It’s possible to download individual instrument libraries so you don’t have to grab the lot in one go.
The sound libraries can be downloaded from your user area of the website and at full stretch will use 256GB of hard drive space, though the library can be offloaded onto a secondary or external hard drive, thankfully. There’s up to 200GB of new content (depending on which version you buy) comprised of over 90,000 new samples, covering keyboards, brass, strings, drums, synths, vocals, percussion and much more. It’s smoother and more slick throughout, and feels great to use.
their download of 5 EP models requires a total of 1.6 gb of storage, so none of them can be that large.The first thing you notice is that version 4 is now scalable - the interface has been vectorised so that it can be freely resized (although there is a minimum window size) to suit any screen.
(They still haven't applied that tech to their EPs. Unless maybe that 14 gb of data includes different sample sets (different mic positions, for example), and still no one set is terribly large? But if they are indeed truly streaming from storage in real time, I think they're the only iOS developer doing it. But then Crudebyte came out with their Colossus Concert Grand which includes about 14 gb of data. Or maybe there was a hardware bottleneck of some sort in the design. I was thinking maybe iOS simply didn't support that kind of streaming, on a system level. I suspect they were using lossless compression rather than true streaming. Then there were a couple that had larger sets, but not enormously so. For a long time, there were no apps that used sample sets bigger than what fit in available RAM, typically a few hundred megabytes tops. It is interesting that large streaming samples are so rare under iOS. I'm sure it won't be too long before we have larger EPs to match the >1GB APs. I'd looked at bs-16i and Soundfont Pro, neither of which can stream, but I'll checkout the others. Thanks for the suggestions for SoundFont Players. As long as you stick with apps that have their own MIDI channel settings, combining multiple apps can be pretty straight-forward. An app like iMidiPatchbay can smooth the process or integrating multiple apps, it basically brings them into a single environment for patch selection (most apps are compatible), or you might not even need that if your keyboard allows you to easily select/store MIDI transmission channels and Program Changes. Running multiple apps at once (within the limits of your particular i-device) will probably get you better results than trying to rely on one app for everything, whether you replace Sampletank or merely supplement it. Sampletank doesn't even have IK's own best EPs, those are in a separate app (iElectric). The all-the-sounds-in-one-app approach tends to fall into the classic category of jack of all trades, master of none. Neo Soul Keys is my favourite of a mediocre bunch. I wish I'd saved the $20 for a nice bottle of red.įor iOS we have a couple of great APs (Ravenscroft and Ivory Steinway) but the EPs are still substandard. The sounds take me back to my 1994 Kurzweil PC88 - I was hoping we'd moved beyond this on the iPad. With only 3 discernible velocity layers, they have very obvious breaks and don't bark when you want to dig in. The AP is OK but the EPs just don't cut it. Overall a nice interface but I'm very underwhelmed with the sounds.
I downloaded the free version yesterday and bought the Pro Classic Keys upgrade.