funny how things work out.

the expensive fake strings had too much reverb baked into the samples and no way to get it out. please, people - keep your samples dry. let me do the effects work myself. it's especially problematic for the staccato, which you don't want bleeding off between the notes.

the free fake strings initially seemed to have better staccato, but upon listening to them over and over they lacked a level of depth. i tried a few effects, but it was just a lack of character.

my machine can't really handle the expensive string plugin. it's bad programming - there's no reason, in theory, that i can't run a sampler on a dual core processor with over a gb of free ram but it's doing it over three application levels and a far-too-fancy gui. it's not the samples that's eating the ram, it's the sampler. but, hey, you've all got 16 gb of ram to waste, right? i've got 2 i can use...

what i can do is run each phrase one at a time through the sampler, dump them to wave and then mix them into the project as wave files. there's no loss in quality.

so, i ran all the expensive fake strings through and mixed them at roughly half the volume of the free fake strings, just to beef the free ones (which have a better staccato, but lack depth) up a bit.

i think it's finally sounding the way i want, but i'll have to confirm in a few hours.

it's really amazing, though, that i'm using a thousand dollar plugin as a secondary sound source to a free one. remember kids: markets don't work. you usually don't get what you pay for...

next song, i'm going to replace that fancy string set with one of the competitors that has a drier source. for now, this is working.

i should point out that upgrading this thing would not be expensive. the board can take 8 gb of ram. there's 4 in there, in 2 gb chunks. i have a 64-bit os from school (2, actually). so, i'd just have to get 2 sticks of 2 which would be relatively cheap nowadays...

it's the hassle. it's an nlited os with all kinds of scripting set up...

i haven't seen a reason to yet. this is the closest to a reason i've yet seen. but it's not convincing me.