How the Sampling Industry Forgets the Pros

We live in a golden age of sampling. Practically every day, a developer releases a new package of samples that is targeted at media composers. There is hardly any instrument left on this planet that hasn't been sampled and there is hardly any playing technique left that hasn't been covered in any of the libraries.

Media composers are expected to have a huge arsenal of different samples so they can write convincing demos (or often final products) in any style at high qualitiy. The media composer who just presents a piano sketch to their client and then moves on to the full orchestra recording doesn't exist anymore.

So we should all be very happy that there are companies and developers who keep giving us new and improved tools to create sound worlds and sometimes surprisingly convincing performances, right?

In my opinion, not so much. For me, the problem lies in the primary user base that almost all developers target these days: the enthusiastic hobbyist/semipro.

There is this not so small group of people who make music as an (expensive) hobby besides their regular (usually well paying) day job. Often, they are "sample collectors", which means they get almost every new library as a new toy to play with. These are the people who get mainly excited when Spitfire starts up a new hype train and speculate and anticipate excessively in online discussions, and these are the people who generate a constant stream of revenue for the developers. As long as they keep releasing things, they will buy it.

However, there is also a caveat in this, which is the perceived price range in which a new library should be for this group. We can roughly say that anything above $1000 is too expensive so nobody will buy it, anything between $500-$1000 is considered a "flagship library" that should provide a comprehensive collection, anything between $200-$500 is a "regular library" that is expected to do one thing quite well, and anything below that is often considered "instabuy" but it shouldn't be too cheap (<$100) or it will not feel valuable.

I don't want to sound like "grandpa tells about the war" but when I started out working with samples in the early 2000s, there were exactly 2 major orchestral libraries on the market, each with about 4-6 CDRoms. "Advanced Orchestra" and "Miroslav Vitous". Advanced Orchestra was about $750 and Vitous about $3000. They contained a basic set of articulations, a few phrases and that's about it. Yet, every professional who worked in the orchestral world with samples would buy them.

If we just counterweigh the values and expenses, we need to acknowledge that the expense of session times with musicians hasn't changed much. With these early libraries, the makers could easily cover recording everything in one or two sessions and make a considerable revenue from the (admittedly few) sales.

Now the market for samples has grown immensely since then so developers sell much more copies of their products but the effort and recording times have grown as well. Recording all these dynamic layers and legato transitions etc. just takes time.

And this is where the problem starts: The target of the expected price range for a library sets boundaries for the sample developers regarding how much money they can invest. This whole orientation of the market on the hobbyist collectors creates a stream of products that are not really pro friendly, as they either are one trick ponys or suffer from bad QA.

I need to get things done with the libraries that I use. And unfortunately, almost any library that one can buy has problems, glitches and/or programming issues that are often caused by sloppy QA. From obvious things like someone talking in the release tails of the samples to sloppily edited staccato samples that are uneven when cycling through the round robins to annoying crossfades between too few dynamic layers, to bumpy legato transitions to instable proprietary sample players to cutting corners by sampling too few notes per octave and audible artifacts, there is just practically no library on the market that doesn't have such things. And unfortunately, at least one third of the time, when doing a mockup, I'm fighting with such issues, programming my way around that.

For a hobbyist, this might not be a big deal as they can just use excessive amounts of time to polish something but for people with deadlines, these things can become incredibly frustrating.

It is unfortunately relatively clear that the pro composers are only a secondary target group as they tend to "never change a running system" and very often rely on a set of tools that they have tested and studied thoroughly knowing exactly what to expect.

For me personally, I would love to spend $2500 on a string library that is well crafted and "one library to rule them all" instead of spending $500 on five string libraries that are all halfbaked as unfortunately almost all libraries that I own are.

But unfortunately trying to sell a library with such a price tag nowadays is almost impossible. There are a few small developers who really polish their products to perfection, as for instance Cinematic Studios or the one man show Performance Samples (with the later one up to now still only being (very good) one trick ponys), but all the major players have established a strategy of releasing a new library every few weeks that does a few things okay but lacks either in quality control and/or depth and basically gets abandoned after release except for a few minor fixes.

And unfortunately, their regular customer base is way too generous to let these issues slip by. There are endless discussions on the internet how to avoid quirk x with library y as if that was part of the experience or even worse "these glitches add realism" but it simply shouldn't be like that. I don't see the user's responsibility in navigating around the weird things that have remained unnoticed or were accepted during beta phase.

Unfortunately, I don't see this trend to be changing anytime soon. In fact, the whole sample industry has become incredibly unambitious in the last 10-15 years except for a few developers (Straight Ahead comes to mind) that try to push the boundaries. But hardly any of the libraries released today do things fundamentally differently than the libraries from 10 years ago. In fact, the old East West Hollywood series still holds up quite well against current competitors.