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How many samples… is too many?

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vpo-organist

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 3:57 am

larason2 wrote:I still think that even a dry set with compatible IR is still not as good as a recorded perspective that has a good balance of pipe and room sound, but I guess there is some personal preference to this. My reasons are that it’s hard to get a pipe recording truly “dry” aside from recording each pipe in an anechoic chamber.

In other words, the technique is no good because the sample maker did a bad job. That makes no sense. If the sample manufacturer has done a good job, then this is the technology of the future. But the sample makers have more work to do with this technology.
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vpo-organist

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 4:30 am

Thanks for your opinion. Why there are only 8 mixer presets was an unnecessary limitation from the beginning. This should be expanded with high priority. But please not to 16 or 32, but rather to 1024.

The way the busses have to be configured at the moment is way too complicated. You can't work with that. I say this as a longtime software developer (C++ and C#) and not as a PC beginner or PC user. There might be a nice idea integrated in cantabile - a graphical configuration: https://www.cantabilesoftware.com/blog/ ... -diagrams/

As for CPU performance - you'd have to look at the configuration to see why it was solved that way. In Hauptwerk some things have to be changed, so that complex configurations can be created user-friendly. But to do this, you first have to analyze the existing configurations, simplify them if necessary, and work out an optimized approach.
This requires the cooperation of the community and MDA/MDyde. First, however, the corresponding interest in an improvement must be present. As long as the users say that everything is fine as it is, nothing will happen.

I repeat it for Martin Dyde: The bus configuration is not operable. The 8 mixer presets are far too few. The number should be urgently increased in a small update, because it limits and annoys every user who uses IR. What is also always said is that the presets per organ make sense.

For now, the 3 release model is probably more practical.

This should be an alternative, but not the only option.

Best regards
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mdyde

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 5:07 am

Hello vpo-organist,

vpo-organist wrote:Why there are only 8 mixer presets was an unnecessary limitation from the beginning. This should be expanded with high priority.


Yes -- the intention always was/is for the limit to be much higher than 8, so that you would effectively use one mixer preset per organ if you wish. There wasn't time within Hauptwerk v5's development to include the ability to filter the screens by mixer preset, so the limit was set to 8 as a temporary measure, in order to keep the screens reasonably usable in the meantime.

However, as high priority enhancements we do intend to increase the number of mixer presets, and also to allow filtering the screens by mixer preset, and also to allow mixer presets to be copied/imported/exported, so that mixer presets could conveniently be used on a per-organ basis (and suitable configurations provided by sample set makers or other users to import) for those people wishing to use per-organ convolutions schemes.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 6:26 am

Martin, thank you for the feedback.
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mdyde

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 7:22 am

Thanks. You're very welcome.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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larason2

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 8:16 am

I disagree that being unable to record truly “dry” sample set is a fault of the sample set creator. Close miking increases the volume of a pipe substantially, but it doesn’t eliminate all room effects, and this is in no way a sample set creators fault.
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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 1:28 pm

Sonus Paradisi has proven that DRY sets are possible.
I don't have the Anloo V2, but I think that's also a dry set with IR.
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JulianMoney-Kyrle

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 1:53 pm

Actually I am not quite sure that the mixer is as limited as this.

Each of the eight mixer presets allows 1024 channels, and the same physical audio/speaker channel can be included in different audio groups using different channels. I used this recently to troubleshoot sound coming out of the wrong speakers (it turned out that using HW6's 96KHz processing halved the number of digital channels my audio interface was sending to a separate DAC), and I found that I could specify separate output groups for each pair of speakers, for all of them together, and for various subsets, by allocating them to different channels (I have 6 stereo pairs, currently with three at the front, two at the side and one at the rear). I haven't tried this with different reverb for each group, but I don't see why it shouldn't work.

I am afraid I hate the HW mixer, and after setting anything up I leave it alone as much as possible as it is always a headache trying to figure out what I have routed where. However, as I now have a number of different output group configurations all on the same mixer preset it is quite easy to change the routing using the rank routing screen and to hear the changes on the fly as this doesn't involve reloading the organ or any sort of MIDI reset.

