Nord User Forum

Great sounds! Thanks! I’ve used to own some of these synths. Interesting, I’ve been recently “red flagged” by a site moderator for posting samples that are also available in a commercial VST library, how would that translate to posting these sounds since there are VST versions of these synths nowadays?

jonson808 wrote:Great sounds! Thanks! I’ve used to own some of these synths. Interesting, I’ve been recently “red flagged” by a site moderator for posting samples that are also available in a commercial VST library, how would that translate to posting these sounds since there are VST versions of these synths nowadays?

That's a good question. I would personally say the one major difference is that the D-50, M1, Trinity, etc may be available in VST form now, but they're also available (on the used market) as hardware, and of course there have been many people sampling these boards for decades before these VST's came out. However if you post a sample of a commercial VST that is only available in that form, there's not really a gray area because those sounds could not have come from elsewhere. It's an interesting discussion because almost all sounds on this forum are samples of hardware. Meaning I'd say over 90% of the posters don't actually own the legal rights to the samples being uploaded. No one from Roland, Korg, Yamaha, Kurzweil, etc is posting samples here. But a lot of these sounds are also available in other manufacturer's hardware. Let's take something like Staccato Heaven from the D-50, that's a famous patch. Yamaha has samples of it in their workstations, the GSI Gemini also has a sample of it, there's a post of it on this forum for Nord keyboards, and I would be shocked if Kurzweil and Korg also did not have a sample of that sound. Some will argue "well, they got licenses for that" but I actually find that unlikely, because the patch names in these other non-Roland boards are never called Staccato Heaven. They are always some play on the name or a totally different one, as though they want to hide the original identity of the patch which I would assume is for legal reasons. So then let's say someone else posts another Staccato Heaven sample here... Well did it come from the D-50? From a Yamaha Motif? The Gemini? Roland Cloud? Who knows...
I imagine if you emailed Roland and asked them if you could sample their old hardware and post it for free on a website, they'd say no...but they also know it's not a battle worth fighting.

So yeah, this hardware came first. The commercial VST's of pianos, guitars, etc are the one and only source for their respective samples and their license agreements will always tell you that you cannot redistribute the samples whether for free or for money. Some allow license transfer but that's a different thing entirely.

You’re absolutely right. Hardware manufacturers don’t have a choice but to allow their sounds/patches to be used commercially otherwise who would buy their products. I know Roland got in trouble back in the day for using loops in their expansion boards that they didn’t own rights to, interestingly enough, the hardware with these loops is still there getting circulated in the used market. My instance was the old virtual guitarist VST which had all the samples in folders on the install CD. I’ve made sample instruments for Nords from those wav files. My work was taken down by a site moderator. What would be the difference if I created loops or instruments simply from recording the output of this VST? We take the time to share our work and help one another, and this is the result??

Hi jonson808,
Your intention to share many guitar patches with others is really generous, but please understand that you clearly specified that they were taken from a commercial product CD, which is for sure copyrighted.
Please understand that hosting such material in the forum puts the forum owner (not you) in a difficult legal situation.

Thanks for your understanding.

I see your point regarding samples taken from commercial VST installation CDs (you know it’s old when it comes on a CD ) what I’m trying to understand is how are all the other numerous samples of hardware synths (as well as samplers that came with content CDs) are allowed here. We have to come to an agreement that most of us here don’t own all the instruments that we post here in sample format so we don’t own any rights to the sounds since they were originally obtained thru some other method. Which leads this whole discussion into a gray area where the difference between the recorded output of a VST or the hardware version of it versus the sample content loaded into it from the factory yields the same result. I could’ve named these samples anonymously and avoided all this but what about the other samples that are clearly labeled with the VST they originated from? I’ve got a good amount of user and factory content I’d like to share with the red synth community as time allows but there’s no point posting work that gets taken down. I do take your precautions in consideration, just can’t see the difference between a sample posted coming from a Korg VST or Omnisphere versus an old Steinberg VST.

Quite an interesting topic to discuss since this is a sound sharing community. A friend of mine who has more experience (over 25 years) with samples and their origins owns (in one way or another) probably the world’s entire Kontakt library collection. The amount of sharing (torrents,etc) of such libraries would get one to come to a conclusion that there isn’t a point for manufacturers to produce VSTs of their legacy gear such as Korg or Roland. Nevertheless, I hope this discussion shines some light on the purpose of the forum itself.

There are so many variables with this. Some really old sample CD's which are long discontinued have samples which are no longer in use in any subsequent products. The company may still own copyrights to them but they are not going to lose a cent if they are posted. There are many Roland sample CD's listed on archive, for example: https://archive.org/details/roland-sample-cd-roms Lots of 90's content. If Roland has ever tried to get this taken down, they've clearly not been successful.

I'm generally not really concerned about the risk with long discontinued material. Some of these sample CD companies aren't even in business anymore and as said before many of those which are are not using any of those samples in any capacity. But sampling current releases, for example Kontakt libraries, and sharing them could cost developers money.

I own a Sequential Prophet X synth, which has a 200GB SSD inside. I've converted dozens of Kontakt libraries which I purchased (along with some legitimately free ones) for use inside that synth. But I would never share those files. That is no different than just uploading the whole Kontakt library or sending someone a torrent. Unless it's totally free and the developer is cool with it, or it's old hardware as what is posted here, I have no intent to distribute someone else's work. I have made a sample library in partnership with a Kontakt developer (I recorded, organized and edited the samples, they will do the Kontakt design.) I understand how much work goes into these modern libraries. Aside from a few individual products / developers who release half-baked stuff, but that's another discussion.

I'd say as a general rule it's best to use samples from software for personal use only. If it's offered for free you could ask the creator if it could be posted in the Nord format. Some are ok with it, for example I got a few samples off Pianobook to be converted for use in the GSI Gemini this way. Some companies even forbid you to convert the samples for personal use, but at that point I simply don't care and will gladly do it anyway. I had one company tell me it was against the EULA to put their samples into my personal hardware. I replied promptly that I was working on it anyway and asked what they were going to do about it. I never did hear back And on the flipside some companies are really happy to help with that process.

If it's really old, long discontinued, from a company that no longer exists or from a product that was discontinued 20 years ago I don't personally see a problem with it but this isn't my forum and it does become a potentially troublesome gray area.

Great info! There’s definitely a lot of gray area with all these sounds, especially knowing that multiple manufacturers use the same sample in their programs/combinations/performances. I was planning on making the Nord wave classic patches available for Nord wave 2 users in sample form, assuming there’s interest in this. Other than that, a few more guitar patches, drum loop collections, and the Access Virus patches to bring to the table.

Hi Tsss

Do you have also Korg M1 sounds for NS4C?

I would be very grateful

Thank you!

Simo283 wrote: ↑Today, 07:04 Hi Tsss

Do you have also Korg M1 sounds for NS4C?

I would be very grateful

Thank you!

All the samples from the OP are nsmp3. They are compatible with many of the Nord instruments, including NS4C.
Simply download the samples, and use the soundmanager to transfer they to your NS4