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Yeah, that's happened to me several times. A few times I've been able to edit the XML files and fix it (it seems that the sample paths are case sensitive) but other times I have no idea why they don't import...
I feel your pain @Gavinski.
I try to hold my frustration back regarding Decent Sampler for a couple reasons:
I just keep pushing past the bugs… of the maybe 200 downloads many failed to install. @lasselu shares a nice tip for the technically inclined. “Case sensitivity” in file path names.
After 100 free downloads (many coming from the apps internal “store”) I relied to purchase the “Ethereal Vocal” product… it posted that my app was not set up for “licensing”… Oh oh! I left desktops to avoid licensing managers and servers. Nothing but pain for the user in many cases. Anyway, 2 weeks later the product install for $10 and I’m loving it. The best vocal sample I have on my iPad. Truly magical sound.
There are over 200 instruments downloadable from PianoBook.co.ul in Decent Sampler format. It’s become a thing… go figure because the target app is buggy and frustrating but it works about 90% of the time.
The best free samples are from “Venus Theory” and there are 10 free samples on the Decent Sampler store to serve a variety of musical applications from ethereal to drone to orchestral. Solid products all and well worth buying the paid packages. I finally felt bad and paid for one of them and support “Venus Theory” Patreon for $5 a month… lots of loops made available to me for that support and %50 off gumroad products too.
I’m sure many have been alerted that David Hilowitz doesn’t respond and his free product is just a buggy mess so act accordingly.
He’s got 176K subscribers on YouTube, 130 videos, 10 albums of music, wrote and supports Decent Sampler on IOS, Mac, Windows and the Apple Watch (beta only… just kidding). Anyway, if you see him let him know his product has bugs… I’m sure he’s heard from a few users And continues to improve his free product.
But I feel you pain. And I suspect you experience a lot of my pleasure with the sounds this piece of shit produces.
Avoid Decent Sampler until further notice… I don’t want to compete with you for download bandwidth from the servers
whoa. noob here but never knew about pianobook and was only getting decentsampler instruments through the actual app…
are you guys still using this weird roundabout way of downloading pianobook instruments on desktop and transferring them to ios or is there a way to just download and unzip them on our ipads? thanks!
Some pianobook instruments are available in DecentSampler format. You can download them in iOS, unzip (if necessary) in the Files app, then import them to DS. I guess other formats may require some roundabout methods.
Your have to change the file extension from *.zip to *.dslibrary.
I use a “Shortcuts” script called “Rename File” to do this from the zip in the Dowload directory and placing the *.dslibrary output into an “On My iPad/Decent Sampler” folder.
Then you open the “On My iPad/Decent Sampler Folder and tap on the *dslibrary file and about 80% install without errors.
I need to try XML editing on the other 20% because the biggest coolest PianoBook files usually error out like the massive Pianos that Christian put up.
NOTE: I also keep the *zip version to uncompress and re-purpose the samples in AudioLayer to make even more
Instruments. It’s easy to fill up 100’s of GB’s of storage with these habits but external SSD’s might be an option for older iPads.
awesome. thanks for the thorough directions.
figured it out!
It depends - sometimes you need to unzip the zip file first and there may be a folder in it already suffixed dslibrary. At other times you need to rename the zip file so the suffix ends in dslibrary 😂
Yeah McD...so much good stuff there.
And indeed, especially for paid stuff, better to buy on the decent Sampler website so you can hold on to your original downloaded files. Otherwise if you buy in the Decent Sampler app itself... What are you gonna do when your device breaks down? All those downloads are just sandboxed in there. Will the paid ones need to be paid for again when you change device? Hope not but given the level of bugginess of the app I'd rather not take my chances.
And again, anyone overestimating the significance of the fact this is free needs their head seen to. Not to say that's not great. It is great! But there are plenty of ways to make money and raise your profile by doing free stuff. The free stuff lures people into paying for the paid stuff. And the vast majority of the free stuff on Pianobook or Decent Sampler is created by random people around the world, not by Dave Hilowitz. This is a product and a money-making endeavour, and people should expect the product to function well, regardless of how much free stuff there is. Dave brings in $1.5k a month from patreon alone, never mind paid packs and the ad revenue that comes from a very large YouTube channel, plus the money from whatever extra work he gets due to this exposure. I'm not sure whether Decent Sampler gets a cut of sales from other makers' paid libraries but that could be another factor. This is no more a charity than Facebook is a charity, it's just a different financial model.
It will take days to download everything possible but start with all the free packages in the Decent Sampler store. There’s some gold in there. Especially the Venus Theory packs… I have been raiding them for samples and making new pairings in AudioLayer for fun. Some of his samples are 10-20 seconds long and that’s part of the difference… great fodder for ambient textures.
