PMI OLD LADY UPDATES APRIL 2005

GigaStudio 2 and 3

Updates are delivered on www.postpiano.com under the support section as zipped articulation files. Simply unzip the file (with WinRar, WinZip or Stuffit) and load the articulation file in the Giga Editor.

Detailed Notes: What are Articulation (.ART) Files?

Articulation files represent an easy way to provide the user with fixes, modifications, and new features without the need to send out new hard copies of the complete .gig files on additional CD’s. Articulation files contain all the program data of a file, without the samples themselves. Since the sample data is not included, the files are quite small in comparison to the full .gig files. Be sure to save your own articulation files of an instrument when you have made changes to the original .gig file. To use the articulation files, download them to your Hard Drive and unpack them. The files are self-extracting. Just double-click an update file and it will start unpacking. You may wish to create a special folder for your articulation files.

How do I load an articulation file?

1. Open the Giga Instrument Editor.

2. Load the .gig file you wish to update into the Instrument Editor by opening the "File" menu, choose "Open," (select the location of the .gig file you wish to update on your HD), click "Open."

3. Open the "File" menu a second time, choose "Load articulation file . . . ," (select the location of the .art file with the corresponding name to the .gig file you wish to update), click "Open."

4. Save the updated .gig file by selecting "File," and then "Save."

5. The save process may take as long as 15 minutes or more to finish, don’t stop this process as data loss will result!

6. When you re-open the .Gig file the new features are available.

The OLD LADY 24 bit Final (gigastudio3) update looks like this:

The GigaStudio 3 articulation file destroys the embedded GigaPulse presets in the Old Lady Instruments inside the Gig file. There is a simple workaround. The original Old Lady installation has created a folder on your hard drive with the name “GPulse”. Open that folder and find the embedded GigaPulse Shell files. You can stack these to get even more flexible control over the GigaPulse Resonance models of the sustain pedal down behavior. The picture below shows a stack with the updated OLD LADY FULL gs3 (main instrument) and Old Lady Pedal Down Resonance (the embedded GigaShell file). This embedded GigaPulse effect is found in the gig file “PMI Body Res.gig”.

Don’t forget to enable stacking using this button. When you click on the FX button beside the Old Lady Pedal Resonance, a window opens that gives you control over the GigaPulse parameters. You can also encode these IR’s into the main Old Lady 24 bit Final. Gig file when you have the full version of GigaPulse (Orchestra and Ensemble). You would simply open this Old Lady Pedal Down Resonance GigaPulse bank in GigaPulse and select the encode settings to gig file from the GigaPulse File menu. Further instructions are in the GS help files.

KONTAKT 1.53

Kontakt 1.53: Simply load the Old Lady #7 nkm multi in the directory where your Old Lady patches are located.

Kontakt 2

The update for Old Lady is online at www.postpiano.com in the support section.

Instructions: Simply unzip the update to your Old Lady folder. The assumed sample location for the patches is the folder “old lady Samples” one level below the nki’s and nkm’s.

See picture.

The main multi is called “OLD LADY HARMOCIS RELEASES.nkm”. It loads 3 instrument files:

Old Lady K2 Small IR, Old Lady releases and Harmonics.

1/ The Old Lady K2 Small IR file is encoded with the special body impulse sample Soundboard3.wav that is used to create the soundboard resonance when the sustain pedal is pressed. The convolution effect can be adjusted to taste in various ways.

You can adjust the overall sound of the effect by adjusting the Early and Late Reflections frequency spectrum and IR size separately. You can adjust the overall volume of the resonance in the MIDI AUTOMATION window.

HARMONICS.

The sympathetic resonance of the piano let’s you hear the non-struck notes that are sympathetically singing when other notes overtones induce vibration. This patch uses a script that can be Bypassed and adjusted to taste.

To adjust the release and attack time of the harmonics samples please adjust the ADSR settings all the way down in the editor.

EXS24

The latest updated patches are online, at the www.postpiano.com support section, as a zipped file. Unzip with Stuffit or WinRar and copy to the Sampler Instruments folder for Old Lady. You can use the new patches instead of the older patches. Please use RedMatica’s brilliant ExsManager to re-link the new patches to the wavepool of the OLD LADY (free trial works fine). See detailed instructions on how to re-link the samples on: http://www.postpiano.com/support/updates/exs24/EXS%20installation%20issues.htm

Or scroll down this document.

The Latest Old Lady patches

Notes:

* The new main instrument is the OLD LADY NEW patch. It has the latest bug fixes, sample start adjustments and velocity scaling. This patch should be used in combination with a second instance of EXS24 that plays on the same midi channel and loaded the old lady releases patch. The reason for this new setup is that the releases patch has small attack clicks when combined in one patch with the main instrument. When used alone you can adjust the attacks and overall volume to taste without altering the sound of the main instrument.