I am afraid I haven't explained this very well but I hope you get the gist.
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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 2:25 pm

That's a good point. You can, within a single preset, use different primary buses (1024) to output to the same speakers, route different organs to distinct sets of primary buses, and add different IRs and reverb settings to all. But that only makes a wet organ out of a dry one, with results like Metz or Salisbury.

What's missing is when I send IR to speakers on the other end of the room (front <---> rear) from the primary bus output to make it surround. (I send primary buses to surround buses at -24dB to suppress the dry signal when the wetness scalar is less than 100.)

One preset has only 8 intermediate and 8 master buses to do the surround IRs for all organs. So you're really limited to 16 / N surround buses, where N is the number of real stereo speaker pairs, if you want to do surround IRs. A lot less than the 1024 / N you have for wet only.
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JulianMoney-Kyrle

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostTue Aug 10, 2021 7:58 pm

I don't really have any dry organs. Some of the ones I do have have fairly short reverberation times and I have tried adding reverb to them, though I am not convinced that they sound any better for it, one exception being Anloo, which is supplied semi-dry by Prospectum with its own IR file.

I still haven't worked out the best way to set up set stereo organs with my 12-channel system. I originally got all those speakers in an attempt to reduce what I thought was intermodulation distortion when using the plenum. However, with the new sound engine in HW5 this mostly went away and now I have HW6 I can't hear it at all. It would be nice if there were a way of getting a pseudo-surround effect, and it occurred to me that one way of doing this would be for the rear channels to duplicate the front but quieter and with a slight delay. I don't know how that would work in practice as HW doesn't let you do that, and adding additional reverb, with or without a delay, to an already wet instrument doesn't sound very good at all.

What I have been doing instead is to route the Positive or equivalent division to the side speakers so they are slightly behind me, and the blower to the rear, along with certain stops that might benefit from a spatial effect, such as chamades. However, I don't think this is a definitive solution.

For six- and eight-channel organs, using the side speakers for the distant channel seems to work very well, and I am finding that these are the sample sets that I am mainly using these days as they give more of a sense of space and ambience which I think enhances the illusion of being in a larger hall or church.

As for the original topic of this thread, I am afraid that I am also guilty of having more sample sets than I can possibly play on a regular basis. It is nice, though, to be able to compare North German Baroque with Thuringian, or Silbermann with Schnitger (and with other members of their families) or with Trost or Muller or Engels, or to see how Cavaille-Coll evolved and how he voiced his organs for different acoustics. And I do like to have available some of the instruments used by M-C Alain, Koopman, Werner Jacob and others for the many recordings I have of Bach's organ works.
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Antoni Scott

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Re: How many samples… is too many?

PostSun Aug 29, 2021 11:26 am

I have asked myself the same question - How many sample sets is too many ?
I think it boils down to one seeking perfection, for which there is no answer. As technology moves forward so does sample set realism. The organ is a difficult, I would say impossible, instrument to properly sample and reproduce. All of the sample sets I own do not sound exactly the same as the original organ I have heard in person or on a video recording but some of them do sound fantastic.
On their own they are prefect practice organ and could easily stand on ther own in a church or cathedral given the right audio.
I have 20 plus sample sets But I do have a few favorites that I play 98% of the time.
1). The Sonus Paradisi Zwolle
2). The Sonus Paradisi Caen
3) The Sonus Paradisi Freiberg Silberman
4) The Sonus Paradisi St. Maximum
5) The Organ Art Media Bosch/Schnitger

Because I felt that I needed more I was able to buy a superb sample set for $40 that consisted of additional stops using the Cavaille-Coll Caen as the core plus many many more stops and an additional fourth keyboard. It is by far the largest Cavaille-Coll sounding sample set and quite spectacular.
I was considering adding the Nancy sample set because of its larger size but was not that impressed with the Youtube videos I heard.
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