Members Anderton Posted October 4, 2006 Author Members Share Posted October 4, 2006 There is no Mac support, it's Windows only. However, I would assume it works under Boot Camp...not that it does you any good if you're, say, a DP or Logic user. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted October 4, 2006 Author Members Share Posted October 4, 2006 But one other thing...just as people bought PCs just to run Giga and use it as a "hardware sampler," it would make sense to do the same thing with the X2 if you're really into it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members the otter Posted October 4, 2006 Members Share Posted October 4, 2006 Originally posted by Anderton But one other thing...just as people bought PCs just to run Giga and use it as a "hardware sampler," it would make sense to do the same thing with the X2 if you're really into it. I reread what you typed... "if you're really into it".... so my first "opening line" was kind of off the mark. Nice. but here... No it doesn't make sense and EMU is basically snubbing Mac users. I use mac because I like mac.. I don't want a windows machine. How does this compare to a Korg Oasys (PCI version)? Why not just get another mac and a used Oasys card? It can be used a sampler and so much more Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted October 5, 2006 Author Members Share Posted October 5, 2006 > Not sure what you mean by this... > It takes more effort to support two platforms and E-Mu has always been a PC-centric company. I presume they don't want to have to spread their resources over two platforms, but maybe someone from E-Mu could speak to that. I also don't know whether it will run under Parallels or Boot Camp; my Mac is a dual G5 so I use it solely for Mac functions, not emulating PCs. > I'm pretty sure the Oasys PCI card drivers do not support OS X. You're probably better off with Mach5, Kontakt, HALion, etc. or some other sampler that runs on the Mac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 6, 2006 Members Share Posted October 6, 2006 I recently got a 1212m and bought the X2 a couple of days afterward in a rare lapse of self discipline. I must say that the 1212m is the best sounding card I have ever used, and Craig's comments regarding it, and the x2, are right on the money. Having never used emu products before (the Emulators were a bit out of my price range when they were in production), I'm still coming to grips with the way they do things; the interfaces are a bit different than what I am used to. I have already used it to (succesfully) tackle editing a sample set that was giving me some trouble on Halion, and came away quite impressed with the whole deal. Sample importing is mostly straightforward and it has tools that help quite a bit with the process. Both products are exceptionally good... the only gripes I have are with the gui's and general ergonomics; for example, they are not resizable and are difficult for me to read at high screen resolutions (I just change the display res temporarily), you can't hear pitch adjustments to samples in realtime which made it a pain to tune the solo violin I was working on, etc... there are other idiosyncracies, but it's getting late and I write very slowly. In any case the quirks are not showstoppers (by any means), and I would certainly buy these products again if given the choice, and would recommend them highly. Anyway, thanks to Craig A for a very useful and interesting review (there will be more of this I hope?) and to emu for some very cool and useful (and great sounding) stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dino321 Posted October 6, 2006 Members Share Posted October 6, 2006 tarvini, You don't by any chance have any Gigastudio samples to try importing do you? I have the Proteus XLE and am very happy with it. I really like their "usable dongle" scheme. I have a mountain of headaches trying to run Gigastudio 3 with Sonar and am wondering if I could successfully run my Giga samples in Emulator X. Dean Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted October 6, 2006 Author Members Share Posted October 6, 2006 >I would definitely recommend stretching the extra $$ for the "m" versions with the better mic pres. What you get in return is worth it.>Yes, and thanks for bringing that up. I was raised on the Emulator many years ago, so for me, it was more like hooking up with an old friend. As a result, I cannot look at the GUI from a neophyte standpoint. I CAN look at the soundcard GUI from a neophyte standpoint, and at first, I found it very confusing. Eventually I wrapped my head around it, but (for example) expected that when I clicked on the FX button that I would be able to choose FX, not just see them. >E-Mu...are you listening? I mentioned how hard it is to read the labels, and apparently I'm not alone. I would strongly suggest ditching any aesthetic concerns in the X3 or x2.1 or whatever and making the knob/button labels LEGIBLE!