* Lady pedal: This is a patch that only uses the pedal down samples for a lush, warmer sound. Since it uses only 50% of the wavepool it effectively halves the CPU/RAM load of the piano. You can use this patch if your system has performance problems with the main patch.

*no pedal lady: This patch uses the sustain pedal up samples only, resulting in a cleaner sound with less harmonic content. Since it uses only 50% of the wavepool it effectively halves the CPU/RAM load of the piano. You can use this patch if your system has performance problems with the main patch.

The REALTIME PEDALLING folder contains two special exs patches that should be loaded in separate instances of EXS24 on the same midi channel and they enable to add the sustain samples to the non-sustain samples when the sustain pedal is operated. This doubles polyphony and should only be used when extra harmonics are needed.

EXS installation issues:
The Emagic Exs24 sampler uses 2 kinds of files for its operations: instrument files and samples.
Instrument files contain all the Exs24 parameters, zone settings, groups, and a list of references to sample files. A Reference is a data structure inside the instrument file that points to a sample file location on the hard disk.
The system works beautifully when, on instrument loading, Exs24 finds the samples exactly in the places the references indicate they should be. In this way load time will be next to zero. When, for various reasons, Exs24 doesn’t find the samples at their referenced location, it must search them on the hard disk, and with nowadays typical huge sample libraries like pianos or orchestral libraries this can be a long slow operation. When we (the sample library producer) burn the Instrument files to disk, their instrument files are referencing to samples with a specific location on our drive. Hence, when installed on our customers systems these references are only valid when the user has the same drive name and folder structure, which is highly unlikely. This causes EXS24 to start looking for samples. Typically EXS24 is set to search for samples on local drives. But it can not always find the files. One reason can be that the file size, file name, bit depth or other variables have changed since the last instrument edit. If recognition failed the error: “Can’t find file:xxxx” appears, usually followed by an incomplete EXs24 instrument that (when it plays anything at all) gives loud bursts of white noise and silences in random combinations, all very suited for experimental electronic music compositions that were so popular during the 60’s but not a nice warm piano sound as you would expect.
Logic 6 introduced Project Manager for handling the task of keeping track of references to resources by using a database. While being an excellent overall solution, it lacks some of the features needed to handle an efficient, well-maintained and well-organized sample library. Moving and copying all files to locations by hand would become an impossible job.

And now the good news: A company called Rematica www.redmatica.com makes a program, called ExsManager, that locates your samples and fixes the references inside the instrument files to wherever you placed your samples. And what’s even better about the program is that it operates in seconds. And what is even more exciting the program has a free downloadable version of just 2 MB @ this page: http://www.redmatica.com/Site/Pages/EM.php that will do all this magic for you with a maximum of 40 instruments and 30.000 samples, which is just enough for our piano libraries.
So, after unstuffing the SitX files to your hard drive of choice download the demo version of ExsManager and run it to fix the references. To do so you need to set the instrument path and the samples path correct. Click Analyse, then process and after 3 seconds all references are set for your specific situation.


Shameless plug: Buy the full version of ExsManager and re-organise your whole sample collection this way!
The program costs just 40 euro and will save you many hours of frustration. There is a Pro edition that has a very cool feature: SampleMerge. This process lets you consolidate your sample library in the lowest possible number of (big) files. In this way, when streaming, you can use many more instruments simultaneously, as you are streaming from a much lower number of files. It vastly improves the performance of EXS24 streaming.

So the new installation instructions:
- Unstuff the EXS24 sitx installer files.
* (You can use StuffIt X archives on any version of the Mac OS from 8.6 to 9.x, and any version of Mac OS X. You can also use StuffIt X archives on Windows. StuffIt X archives cannot be expanded by older versions of StuffIt Deluxe or StuffIt Expander. In order to expand a StuffIt X archive, you must have a copy of at least StuffIt Expander 7.0 installed. To make your life easier, StuffIt Expander is free to any Macintosh or PC user. If you need a copy of StuffIt Expander, visit their website: www.stuffit.com/expander
- The location where samples are stored in the new Logic Pro 7 edition is:
Macintosh HD>Library>Application Support>Logic>Sampler Instruments.
- You can also install the Old Lady anywhere else on your hard drive and place a shortcut (alias) in this folder.
- download the demo edition of ExsManager from www.redmatica.com
- Run the program to fix all references to fit your situation.
- Set the instrument and sample paths and use these settings:



- Click analyse and process.
- The instruments will now show up and play correct in EXS24 after launching the program.

Note: There is a special environment for Logic that enables you to activate the pedal sound when using the sustain pedal. When you push the pedal you hear the sound of the pedal and when you release it you hear the corresponding sound.
You can download it from the Pete Thomas website

http://www.petethomas.co.uk/logic-environment-downloads.html

See screen:

__________________