Any advantage to converting Decent Sampler instruments to AudioLayer? [Yes!]

[Deleted User]

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jo92346

Audiolayer offers more velocity layering options and round robins but lacks proper layer switching based on custom CC. (That the dev promised months ago and is still not there)

I converted my pianos patches for audiolayer )and other percussive instruments: glocks, vibraphones etc.)

For strings and evolving instruments with layers that require CC switching / cross fading I don’t like audiolayer and prefer using obsidian despite its only 3 layers.

I don’t like Decentsampler on iPad. It seems poorly optimized.

Paulo164

Biggest advantage is per-voice LP filtering assignable to velocity or mod wheel, essential for expressivity.
Auto-sampling a patch takes 5 minutes and a coffee.

[Deleted User]

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jo92346

You can assign a low pass filter on each zone. I personally don’t like the way it is implemented and I don’t use it. It sounds very digital which could be perfect for out of the world sounds but I don’t like it on real instruments imitations.

tahiche

Hadn’t thought about this. An obvious advantage would be that Audiolayer lets you keep patches on an external drive or iCloud. If you’re short on space, like I am, it’s a must.

Paulo164

@jo92346 said:
You can assign a low pass filter on each zone. I personally don’t like the way it is implemented and I don’t use it. It sounds very digital which could be perfect for out of the world sounds but I don’t like it on real instruments imitations.

Personally I find it very convincing on stuffs like strings or choirs but would be interested to know how you consider this feature could be better implemented.

@tahiche said:
Hadn’t thought about this. An obvious advantage would be that Audiolayer lets you keep patches on an external drive or iCloud. If you’re short on space, like I am, it’s a must.

Yes, external storage is a big plus.
Also, the auto-sampling feature is so great…

I think a big move still would be pitch shifting algorithm, to stretch samples over several keys without changing the timing. Virsyn has already the tech in his other apps. Or something like Tomofon for wave morphing, we can dream…
MPE support…
Ok, I stop 😅

HotStrange

@JMmusic said:
What is per-voice LP filtering?

Each individual voice passes through a low pass filter. Like a real poly synth.

[Deleted User]

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jo92346

@Paulo164 said:

Personally I find it very convincing on stuffs like strings or choirs but would be interested to know how you consider this feature could be better implemented.

I just said I don’t like the way it is implemented, not that it is bad. It is very far from the user interfaces I’m used to coming from hardware samplers I’ve been using since 85 and then Kontakt.
It could be better for my personal use if it was more like obsidian with total control of midi CC routing and modulation routing, and with the same pages system.

My dream sampler on iOS would be obsidian with the sample streaming, zones, layers, round robin and samples management from audiolayer.

But it’s only me. My own personal tastes in user interface don’t matter.

jo92346

@JMmusic said:
With the modwheel set at let’s say 50%, then filters tied to it would be at let’s say 1kHz. Since all the individual zone filters are set the same would it sound different than one filter on the instrument level set at 1kHz?

I’m not sure I’m understanding the benefit of per zone filter settings, unless they all have a different frequency setting setting for the modwheel input.

All the individual zone can have their own filter settings. Zone 1 can be 24db low pass set to 900hz, mod wheel set to 50% and zone 2 can be 12db Band pass set to 2khz mod wheel set to 0 and key track set to 24% if you want to.

[Deleted User]

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jo92346

@JMmusic : I used than on one of my piano patch: it is 5 velocities layers, 5 samples for one note, no RR, and a double set of pedal samples.
Rather than using key track to set the low pass on each layer I set that at zone level. Took literally hours, but each note is perfectly filtered according to my taste and the filter curve along the keys is not a simple straight line, mine is more S shaped. I can also change all those filters globally with the mod wheel to make it brighter or darker.
The amazing thing is that audiolayer doesn’t seem to struggle with that, cpu usage remains super low whatever I’m playing.

I admit it’s a bit overkill and likely no one would care.

Paulo164

Assigning filter per zone allows for example to tame some samples that are brighter than others.
Or you can set the amount of modulation higher for certain parts of the keyboard. This can also be obtained somehow at layer level with the "keytrack" parameter.
Finally, you can set different mod wheel modulations for each layer, which is not possible at instrument level.
Ex : one layer gets brighter when modwheel is on and one another layer stay untouched or less brighter.
Also, compared to DS, Audiolayer allows to modulate filtering according to an enveloppe. The enveloppe can also be assigned to modwheel.

