Is it just me, or do Cinesamples libraries lag

What kind of lag have you experienced? I personally find cinesamples libraries very hard to play anyway...

 

I always off set my cinestring patches by -50 milliseconds so they play in time on playback. Don't know if that helps, but I picked it up from a Daniel James overview of cinestrings.

 

I don't have Cinestrings Solo, but Cinestrings Core does not lag for me. If you are having an issue, open the mapping ed., and select a note that you feel lags. Then, open the wave ed., and see if the wfm starts at 0, or a little after. If the latter, that is something you can correct yourself, if CS doesn't want to. Just make sure that you first make at least one b/u of the instr. you are editing.

Cheers.

 

The delays are built in. They're in the manual, in the Tips and Tricks section under Timing. Here's the gist:

1. There's 50ms of Pre-roll before the brunt of the short attacks - so move all your shorts back by 50ms to line up perfectly.
2. The legato intervals take 150ms at default settings (!!!) to reach their destination, so move destination notes back 150ms to land right on the downbeat.

Alternatively, there's the Sample Start knob to adjust things.

I think the idea is that you crank up Sample Start all the way when you're working on things to have everything line up, then dial it back and move things back 50 and 150ms respectively to have the full sample but lined up. Personally I usually cheat when I use them and crank up the legato speed all the way and tweak the Sample Start so that it feels tight but not stifled.

In Cinebrass, Winds and Perc, there's some pre-roll (and a Sample Start knob) but it isn't nearly as long.

 

Most libraries have a bit of lag in my experience. Cubase has a timing control in the channel settings. I'm often setting that to -18 or -30 ms, sometimes -80ms. You can set it in your template and have it for every project. But I only notice when I'm quantizing.

 

IGNORE THIS ADVICE. I’m in the process of turning this off on my template. What a horrible idea. Only makes sense if you’re going to quantise everything then turn it into a printed score.

 

A friend of mine have Cinesamples Solo Strings in studio and I found that legato patch is very tricky to play and incorporate inside arrangement.
It has good long transitions and fast transitions, but somehow standard "middle / regular" transitions always have bad timing.
After hour of fiddling with legato knob and other settings we finally did it.

 

The copy of Cineperc I have does indeed have some pre-roll lag, but it's extremely consistent. As Brian Bunker mentioned, the sample start offset readily solves any issues with timing when playing them in. After recording, resetting the sample offset and adding an equivalent, opposite offset in the midi track is all you need to do.

I'm not sure how well this works with the other Cinesamples libraries as I don't own them. I imagine that sample offset could potentially have an unusable implementation for legato instruments if it applies to the transitions as well as sustains, but I would hope the patch designer knows better than that.

 

The thing is that on a legato sample the first note has lag X and subsequent notes have lag Y plus or minus Z. Some of this is unavoidable — you can’t have the transition start before playing the next note so you play ahead of the beat. But the inconsistency means you need to edit sometimes. And sometimes round robin samples have different lag times, arrhgh. Oh well, chalk it up to human slop factor.

And getting rid of lag wouldn’t sound good either. Double-tongue horns without the attack would sound like DX7 brass. So you just need to develop an ear for it. One more reason not to quantize.