elysium Harp from Soundiron, I've managed to get the HDD space down to 1GB from 14GB and just over 100mb after loading into memory, this was done very quickly removing the bulk of unnecessary files, and I think my version sounds about the same.

 

Could you opload this version for testing?

 

You'd be surprised how many libraries actually have *duplicate* samples. No, literally, byte-by-byte duplicates. It seems it's way too hard for them to use the plethora of automated tools to clean it up after such a "big work" on a project, 5min extra work is unthinkable (even file managers like Total Commander can do it). Oh wait, they do it on purpose so it seems bigger and with more layers or round robin or velocities!

99% of big name sample libraries also have *artificial* round robins or even notes themselves on MANY samples. The samples themselves aren't purely identical, they can be pitched up/down with a cheap pitcher just to fill the entire keyboard and make it seem as if they were sampled on every key (even Eduardo Tarilonte's libraries have this, just pathetic), or in most cases artificial round robins by just altering phases a little bit. The sound is the exact same, the spectrum is the exact same, only difference being phases. This is not possible in the real world if they had *real* round robin. They probably alter phases so they don't show up as duplicated samples when you do a simple inspection.

This is one reason I don't feel sorry for a single sample library company I have found even 1 duplicated sample, or an artificial round robin/layer sample. They deserve to get out of business for this. Simply scum.

 

I think these devs are thinking about the quality and depth of the samples used and not the size of our hard drive. Well hard drive size used to be not much of a problem, but with the advent and widespread use of SSD's, I think its time for them to start thinking of more modern ways to present the otherwise large libraries so that we don't have to have so many large normal spin drives just to hold these.

 

@Michael Sa or anyone else.. care to tell their method for paring down the size of the libs?

Would be great to get rid of the bloat,and make room on my external ...

do you just delete duplicates and the ones left are still able to be found and loaded without any special adjustments ?

 

I was wondering why Ownhammer impulses weigh so much. Most of the cabinet IRs I have weigh virtually nothing, but Ownhammer seem to have 6GB libraries. Is it really that much variation? I mean, even the Bricasti Fusion IRs weigh "only" about 11GB, and they are supposed to be really complex as well as long.

Personally I have the opposite approach to "bigger is better". I really don't like choking my hard drive with 40GB libraries of a cowbell, particularly because they take long to load and kill the cpu when you use several on a project. I look forward to more instrument modeling.

 

There is no easy way to do this unfortunately, you'll need to know how the library is setup, load it into Kontakt and find the sound you want from available microphones, play a key and see what activates in the Group Editor, once you know this, check the mapping editor, highlight and copy them into a new instrument, then work out how to get them to play the same way. It takes a lot of time to do.

The slightly easier way, If the samples are visible in folders and not combined, and are well named, say close, far, tree, mix, or load the NKI file and save to new instrument with samples compressed, you could copy the library to a new directory and start deleting parts you don't need and keep loading to make sure it still sounds/works.

 

Last edited: Jan 9, 2017

Reminds me of how I felt when I tore Damage and Lacrimosa apart. looking at Damage was confusing for me at 1st, but it kinda made sense to do it the way they did. but, Lacrimosa... I was not impressed. what was it they claimed? 15k samples? pleeeaaasse. a lot of the samples in that library are stretched across the map and use a generic group. I still never could understand why it was so large. Also, the sound quality is nowhere near the demos and the playability is kind of a joke.

 

A lot of these libraries are also streaming "extra" stuff from your hard drive (and not loading from RAM), things you barely notice and, in a full mix, often can't even hear, like release sounds, foot pedal noises, ambient noises, etc. Nice things to have, maybe, if you were doing a solo piano or guitar track, but probably not necessary for a mix. I've never had any ambition to d/l a 192 GB piano library when my NI Akoustik Piano library sounds great, has all the bells and whistles those bigger libraries do and only takes a total of 1.2 GBs on my drive.

Also, if the library's not on an SSD, it doesn't even matter how much RAM you have or how fast your machine is otherwise, those jillion extra samples are the first things to get dropped (pay attention to the red CPU/Disk alert light in the right hand side of your Kontakt screen when loading a massive library).

 

they're adapting to the market, if all their competitors are releasing 30 GB pianos who is gonna buy a 1GB piano for the same price ?