[Deleted User]

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jo92346

It is still worth it reprogramming DS patches for audiolayer (or obsidian) And it isn’t very complicated after your rename the samples so AL imports them in batch and assigns the zones automatically.
DS uses lot of processing power, I can never use 2 instances at the same time without experiencing crashes, glitches and slow downs.

espiegel123

@JMmusic said:
It would take some work to do, so wondering if there is an advantage in AudioLayer over DS.

AudioLayer doesn’t need to load all the samples into memory. If I recall correctly, DS has heavier memory requirements.

[Deleted User]

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Gavinski

DS is indeed extremely heavy on ram - constantly stops working due to memory issues, so I might be considering converting some of my fave decent Sampler patches to Audiolayer too

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Gavinski

@JMmusic said:
I wondered about RAM use too, so I’ve tried changing DS preferences to disk stream, unchecking Auto, and setting buffers to around 12.5k-25k but it still seems crashy.

Also I’ve noticed some multi-mic layered libraries will have some distortion when played loudly. If I turn down the volume levels of the individual layers it seems to fix it, so not sure if this is an issue with DS or not?

And another…MIDI learn cannot be un-set.

Reported these to David Hilowitz via the Decent Sampler website contact page

I've reported a ton of problems about Decent Sampler to the dev, as have many people over the year or two it's been out. I suspect he is willing to fix them but either doesn't have the time or the coding skills. The distortion thing is annoying as hell and doesn't happen with kontakt libraries using the exact same samples, according to @enkaytee's investigations. I also played around with settings but haven't found anything that consistently works yet. It's such a pity as some of the packs available are truly excellent.

bleep

@jo92346 said:
It is still worth it reprogramming DS patches for audiolayer (or obsidian) And it isn’t very complicated after your rename the samples so AL imports them in batch and assigns the zones automatically.
DS uses lot of processing power, I can never use 2 instances at the same time without experiencing crashes, glitches and slow downs.

Best advice for renaming and other choices when going DS to AL?

jo92346

@bleep said:
Best advice for renaming and other choices when going DS to AL?

I usually create different folders for different velocity layers: samplename_notename-velocity.fileformat like piano_A3_100.aif

Lot of sample pack for DS suffer some terrible variations in recording level, DC bias is very often not adjusted, same with sample start - end. I usually rework these samples to adjust level, dc bias, start and end. Saves time in audiolayer were you only have to work out the loop point if needed.

[Deleted User]

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espiegel123

@JMmusic said:
Realizing this is biting off more than I want to chew.
porting over libraries with looping means setting up loop points for 50 or more samples…too much for me I’m afraid.

If the samples have loop points already set in the audio files, I believe AudioLayer uses them.

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Gavinski

@JMmusic said:
Alrighty - so I am attempting to bring Woven Strings over to AudioLayer. Not too bad so far actually.
The sample file names had the note numbers in them, so getting the samples placed on the correct note/zone could be done in one import step.

I'm now setting up the start and end points and the loop start and end points for each sample. Not as bad as I thought. Takes about 3-5 minutes per sample.

What is nice is the DSPreset file can be renamed to a .txt file and opened. Then all the loop points and other parameters are listed out - just have to set them up in AudioLayer. Actually found the DSPreset loop points are not at zero crossings, so I could adjust them a little bit.

The only thing I've struggle with is the crossfade is shown as a number of samples in the DSPreset (10,000 in Woven Strings case on all the samples). I couldn't quite see how to set the green point to exactly 10000 samples, so I just slide the green dot to about 0.2s (0.2s = 1/48000 * 10000). There's a time scale at the bottom of the sample edit window, but there's no scale for samples (unless I missed a setting).

I actually like creating this in AL, so I will probably try another PianoBook library.

I just got too fed up with DS crashing
Also, what's nice is I can adjust things in AL that aren't as easy to adjust in DS, such as loop point, envelope settings, FX.

Yeah, I'm really pissed off with Decent Sampler even though I love it. I had an aum session saved with 5 ds instances. Have tried to open it a few times and they all open crashed - no way to see what library or preset was loaded in each one. Going forward, when I save an aum session with decent Sampler instances I'm going to make a note of what preset is loaded in each.