>And you need to hit play when you change sample loop start or end using the loop markers, although if you change the loop time by adusting the loop start or loop end numeric fields, you can hear the changes in real time. I'm with you -- these aren't dealbreakers, but it takes a little effort to get used to how it works. >This is nowhere near ending I haven't hit the Twistaloop feature, and I didn't get to post my sample editing screen shots before leaving for AES. There will be plenty more...the deeper I dig into the X2, the more I find.I even have it installed on my laptop, but given how nuts AES is, I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do with the X2. HOWEVER -- E-Mu will be at AES, so if you have any tough questions, post 'em and I'll get an answer for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dragonfyre Posted October 6, 2006 Members Share Posted October 6, 2006 Originally posted by Anderton It takes more effort to support two platforms and E-Mu has always been a PC-centric company. Being a fan of the E-Mu products and their filters, I also would love to use this on my Mac. Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember the original Emulator editing software was Mac based ONLY. This complete PC-based product line was fairly recent. Oh well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Tony Scharf Posted October 6, 2006 Members Share Posted October 6, 2006 Ive been a big fan of the Emulator X software since it came out (I grew up on EMU samplers) and the X2's features (including their bringing back transform multiplication) look really sweet... anyway, I believe that the fact EMU is actually owned by Creative Labs, who made their mark on the world by selling (you guessed it) Sound Blaster cards for the PC may have a lot to do with why they are PC only. I dont believe creative makes anything for the mac, at least not that I am aware of. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 6, 2006 Members Share Posted October 6, 2006 Originally posted by Dino321 tarvini, You don't by any chance have any Gigastudio samples to try importing do you? I have the Proteus XLE and am very happy with it. I really like their "usable dongle" scheme. I have a mountain of headaches trying to run Gigastudio 3 with Sonar and am wondering if I could successfully run my Giga samples in Emulator X.Dean The only .gig files I have at the moment are the freebies which came with GS3 Solo. Just after I got the 1212m/X2, I tried to import a few of the instruments which came with GS3 and can safely say that none of them were successful (it imported the samples but didn't create the presets correctly... could have been my ignorance). I'll try again when I get a chance (now that I've had X2 for a few days) and post the results here afterward, if the moderators allow. But, I strongly suspect that you will need something like ChickenSys's Translator to help things along, especially if you have complex libraries to translate. Even with Translator (or whatever) I would expect to have to do a fair amount of work to get things right, at least that has been my experience so far with this sort of thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 7, 2006 Members Share Posted October 7, 2006 Originally posted by Dino321 tarvini, You don't by any chance have any Gigastudio samples to try importing do you?... I tried this tonight; here are some notes I took along the way:- Drag and dropped the Megapiano-II off the GS3 Solo 'content' cd- The conversion completed with no errors- It created a bank called MegaPiano-II.exb - It created a preset within the bank called MegaPiano-II as expected but produces no sound, hmmm...- All of the converted samples are in the samples folder (several hundred/numbered 00-105 for each velocity layer) but 'Voices and Zones' has no voices or zones allocated, so of course there is no sound (ps - why isn't the keyboard at the bottom live?)- No problem, I thought, I'll just move the first 106 samples (chromatically as the lowest velocity layer) into a new zone* As far as I can tell, you cannot select multiple samples and drag them into a zone/region/whatever (say it isn't so ... please)- Tried another GS3 instrument (DX7classic), got same results- Tried another (Composer's Choice... a solo violin), got same results- Tried another (World Percussion), got same results- At this point it seems safe to say that GS3 files do not work with the converter (unless I'm missing something of course... maybe these files are copy protected and that is interfering with the process)HOWEVER... GS2 WORKS:Trying to convert a GigaStudio2 (GS2) file was the the next logical step, so I converted an instrument from the Roland LCDX-04 CD (using Translator - a sample conversion pgm by ChickenSys) to GS2 format. I am pleased to say that this worked very well. The loops were perfect, the tuning was perfect, the only change I had to make was to remove a highpass filter that it applied improperly. So, there is some hope I'm a