Kontakt/Kompakt or SS2/ST2? GPO? Hardware??

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sax_fan

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I'm in a bit of a state of confusion and hope I can get some clarity here. I have been looking at various software plugins/stand alone synths etc. Lets assume for the moment that I have basically nothing but a PC Daw with Sonar and a controller (which is just about accurate) and that I'm going to be playing and recording jazz and pop music generally. I have very little experience with these things at this point and keyboard is not my primary instrument.

I was looking at Sonik Synth 2 and Sample Tank. Sounds seem very good and both heve gotten good reviews. How do these compare to Kontakt and Kompakt? Are they mutually exclusive or do people use both? I'm sure this opens up a real can of worms, but am I just better off saving the money and buying a hardware module?

Finally, in light of the Garritan Personal Orchestra Group buy, I was also looking at that. I'm not sure I would use it all the time, but it certainly does seem to have some nice sounds to add to a collection.

Any thoughts, insight, experience with the above, would be VERY helpful and appreciated.

There are many things I am interested in purchasing and I am just trying to give some priority to the pending purchases.

Thanks in advance.
 
Sample Tank and SS2 are Romplers, which offer good sounds, and are primarily aimed at quick setup of sounds in a song. And provided you are content with what is on offer for sounds, you'd be good with that (And there are plenty of sounds available). If you want a full-blown sampler that offers far superior editing abilities, go with Kontakt. Kontakt will give you more choices of sounds from various libraries, as it can import way more file types. And if you plan on designing ANY patches from raw wav/aiff files, go with Kontakt, as everything is very convenient to setup (Especially key-mapping). As far as hardware goes, if you're talking hardware sampler, I'd say forget it, stick to software, much easier to edit.

There are excellent orchestra collections available if you Kontakt. Another to check out is GigaSampler, but it doesn't have as good of file support (That may have changed with the newest release though, you'll have to research).
 
Thanks, Atterion. That's exactly the kind of info I needed.

Sounds like Sample Tank and SS2 are what I'm looking for. Ease of use and good sounds. At this stage I don't anticipate getting involved in editing. If sometime down the road I want to do that, I can think about Kontakt then.
 
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