Still also regularly get the bug where, opening an aum session, the first instance is crashed but the others OK. Also if I switch out to another app, I almost invariably get at least one of the ds instances losing ram and needing to be reloaded. Great sounds, shit user experience.

How long did it take you altogether to import woven strings into Audiolayer?

[Deleted User]

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Gavinski

@JMmusic said:
I could never use more than 1-2 instances of DS, or crash fest.

In AL conversion, I didn’t keep good track of time, but I think it was about 2 hours. Some of that was learning some stuff in AL, so I’ll probably get a little faster on the next one.

I noticed Woven Strings has two presets, Woven Strings and CH Stereo Woven Strings. I checked the DS code and it looks like to me like CH Stereo has three layers, 1 normal layer , 1 pitched up and panned left, and 1 pitched down and panned right. It’s easy to do in AL - once the base layer is set, duplicate the layer and set the layers pitch and pan settings. Adds some nice depth. But…when I play this preset in DS I can’t hear the pitched up and down layers!
I think there’s a bug in the code…group header shown tuning=0 (blue arrow) overriding the individual lines showing tuning=-1

Glad I moved it to AL to be able to fix it!

I’d like to try NFO Chamber Strings next, but there are a lot of samples with loops point settings

These unfortunately are really the kind of tasks I don't like doing! Feels too much like admin. I wonder if we could make a community project where everyone interested converts one DS library to Audiolayer and we all share them! I would need to learn Audiolayer first but I reckon it would be worth it

Krupa

@Gavinski said:

@JMmusic said:
I could never use more than 1-2 instances of DS, or crash fest.

In AL conversion, I didn’t keep good track of time, but I think it was about 2 hours. Some of that was learning some stuff in AL, so I’ll probably get a little faster on the next one.

I noticed Woven Strings has two presets, Woven Strings and CH Stereo Woven Strings. I checked the DS code and it looks like to me like CH Stereo has three layers, 1 normal layer , 1 pitched up and panned left, and 1 pitched down and panned right. It’s easy to do in AL - once the base layer is set, duplicate the layer and set the layers pitch and pan settings. Adds some nice depth. But…when I play this preset in DS I can’t hear the pitched up and down layers!
I think there’s a bug in the code…group header shown tuning=0 (blue arrow) overriding the individual lines showing tuning=-1

Glad I moved it to AL to be able to fix it!

I’d like to try NFO Chamber Strings next, but there are a lot of samples with loops point settings

These unfortunately are really the kind of tasks I don't like doing! Feels too much like admin. I wonder if we could make a community project where everyone interested converts one DS library to Audiolayer and we all share them! I would need to learn Audiolayer first but I reckon it would be worth it

Good idea, a basic tutorial would be a prerequisite to this working well (possibly but not necessarily a video one, just a list of instructions would be great). I’d like to use audio layer more, and cross platform and I love the piano book library but just can’t be bothered using it because decent sampler just ain’t…

Gavinski

@Krupa said:

@Gavinski said:

@JMmusic said:
I could never use more than 1-2 instances of DS, or crash fest.

In AL conversion, I didn’t keep good track of time, but I think it was about 2 hours. Some of that was learning some stuff in AL, so I’ll probably get a little faster on the next one.

I noticed Woven Strings has two presets, Woven Strings and CH Stereo Woven Strings. I checked the DS code and it looks like to me like CH Stereo has three layers, 1 normal layer , 1 pitched up and panned left, and 1 pitched down and panned right. It’s easy to do in AL - once the base layer is set, duplicate the layer and set the layers pitch and pan settings. Adds some nice depth. But…when I play this preset in DS I can’t hear the pitched up and down layers!
I think there’s a bug in the code…group header shown tuning=0 (blue arrow) overriding the individual lines showing tuning=-1

Glad I moved it to AL to be able to fix it!

I’d like to try NFO Chamber Strings next, but there are a lot of samples with loops point settings

These unfortunately are really the kind of tasks I don't like doing! Feels too much like admin. I wonder if we could make a community project where everyone interested converts one DS library to Audiolayer and we all share them! I would need to learn Audiolayer first but I reckon it would be worth it

Good idea, a basic tutorial would be a prerequisite to this working well (possibly but not necessarily a video one, just a list of instructions would be great). I’d like to use audio layer more, and cross platform and I love the piano book library but just can’t be bothered using it because decent sampler just ain’t…

True, maybe someone who understands the process well already could write that list