You have a new ipad with large ram, yes McD? I'll bet that takes away some of the ram usage pain points with DS? For those with less ram, it's worth closing other apps while trying to use Decent Sampler. Close your Internet browser etc.
There are so many incredible free packs which is why I'm tolerating the bugs. Woven Strings, Harmonic Flights, much of the Venus Theory stuff, many more. A few of Dave's packs. I LOVE his paid Metal Cups pack. 10 bucks and worth every penny to me. Just one preset but what a sound, for those who like bells.
People who like to work with one thing at a time and bounce to audio will get along a lot better with decent sampler than those of us who like big sessions in aum jamming with a few instances simultaneously.
If you do have aum sessions using multiple instances, I strongly recommend keeping a note of what is loaded in each instance, in case they load dead on reopening the session... This may be auv3 but the bugs mean you need to treat it more as iaa in some ways 😁. Well, it is what it is, for now, but I hope the bugs get ironed out. It's only been about 2 years now 😰
I get your point… I resisted risking any investment for all the reasons you mention. At this point I’ve paid for 2 packages so I’m still being cautious. I created an account at DecenSamples.com and purchased the Ethereal Vocals product for my Mac and it complained that I was not a licensed user of the software… I think there’s some lag time until the license gets updates. Anyway, the 2 store packages I have bought are now showing in my list of orders on DecentSamples.com so I’m hoping I’ll alway have access to them. I deleted Sub-Frost and was later able to download it again.
Hilowitz is pretty ambitious but as you have surmised… he’s more of a musician than a programmer so buggy software for sure.
But it seems to be improving in functionality.
I might learn how to make Decent Sampler samples and upload to PianoBook as hundreds of others have done. A lot of us enjoy just having someone appreciate our effort and the occasional thank you is enough. Coming from the Open Source world of software I get the concept of free software. I don’t begrudge Hilowitz for trying to make some income from his efforts. I don’t begrudge you for hoping to get revenue from your considerable effort making videos either.
I just hope too many don’t miss the boat on this because it’s getting 1 star reviews for bugs when it’s probably the most useful sampler because the instruments it plays are mostly free. AudioLayer is a much better piece of technology but there’s no site with it’s format and honestly I’ve had a lot of problems unloading and reloading instruments there too over the months but I always expected Harry to keep polishing it if enough people bought it. We have to support the developer through the early period to reach the goal of a solid product… this issue spans the IOS Store from Cubasis to Auria Pro to Beatmaker too … Without steady revenue a product just withers. I’m hoping @Michael’s Loopy Pro strategy keeps him funded until his kids go to college. We need to make that happen with purchases along the way.
Oh man, of COURSE he should be making money from his efforts. I’m simply making 2 points. 1. The bugs should be ironed out. Users deserve that, whether they are only downloading free stuff or paying. All the people who spend time and energy making free or paid packs deserve that (Yes, I’m also considering learning to make those packs which is one of the reasons I am pushing for this app to become less buggy) . 2. It’s free for a reason and that reason is not just for charity’s sake.
@gavinski bugs are really hard to fix if your not a great programmer. Begging for them to get ironed out doesn’t help. I imagine some programmers of IOS products are right at the edge and we keep begging them to jump into making their code AUv3’s. They think “you go first monkey boy… or just shoot me for you $8.”
Decent Sampler seems to be getting better but it’s still the buggiest free app. You get it for free and know it’s buggy.
But the sounds are so good… sometimes they just blow the good stuff like BeatHawk away with their unique beauty. I think it!s just the nature of samples… good samples make the sound if the app doesn’t crash or add clicks.
Anyway… keep on those developers for being lazy and entertaining more bugs.
All software has bugs and Apple changes the OS to help grow new batches. It never ends.
Memory safe programming languages are reported to help… I wonder if Apple will make one. The hotness is something called Rust. Fewer bugs they claim.
Gave up on DS ages ago. I don't have the time to muck about with software that is buggy, even if it is free.
Sad to hear there are still problems with it.
I'm not finding Harmonic Flights (or Flight Harmonics) anywhere for Decent Sampler, sadly. Only as a Spitfire Labs pack.
I honestly agree to 100%.
As I see it MPE is mostly suitable for 'lead type sounds' and for those who wish to emulate 'string instruments' etc. with key note articulations.
Most real-world examples I've seen of MPE usage are for per-note pitch-bends and per-note pressure for timbre control.
Poly after-touch never really took off (some say it was too expensive to implement) and most keyboard today lack basic after-touch since they are most of the time treated as 'sound modules'.
