Sample Cd's And Me...a Logic Scenario, help! Options

[tokyoroland]

Alright, so lately I have been bombarded with possibilites in getting professional quality sounds from going to the kvrvst and sonic control website.

I want to know how Logic (osx 5.3) coincides with Gigasampler, Gigastudio, you know the Giga format in general and how the exs24 fits in.

In order to use, like, Garritan, Spectrasonics, and mostly the good-quality but less expensive sample cd's.... will I need to get the exs24 AND the giga studio/sampler??? Will the exs24 be unessasary? or will the giga studio/sampler be unessesary?

Can all sample cd's be loaded into Logic on osx (10.1.5 for now)?

Why would I need the giga workstation if I already have Logic?

Will the exs24 do the job of the giga studio/sampler??

I just want to know the next step..... should I just get the exs24 and get sample cd's....do they need to be in Akai format?

I heard the new exs24mk11 can load giga formats.. is this true?

I am all lost and undone? Does anyone here understand me?

I hope I'm not confusing anyone greatly..

- Jeffro

[formatj]

Jeff,

you will only need to go into OS 9 if you want to convert AKAI samples using EXS24's built-in sample format converter (AKAI conversion is not currently supported in OS X).

The program cdxtract and also Translator (a similar program) are currently only OS 9 compatible. These programs allow you to translate multiple sample formats into other formats (including into EXS). So for example you can translate Roland library to EXS or AKAI to Halion. You don't really need to purchase these programs if you are only translating Gigasampler or AKAI formats, however they can often do better translations than the built-in EXS converter.

Generally samples available in Gigasampler library will be better than AKAI library. The reason being is that library created for AKAI has a patch limit of 32MB due to the RAM limitations of many old AKAI samplers. Gigasampler being computer based (more RAM) and also having the ability to "stream" samples means that library created for it is much bigger, often 100MB to 1 Gigabyte for a single patch. So for example on the AKAI you might have a piano sample where every third semitone is sampled with two velocity layers and loops are used to provide sustain. On Gigasampler format a piano may have every single note sampled with 4 velocity layers and no loops for sustain. The result is amore realistic sounding piano on gigasampler format.
EXS24 can use large samples and streaming of samples like gigasampler so you can take advantage of the better quality samples available for gigasampler and EXS will translate giga format directly in OS X.

EXSMkII is not available as a separate download, it is part of Logic 5.5.