couple of hours into this and out of time, so I'll leave it at that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 7, 2006 Members Share Posted October 7, 2006 Originally posted by Anderton ... E-Mu will be at AES, so if you have any tough questions, post 'em and I'll get an answer for you. Well, this might be an easy one, but anyway... If I have hundreds of samples to assign to a zone, for example, a typical velocity-layed piano sample, and they are already in a patch (with no zones defined) is there no way to pull more than one at a time (as a chromatic range or spread by their original pitch like in the synthswipe routines) from the 'Samples' folder into a zone??? This was actually the situation for me after attempting to import a GS3 piano earlier tonight (please see my earlier post) and I could not see how to do it. There are ways around this of course, if it can't be done directly. Thanks ps - don't let up on E-mu on the font-sizes/screen-scaling... they need to show some mercy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dino321 Posted October 8, 2006 Members Share Posted October 8, 2006 Originally posted by tarvini The only .gig files I have at the moment are the freebies which came with GS3 Solo. Just after I got the 1212m/X2, I tried to import a few of the instruments which came with GS3 and can safely say that none of them were successful (it imported the samples but didn't create the presets correctly... could have been my ignorance).I'll try again when I get a chance (now that I've had X2 for a few days) and post the results here afterward, if the moderators allow. But, I strongly suspect that you will need something like ChickenSys's Translator to help things along, especially if you have complex libraries to translate. Even with Translator (or whatever) I would expect to have to do a fair amount of work to get things right, at least that has been my experience so far with this sort of thing. Thanks tarvini. That's what I needed to know. I have GS3 files and EMU told me that Chicken Systems is the one that did their conversion routines. Perhaps the full version of Translator would do it but after hearing of your problems I've decided get the upgrade to the VST version of Gigasampler ($125 for GS3 owners). I don't expect to have driver probems with the VST version and that should solve my GS library needs. Thanks again. Dean Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wooden Posted October 9, 2006 Members Share Posted October 9, 2006 I have the 1616m and it came with proteus x le. When i have proteus x le running within cubase i experiment a noticeable latency while other vsti's in the same project dont present this problem. I have my asio latency at 10ms for real time playing, that is when this issue happens. HAve any one ran into this? would this be an issue with emulator x2? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Tony Scharf Posted October 9, 2006 Members Share Posted October 9, 2006 are you running off of disk or RAM? I have Emultor X, and there is definitely more latency when running it from disk. Of course, you need to have a lot of ram for the samples to live in as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wooden Posted October 11, 2006 Members Share Posted October 11, 2006 well no, i am not running out of ram or disk. ANyway it is so wierd that i have created a project with just proteus x le and pro 53, proteus and fm7, and when i play native instruments VSTi's everything is ok, but when i play proteus le it has noticeable latency. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Tony Scharf Posted October 11, 2006 Members Share Posted October 11, 2006 Originally posted by wooden well no, i am not running out of ram or disk. ANyway it is so wierd that i have created a project with just proteus x le and pro 53, proteus and fm7, and when i play native instruments VSTi's everything is ok, but when i play proteus le it has noticeable latency. I dont think you understood me. are you running the emulator X so that it loads its samples into RAM or streams them off of your hard disk? If your streaming from hard disk, you can definitely get some latency issues. I usually run from RAM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wooden Posted October 11, 2006 Members Share Posted October 11, 2006 Yeah i missunderstood, but i was asking about proteus x le, and wondering if this would be a issue with emulator, because while it is just a little bit noticeable, it is noticeable and bothers me. Thanks, i learned something from yout answers though. So you can use disk streamming or ram streamming using the same samples? nice Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted October 13, 2006 Author Members Share Posted October 13, 2006 I talked to the E-Mu folks at AES, and they said the legibility thing was due to being locked in to bit-mapped graphics, which is something they plan to change in the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 14, 2006 