New piano VI: Sonuscore Chroma

EB5AGV

A new kid on the block, this one based on the Yamaha C3

Pete14

Oh no, not another one!😉

dore_m

Yamaha C3 is a 6'1" piano - pretty small. I have a hard time nowadays reading through the superlatives and marketing-speak used for these libraries. I read these things with a grain of salt.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but when I read 11Gb space, 4 microphones positions, 23 layers and 8 round robins, and multiple articulations, something doesn't add up.

My sampling template:
28 keys/layer x 7 layers x 6 mic pairs x 2 pedalup/down = 2352 long samples -- about 4Gb

Sonuscore Chroma Spec (some assumed):
88 keys x 23 layers x 8 round robins x 4 mic pairs x 2 pedalup/down = 129,536 long samples -- 11Gb (???)

Either they don't sample all 88 keys, or the 23 layers are virtual layers, or the round robins are not every key. Something is misleading here.

CyberGene

dore_m Maybe some clever compression for the shippable package?

I've always wondered if it's possible to use an adaptable bit-depth compression because a piano sample is always an attack followed by a sound that gradually fades out. So, you don't need the 16-bit resolution throughout the entire sample, you can remove bits off gradually. And for quite dynamics you won't even need to start with the full 16-bit resolution. Not sure how much space that would save though.

dore_m

@CyberGene I thought about compression too. I think Kontakt's lossless compression only saves about 25%. Maybe more likely that they state "at least 11Gb" space" means you can only load 8 layers and 1 round robin unless you have more space. But still, the entire library, by my estimation should be 220Gb, without the articulations.

CyberGene

dore_m I meant the compression used for creating the installer. For instance, Garritan CFX Full installer is 20 GB if I'm not mistaken but when installed it takes more than 120 GB. So, it's some very heavy compression, probably including piano-heuristics such as the fact piano samples are always fading, etc. and it doesn't need to be one that performs well realtime since it's only used to create a small installer and the decompression can take a lot (I recently reinstalled Garritan CFX on my old Mac Mini and it took probably 30 minutes) but it doesn't matter. However for realtime usage the compression cannot be very CPU-taxing since the CPU is already precious for processing a lot of streaming.

dore_m

@CyberGene Thanks for the clarification, I was talking apples to oranges.

But after reading what you meant and thinking about it, I realized that I stated my COMPRESSED download size and not the uncompressed sample library size, which is more like 17 Gb. That would mean that Chroma should be 936 Gb uncompressed unless those sacrifices were made.

CyberGene

dore_m yeah, there’s some discrepancy indeed. I doubt the 11 GB that are mentioned are the download size. Most probably the uncompressed samples and it’s too modest number for the number of layers they advertise, as you calculated.

Frédéric L

It would be interesting to have a FLAC compression ratio on a sample. FLAC is already optimized for tiny numbers in its compression scheme, then it could be adequate for piano samples which are loud at the attack but have a long quieter tail.