My guess is that part of the 'I wan't MPE for everything' has to do with the fact that someone got an over-priced controller with almost no apps the fully use them with
Strange, it seems not to be there any more. Maybe he took it away from Pianobook in protest at Christian Henson’s views on trans rights, as Venus Theory and presumably some others have, because it was there a month or two ago.
I respectfully disagree. MPE can be great for expressive pads etc.
The use case for MPE is when someone wants pitchbend per note. It allows those steel guitar effects where the 3rd of a chord moves to the suspended 4th and back between a static root and 5th. A sampler is good the handle that request but MPE does support bending up to 24 steps I think so sampled sounds become pretty strange when pitch shifted too far.
Decent Sample installed free with the free content in the app itself is a powerful tool for ambient pads… lots of atmospheric content. No logins required except an Apple ID to get the app. We have all allowed that level of intrusion.
It can be great on many types of sound/instrument, and for anyone who has an appreciation for being able to modulate sound in a way that many musicians/performers have been able to do for centuries.
I am getting the error message "ERROR: the operating system has notified us that we are using too much RAM. We are going to unload the current preset" - nearly every time I use "decent" sampler. Becoming a bit of a joke...
I agree with @Gavinski , that , free or not, this app really needs sorting out.
In the current project, I have 2 instances of DS open, one going through Fluss processor, the other going through Undulator. They are being sequenced by Zoa, via Cality. Hardly pushing the DSP to the max is it?
Boring.
It's not about dsp unfortunately, it's about ram. And then there's just the bugs etc too. But yeah even on the relatively decent 3rd gen Pro I run into constant problems with this app, even sometimes with just one instance.
Gave up on using this app on Mac and iPad. Instead I started doing straightforward conversions of the patches in audiolayer which is quite easy but time consuming (less time consuming than dealing with the bugs in DS though). Now I’m far beyond simple conversions for audiolayer: I edit the samples, correct star, end, dc bias, level, noise and mix different samples together to get sounds that fit my needs.
All the time you spend in DS: lost work because of crashes, settings not loading with the project, broken import and patch loading, etc. All that time lost would be better used just converting fo4 audiolayer. Most DS patches are very basic anyways.
The total RAM used by all instances of DS has exceeded the space the system allows for one AUv3. Hard to know what that number is, or if it varies with device, etc. Unfortunately, some of the available presets are pretty huge, since they are built for computers. There's not much the DS developer can do about that. At least you get a message; sometimes AUv3 are simply killed, with no indication of why.
You can get details about instance RAM usage under “Files…” -> “Preferences…” -> Engine
You can also force Disk Streaming or RAM by not using Auto but I suspect Auto is best.
I think the reputation of this app is pretty well fixed… too bad because it’s making good music for me and seems to be improving.
Making instruments in AudioLayer has a learning curve. AudioLayer is rock solid but there’s just not much content available.
SFZ and EXS formatted instruments are the best option.
I haven’t looked at the licenses of the PianoBook stuff to see if re-purposing the samples is OK. I am moving around some Venus Theory samples to see how he makes his PAD’s. He uses long samples that bloom over a 5-10 second key press.
I think the auto-sampler function in AudioLayer is the way to build similar instruments really fast.
@coniferprod of SynthJacker fame is considering making a *ds.library packaged output option. I hope he does. Decent Sampler
Is very good for anyone on a budget. Its content can be totally free. Just the free options in it’s store can make a good base for
Ambient with some good pianos and strings too.
Thanks @Gavinski and @uncledave fr explaining the dsp/ram thing, makes sense now. And thanks for the engine prefs tip @McD , will look into that
For anyone interest in making Decent Sampler formatted content this is a good place to start:
https://www.decentsamples.com/blog/
The developer seems to be active adding features and fixing bugs:
Yes, that will be really great if synthjacker gets that function. I still have hope for Decent Sampler. As Dave said, with the ram issues at least, there's not much the dev can do, although perhaps he could make a vid - if he hasn't - in trying to optimise the library building process so they play nice on our iOS devices. But ram is not the only issue with the app.
Using Decent Sampler as the input to AudioLayer with the auto-sampler is a good way to keep the sound and swap the engine… you also get more AUv3 RAM between the 2 products in production which is useful on iPads with a lot of RAM like the Pro models.
This is good info. From a rudimentary test, this looks like the total memory used by all instances. I had 3 instances in AUM, and each reported about 241 MB. Removed two instances and the reported value dropped to 144 MB. Obviously, the first instance includes the code and its data; the others will just add data. So a little test loading would let you determine the memory requirement for any combo of presets.