Try-Sound.com
Here’s some great news to anyone who uses virtual instruments: Now you can try many different instruments from your own computer, almost instantly. No need to download huge sound banks or demos. All you need is a decent internet connection and a sound interface. A MIDI keyboard connected to your computer would be great, but is not essential.
This is made possible by Try-Sound.com, “the world’s first online Test Station for virtual instruments and plug-ins”. Basically, you set up a free account at the website, and then set up a “session”, a 25-minute slot during which you can spend some quality time with the virtual instruments. You are then given a link to download a small exe file created just for that session. At the time of your session, run that exe (double click on it) and you’ll have a palette of virtual instruments waiting right there on your desktop to play with.
The idea is very simple and effective: That exe file is just the user interface of the instrument. All the hefty content (the huge sound banks and samples) remain on the Try-Sound servers. When you trigger a note on your computer (through a MIDI keyboard, or by using the on-screen virtual keyboard), that note is sent as a MIDI message to the servers, which process it and send you back the audio.
The latency? You ask. Well it’s there, but not so much as to ruin the party. It’s not ”playable” in the practical sense, but good enough for a test drive. I did not measure it, but with my 2048 kbps connection my totally non-scientific guess was that the latency was somewhere around 25-30 ms.
The sound quality is pretty good, and they add a constant loop of bird tweets in the background so that people don’t capitalize on the free stuff.
The list of instruments and plug-ins currently available for a test drive can be found here and supposedly the list is continuously expanding. I, for one, certainly hope so, and I can’t think of a better way to get a feel for these instruments before investing in them. As much as I love listening to the demo mp3’s posted on the product websites, they tend to be kind of overblown and they don’t really give me much of an idea about how the instrument would behave in person. This new technology promises to deliver just that.
Like
