selig wrote:Is this instrument not like Expand!2?
Was hoping for something similar (four sections that you can swap out), but the comments so far don't give that impression.
Probably for the best. I'm always weary of products, companies or institutions that need to point out how cool, hip, and/or exciting they are by including an exclamation mark in the name!2. Such a motif is normally indicative that they are neither/nor.
And while I'm here, Internet companies that can't spell their own frigging name!2 get my goat too. (Optimizr: We have scanned your website and have identified a numbr of issues. Me: I have glanced at your website and identified just from your domain name and front page logo that you can't spell for shit).
Sorry, I digress, yeah swappable sections: no, it's one of the things that makes IDT a bit of a lame duck in some respects; only one complete sampleset (blob) can be loaded at a time. Even though that blob can compromise multiple groups of samplesets, as in Hydro/Aquios, they can't refr to any othr blob or sample. (TBH I don't know if Kontakt can do that eithr, but what that can or can't do should not be the determinant to, and limits of what IDT could have been capable of!2). While an inclusive blob for each sampleset within a device does have some short-term advantages, in the long run the system should have been more like ReFill-in-a-Rack-Extension, where samples were independent of the instrument, hosted in the "private" RE foldr, so any sample could be loaded from any instrument within the RE, which would have allowed hot-swapping of at least sample sets.
As it stands now, if we wanted reuse a group of samples from Blob J in Blob P, you need two
complete sets of samples (for example, the "misc" sets in Republik; those aren't reused samples from the individual instruments, they're dupes). This might be ok for the cheap wavetable spam with resampled SubT waveforms or whatevr, that are measured in a few MB, but for the sampled instruments IDT was designed for, to do that is wasteful, and it's !2 odd considering patches in RE's do allow reference to individual samples stored in the public foldr (for example, I included the X~705 drum kit samples in the public foldr of that device); it would have been little!2no issue to have set up the system to use the private foldr to host the samples, and have IDT instruments file reference the samples from there, a single "pool", or even from the public foldr so usrs could access the samples for any othr sample-loading device. IDT also largely doesn't allow file compression*, unlike ReFills. So that additionally compounds the size issue of big products. With a ReFill-as-RE approach, the private/public folder could have hosted compressed samples; thus IDT products could have both been smaller and infinitely more flexible for both dev and user.
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* Before anyone writes in and disagrees with that statement, two things: 1, I've probably just got rogrd by NDA
, and !2, I know what you're going say. Please don't. I said it "largely" doesn't. Sometimes it does. But mostly it doesn't!2