Nord User Forum

Hi guys I know it sound like a silly question (maybe it is lol) but I couldn't find any info about it.

There's a way to hear/test the samples/sounds library before loading them into my Electro 3?
It's very annoying having to load samples to hear how do they sound.

cheers
Alek

You could go to the library pages of Clavia's website. Not all samples are there, but many are.

thanks for the reply

so really the software can't do it?
Impressive! the best keyboard in the world and I can't hear the sounds before loading them?

Sad but true.
I don't really know why it is like this, but maybe this hypothesis is the right reason : if the software (Nord Sound Manager) could play the sound (NSMP), then it could be reversed engineered (decompiled) and another company could too easily steal Nord sounds & algorythms. I guess that personnal computer softwares are too weak, we could end up with a (free/commercial ?) VST using Nord's proprietary sounds.

Ok but the Nord sound manager doesn't work without being connected to a Nord Keyboard.
Really strange, I mean we have tons of samples and it takes ages to load them all and listen to them

really frustrating

Good point, and probably the reason for the lacking preview functionality. Basicall, it would be a (very basic) VSTi if you allowed it to be played via MIDI. So while technically probably feasible there might be business reasons to preclude this function. Or even the licence contract with Mellotron etc. don't allow software playback (quite likely IMHO).

Yep licensing could be the issue maybe.
But to me the sound manager lacks a lot in functionality compared to the awesome keyboard we have.

anyway you can't have everything in life can you?

Wouldn't it be a great commercial gesture to its growing customer base if NORD were to put a short mp3 for each sample on its site?

wink, wink...

oh yes would be but best thing would be if we could connect our keyboard to the sound manager and play the sounds directly. Isn't enough to hear them

As I understand it, the Nord sample file formats are designed specifically to be played back by the Nord electronics. So for computer-based playback, I guess they would either need to write a "Nord emulation" program that could run on the computer, or a program that would decompress and extract the samples for local playback (maybe much the same thing). It is pretty obvious why they would not want such a thing to exist completely independently... anyone would be able to access and play any of the Nord samples for free. But it might be possible to prevent the sample from playing unless a Nord keyboard were physically attached, essentially using the Nord keyboard itself as a copy protection dongle.

But short of something like that, I agree, there should be an MP3 demo of each and every sound. Loading the all in to your keyboard for evaluation is simply too time consuming, bordering on completely impractical, especially on models like the E3 that can load relatively few at a time.