Unpaid Commercial Endorsement

Hi Kyle,
Good post. "Li'l Miss'..." is an excellent program. About Kontakt:
I have been porting a bunch of my old hardware-sampler pieces over to Kontakt 2 and have come across that same problem. I have found that changing the "source" from "DFD" (which, as you know, reads the sample from the hard disc) to "sampler" (which reads the sample for RAM) solves the problem. Of course this means you can only use as many samples as can fit in the amount of RAM in your computer. But for my present purposes, this is fine, since all the pieces I'm porting over were built on machines that maxed out at 32 megs (sound so primitive now). Even the pieces that had 3 or 4 re-loads have no problem fitting into my computer's 1.25 gig of RAM. I'm working on a 12" powerbook running at 1.33 gHz, with an external firewire drive, and I find I always have to switch from "DFD" to "sampler" when loading a pre-made instrument.
Let me know if this solves the problem.
Best,
Miguel

Not only is Li'l Miss Scale Oven the best retuning software on the market, Jeff Scott, the guy who wrote the software, is one of the more talented microtonal composers today. His polymicrotonal composition combining 11 equal and 17 equal on his CD ZHXRGHAENIAN NIGHT MELODIES is one of the best polymicrotonal compositions ever done -- arguably THE best such composition.
Jeff Scott is a true polymath. Not only is he a first-rank software engineer, he's a excellent composer and a superb writer. Check out the liner notes for ZNM, which give an inkling of his memorable prose:
http://www.nonoctave.com/tunes/ZNM.html

Alas, like so many other superbly talented microtonal composers, Jeff was relentlessly showered with verbal abuse on the various microtonal online forums, like Making Microtonal Music, until (like all the other serious microtonal composers) he quit posting and abandoned them.

Kyle,

Here's hoping Jeff Scott reads your blog! If he does, maybe he needs to know that the PC market is (a) big and (b) woefully deficient in user-friendly software to help automate those tedious chores, like retuning, that keep musicians' productivity way down. If you're reading this, Jeff, please consider porting LSMO to Windows XP!

Regards,
Yahya

Hi Kyle,

as a very satisfied LMSO user, let me add that I've never got better user support for any software. Should you need help with LMSO, Jeff will answer your questions. He also listens to the user's suggestions and keeps making improvements. If you look at the 'baking method' menu, you'll see two Korg synths among the options. Well, they're there because I happened to mention Jeff that I own a Korg Z1 to which he answered, "Didn't realize you had a Z1. Do you want me to try and add Z1 sysex support?"
-Juhani

I wrote retuning software back in the 80s to tune my PROteus, DX7/E!, Mirage and various other tunable synths. My system was written in FORTH, so , it was part of the language and I could make it do all kinds of tricks. This software was used to tune the AFMM Chromelodeon simulator (which is my old PROteus), and lots other simulated instruments for the AFMM. I'll probably be brushing it off when the AFMM's Horvath/Terpstra keyboard finally gets into production. It was really good for testing out music perception theories and possibilities. But personally, I'm not so interested in static tuning anymore, going more for the dynamically retuned stuff where the pitch you hear lives in an ecosystem of pitches. That, and completely unpitched or unimportantly pitched music.
Speaking of the AFMM, the afmm.org website is back after our provider evaporated.

I'm a user of the lower end Kompakt software, with samples loaded from an external 4200 RPM FW drive on a 1.3 Ghz powermac. The lessons I've learned on glitch avoidance are 1) reduce polyphony per sample to the minimum, 2) avoid NI's reverb especially as it is not shared between samples 3) up the buffer size, especially during playback; you may have to render/freeze some tracks during playing and switch to a low latency setting for part entry, if hands on performance is a factor.

I have 768M so I generally load samples to memory now. Also, on a powerbook, beware automated power management - you may be cycling your cpu on and off which is not obvious except when running NI softsynths. Use highest performance under energy saver settings. With all these in force, I don't experience glitches but my typical polyphony use is modest.