Major update to newly released Cinematic Strings 2.11
What surprised me that they didn't fix this annoying humming noise in release tails and short notes. It's clearly hearable yet the developers didn't fix in anyway.
It came as a disappointment after downloading the entire library nevertheless I managed to get most of the annoying buzzing out of the samples.
Used two different algorithms in my favourite noise reduction VST - Izotope RX Advanced Denoiser, one stronger for release tails and one milder for short notes. Bottom line, some buzzing is still there but it has been greatly attenuated. I've done numerous A/B quality comparison and the fixed samples don't show any signs of worsened quality.
The process took me two hours fiddling with the denoisers' controls and another 22 hours CPU time and 478WHr of consumption.
In the end, all samples were successfully cleaned from most of the hum.
Changes in nki patches include:
- fixed decay time for release tails from 25 to 3 seconds (who could ever do such a mistake)
- compatibility tweaks for UltraTKT randomization script (google it) - very useful for such "dirty" library as CSPE2
TO-DO:
- fix modwheel (CC1) dynamic transition on zero level not to mute the sound, in previous version the lowest position (0) triggered real "pp" samples. This may not sound as important but may have some impact on the quality of the performance. So far I wasn't successful in fixing it
Installation instructions:
In order to replace original samples with the ones provided, you need to extract the CSPE2 nkx archives to different directory. To do so, open Kontakt, navigate to Files > Collect Samples/Batch Compress.
There choose the source directory with CSPE2 and destination directory of your choice. You may need to add the library to Kontakt if you hadn't done that already. Check if "Mirror source folder structure" and "Lossless compression" is selected and if so, click Convert.
After approximately 50 minutes (depends on your HDD&CPU speed), the process should be done and a log file ready in destination directory. Now unpack the archives provided in this post to your new Samples folder, you'll be prompted to overwrite the files. Click Overwrite all and with that you should have your v.2.11u1 almost ready. You can choose to unpack only release tails or short notes, that's why I kept them in separate archives.
Now replace the nki patches in the Instruments folder with the ones provided. Note that "Lite Ensemble" patch won't be altered as it doesn't contain any release triggers.
Final stage consists of moving nicnt file to the new directory, nkc and nkr file to Samples and resaving the patches in Instruments directory.
