Dear Everyone.
Please, I'm a NOOB, really, at all of this. I bought, legit, a Sampletank bundle of sounds and, of course, Sampletank 4 itself. Total size, about 165 gig., give or take. There was the Miroslav Orchestra, Syntronik and some others which I'll list if asked. Thing IS - the IK downloader sucks (sorry!) and I had to download and install a lot of the files myself. Which I DID - but then I had a total nightmare making Sampletank find them! Took me a fortnight, then I just opened each little zipfile, extracted the instruments by hand, looked up the folder hierarchy, reconstructed it manually on my external hard drive and started extracting the instruments into it.
First nightmare - the sheer amount of sub-folders IK use. I mean you're digging down through SIX sub-folders to find TWO instruments in the bottom. You've gotta move them out because you get the Windows long file name prob. otherwise - with it being on an external hard drive - and it was finding the instrument NAMES, but not the instruments themselves. I was going through instrument by instrument, the "can't find TANK" error messages telling me where the files should be, me searching for the files and putting them where it wanted them.
So I've got a bunch of working sounds. First prob. with Sampletank itself - my DAW uses CC7 for volume control, CC10 for pan, Sampletank doesn't recognise either of them. Get in there with that one, IK Multimedia!! But going onto the actual instruments - there just doesn't seem to be 165gig of them there. Miroslav's only got 2 kinds of strings showing up, LIVE and Staccato. There's no woodwinds - all that shows up there is Hot Horns which are brass, surely, not woodwinds! There's 2 pianos, both not bad. About 12 pads in the synths section and a couple of trance leads. A few other bits - but I keep coming back to having 165 gigs' worth of files sitting there. I'm morally certain there should be more instruments. Even more so because I found a few extra .ST4I files and chucked them in with the other instrument names - but they're not coming up. (Yes - did a rescan!) Even though they're Sampletank format, for some reason Sampletank's not finding them. So if it's not finding those, how many others isn't it finding? Or are there other names I should be downloading somewhere, maybe I've got a ton of .PAKs and no instrument names to go with them because I've not found them on the website to download them? This is why I think Sampletank should be in total control of download/setup - take it out of Dumbass User hands, like mine!
Could anyone show me a list of what SHOULD be in each category and maybe give me a hint as to how to make Sampletank find the missing ones? Remember - I've handbuilt the folder hierarchy because I couldn't see any way of doing it automatically - the IK Product Manager sucks blue whales and elephants through thin straws, it really does. IK, if anyone reads this, I'm a programmer, or was! You've gone WAAAAY too elaborate. Why have 6 folders with 2 instruments buried down the bottom, and a separate Product Manager? Think on this.
You're a guy who wants to write a bit of music, not a computer expert. So you download Sampletank - free, to make you want to buy the instruments - and then you buy Miroslav Orchestra. SAMPLETANK automatically downloads Miroslav, NOT a separate product manager, asks you where you want the file system built, you say "Drive F" - the external drive you've just bought to put your lovely new sounds on - and SAMPLETANK builds the file hierarchy on that drive for you, installs the files there it's downloaded and brings up all your new sound names, neatly in the right categories (database file downloaded along with the sounds!) You love the sounds so you buy more. You run out of Drive F so you buy a Drive G. Sampletank asks you where you want the new files downloaded, you say Drive G and it downloads, builds file hierarchy, puts sounds where it wants them, does a new .DB file for those sounds. And so on. No multilayer folder hierarchies, downloading and installing individual sounds yourself so you can mess up like I reckon I have done! Combination ST and Product Manager, working seamlessly as one.
Till that wondrous day happens - I'm pretty sure I've messed up. I don't understand why I've got a little bunch of .ST4I files that Sampletank's not picking up on, despite repeatedly rescanning. I'm pretty sure there's at least a FEW instruments Miroslav's not finding (and why's 'Hot Horns' coming up in Woodwinds!?!?!) Ditto with the other instruments - I'm only getting a few names in each category and they're not totalling up to big enough to account for all that file size. Has anyone got lists of what SHOULD be coming up in each Sampletank menu and how to find/make Sampletank find all the missing instruments? All I've done thus far was search for .ST3I and .ST4I files, put them into one folder, used 'Libraries' to search that folder. That found the names. When I clicked on the names, I used the 'can't find TANK' error messages to manually put the .PAK files where Sampletank wanted them.
Sorry for the length of the above - I've got garrulous fingers. I think Sampletank's a great idea that needs simplifying down as in paragraph above. Wish it had CC7 and CC10 built in - gonna have to MIDI Yoke the standalone because my DAW's 32-bit and I've JBRIDGED Sampletank - prob. with THAT is you can't use the right-click menus, they just blink'n'vanish before you can use them. Never MIDI Yoked anything before - but before I do that, I want to know it's got all its instruments!
Yours hopefully,
Chris.