Members Share Posted October 14, 2006 Originally posted by Anderton I talked to the E-Mu folks at AES, and they said the legibility thing was due to being locked in to bit-mapped graphics, which is something they plan to change in the future. That's what I thought... thanks for asking. I sent them a list of concerns and this one was featured prominently, since it causes me actual physical discomfort (muh seein' ain't too good now); however, it is probably fine for those with younger eyeballs. They responded quickly with sensible responses, and promised to pass my thoughts and (brilliant) suggestions for improvement on to the appropriate people... good enough. On the more positive side, I have since made a few more multisamples with the X2. A basic couple-of-samples-per-octave-type multisample can be created *very* quickly, thanks to the Split-at-silence/spread-by-pitch routines; I can just record a bunch of notes to a single wav file and split them automatically... *very* nice. Modulation routing is intuitive and extremely flexible. The filters work well... lotsa good stuff, as well as a few quirks to spice things up. I'll let Craig take it from here, I reckon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted October 14, 2006 Author Members Share Posted October 14, 2006 > Hey, a Pro Review is all about interaction!! Feel free to weigh in as much as you'd like. You have some good observations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 14, 2006 Members Share Posted October 14, 2006 Originally posted by Anderton >Hey, a Pro Review is all about interaction!! Feel free to weigh in as much as you'd like. You have some good observations. Thanks Craig, I will be working more with X2 over the weekend, so I'll try to have something for show-and-tell. PS - there aren't many people to ask this question of: I am using pitchbend (with a guitar+breath controller) to do slurs and vibrato, etc, with solo orchestral instruments, among other things; it works great except that the samples don't 'stretch' with the pitchbend, and sound less than optimal as a result (particularly with > Major 2nd hammer on's) ... do you know of ANYthing -- software or hardware -- which compensates for this in realtime? I've piddled a bit with X2's 'Twist a Loop' but may not have the hang of it yet. Thanks again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wooden Posted October 15, 2006 Members Share Posted October 15, 2006 Could someone post clips of the sound library? pianos, organs, brasses, strings? Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 16, 2006 Members Share Posted October 16, 2006 Originally posted by wooden Could someone post clips of the sound library?pianos, organs, brasses, strings?Thanks. Here's a sample of the excellent piano (definitely NOT played by me). Uploaded attachments are limited to 100k or so here so I posted it at the link below (there is also a little clip of a Proteus2k acoustic guitar on the same page which I did with MIDI guitar). On the piano, I used the first patch in the set (sorry forgot the name) and kept the velocities below the highest velocity layer of the sound (which is a bit unbalanced with the others I think); BTW, the piano is capable of sounding wildly different than the clip I posted. On the guitar, I only made a small adjustment to the decay, which was too short originally. The strings are excellent-sounding; they don't have multiple articulations, but do have multiple sections with different sized groups so you can do divisi, etc. I doubt I will have time anytime soon to demonstrate them... perhaps someone else has a demo they can render. The Proteus 2000 sounds are just like the Rompler's I believe (and there are a bunch of them... with lots of bass and organ and brass)... . The presets sound very good for their size (the samples are teeny tiny) and also when compared to other romplers of the era. On the negative side, I noticed a lot of variation in the velocity response across the patches, so some will probably require adjustment (big deal); Anyway, Buying the X2 for the "presets" is missing the point, in my opinion, since it seems to be geared more toward producing your own. It's a very useful sound bundle, for me, particularly the piano and strings. I ain't complainin'. * there are basically three packages in the sound bundle: a piano (with multiple variations), strings (also with variations plus sections are broken out), and the entire (I think) Proteus2000 soundset ...no more time to piddle, sadly http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=614318 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tarvini Posted October 18, 2006 Members Share Posted October 18, 2006 Where did everyone go??? If it was because of the little demo clips, I promise not to make any more. On the other hand, maybe E-mu would *pay* me to stop... "Honey, I'm quitting my job..." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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