Nord User Forum

Good and bad news
Of course, first the pleasant thing: The Nord sample library 4.0 is online now: https://www.nordkeyboards.com/sound-libraries/nord-sample-library-40
While browsing through them I also noticed some interesting new samples.

But at the moment, only the Piano 5 is supported. So it stays exciting how this will develop further.

Has anyone been able to test the new samples yet?

With each new Sample Library iteration, Nord keep shrinking their once vast collection of samples. This hasn't been much of a problem until recently because all Nord keyboards up to the Piano 5 had been backwards compatible with older formats. That's why I, for example, didn't care if the RMI Electra samples haven't been updated: I can still use them just fine on my Electro with some fine tuning. And I believe that a significant share of players choose Nord over Yamaha, Roland or Kurzweil mainly for the Sample Library.

Now, all Piano 5 owners have left is a fraction of what any other Nord product can enjoy, and they even had to wait a full year: it's almost as though Nord's engineers need more time for samples convertion than to develop new keyboards or sampling new pianos. For some reason, they have decided that the Piano 5's OS must not support any previous library. That would be fine per se, you do have to clean up and optimise your resources from time to time (especially since some of the older samples are admiteddly far from stellar). But if that's the case, then we'll be waiting years for a full migration (for example, there are no pianos, all of the Mellotron Master Tapes are missing and the same goes for any other sound collection). I'd wager that they temporarily put on hold support for their other keyboards because of time issues.

In my eyes, backward policy isn't clear as of now. There's only one instrument affected for the moment, and it's a piano. But it's an open question if some of the newer features may be supported by converted older samples - monophonic legato e.g. Which we will see if more sample v4 instruments get published and maybe converted versions are provided.

I'm not sure about sample v1 and v2. But the step between v2 and v3 implied a conversion of the v2 samples into the internally used v3 generation on the fly via the managing software. Which may or may not come for the v4 generation hardware, too.

I don't expect all older samples to be converted on an up-to-date-feature level. It might be a question to the community if the older samples are of some use in an as-is state, without support of the newer features.

StrangeAeons wrote:...Now, all Piano 5 owners have left is a fraction of what any other Nord product can enjoy, and they even had to wait a full year: it's almost as though Nord's engineers need more time for samples convertion than to develop new keyboards or sampling new pianos. For some reason, they have decided that the Piano 5's OS must not support any previous library...

It is odd, and I'm not sure if it's tied to the licensing. With v7.60 and higher of the Nord Sound Manager, "user-created" .nsmp files can be converted to .nsmp4 format for use on the Piano 5, however I don't know if Piano 5 owners have actually tried converting a .nsmp file from the Nord Sample Library. Unless there's actual code in the .nsmp sample file indicating it's a licensed "Nord" sample or not, the Nord Sound Manager app would have to have some other way of recognizing what samples not to convert.

Yes would be interesting if an NP5 owner could test / confirm that a nspm or nspm3 file can / cannot be imported in the Sound Manager.

Do we know that already?

florence wrote:Yes would be interesting if an NP5 owner could test / confirm that a nspm or nspm3 file can / cannot be imported in the Sound Manager.

Do we know that already?

A while back I asked folks in the Piano forum about what message they receive when trying to import a .nsmp file to the Piano 5 (nord-piano-grand-forum-f10/nsmp-conversion-to-nsmp4-using-nord-sound-manager-t21845.html) and just got one response that no option was provided to convert it to .nsmp4 format. However, last time i tried loading a .nsmp file to my Stage 3 with Nord Sound Manager, I got an error message with no option to convert to .nsmp3 when trying to import the sample using the menu options; NSM would only provide an option to convert if I used "drag-n-drop" to move the file to sample location. We really need someone with a Piano 5 to try using drag-n-drop to load a "user-created" .nsmp sample from this Forum to their Piano 5.

Hlaalu wrote:

StrangeAeons wrote:And I believe that a significant share of players choose Nord over Yamaha, Roland or Kurzweil mainly for the Sample Library.

Not that this is strictly relevant to the issue being discussed in this thread, but I wonder how true this statement is. Because I have the opposite feeling. I think Nords are chosen for the pianos and organs mainly, but also for the hands-on controls, and build quality etc. I'd adventure saying that samples quality scores very low on this list, even among the more dedicated synth players. Nord has been a pioneer in VA synth technology in the first years (which doesn't concern the use of samples), and are still going strong in this section. Then their pianos and organs have become very refined. I see the sample library as a nice tool to have, but to say that one would choose Nord over other brands because of that... In fact, my feeling is that some people choose Nord over others in spite of the better samples quality of the latters (Korg to name one).

i totally agree with that, just bought grand for the key actions and use VST.