Eddie Sullivan wrote: > Try not to hold anything back Sascha- tell us what you *really* think > of the EXS ; ) Phew... ok, but don't tell me you didn't ask for it. - In order to work with anything in the EXS, you need to create (and save) a dedicated instrument all the time. This is as useless as it could get. What I often like to do is, say, drag an entire audio track of some song into whatever sampler, then fool around with snippets of it and arrange them in various zones. Why would I have to save this as an instrument? I mean, I only need that patch in the current song, nowhere else. The EXS is the *only* sampler doing it like that. And there's not a single advance coming with it. If I want to re-use a patch I'm doing in whatever other sampler, I can still save it for later useage. With the EXS there's no choice at all but having to save the patch. I know how to do songbased patches, but I really don't want to navigate to my song folder all the freaking time, create a new "sampler instruments" subfolder and stuff. - The editor. It'd make you laugh if it wasn't that sad. No visual control over a zone's velocity range at all. No proper tweaking of multiple zones possible at all. You can still only modify all checkbox-ed value entries at once but there's no way of, say, changing the velocity range of multiple zones at once. Really, the EXS editor is pathetic, to say the least. A smaller annoyance but incredible if you think about it: When you open the editor on a single monitor and zoom into the zone arranging space, the higher part of the keyboard is leaving the window to the right. Now, what would you usually expect to happen? Right, a scrollbar, appearing at the bottom of whatever window exceeding your window width or heigth. Not so with the EXS. There's no scrollbar and the shift+mousewheel function doesn't bring you any further either. In short: You simply can't edit zones of higher registers in zoom mode. Come on... - Still no support for longer filenames. Actually, this is a general Logic problem - which doesn't make it any better. And, not only that long filenames aren't supported, it's getting even worse: They are truncated at Logic's own will. Brilliant, really... And it's getting even worse with the EXS as sometimes the truly important parts of a filename are truncated, such as root note or level information. I mean, is it still 1994 in Emapple land? Longer filenames are supported by OSX and as LogicPro isn't backwards compatible anymore anyways there's not a *single* reason to not allow longer filenames. Again, just pathetic. - Has probably been the *only* worthwhile thing in the EXS editor: Automapping. It's been really easy to quickly map an instrument in case you had properly named source samples because the EXS would read the root note from the filename (or from the info embedded in the file) and come up with a nice mapping. This is *entirely* broken in LogicPro 7.2.3. Not only that the automapping doesn't work anymore in "Auto" file name readout mode, no, it also doesn't work when you specifiy the place your notename exists in the filename. I tried with the very same files under 5.5.1/Win and 7.2.3/OSX, and the latter just messed things up completely. But hey, doesn't seem to be enough to break that feature, it's getting worse. When you import multiple samples, for EACH zone there will be a new group created. This is just ridiculously stupid. I couldn't imagine what this would be good for at all. Usually, you'd expect multiple created zones to be sent to either no group at all or to one common group (the latter being the old behaviour). Now, when you only do the import once, it's easy to sort out. You'd just select all zones and route them to a common group, then delete the unused ones. But try that with a rather complexed instrument... - Interpolation mode. While being the most efficient sampler on earth, I fail to see why there isn't finally an optional high quality interpolation mode. When you work with patches only using a few samples (thus requiring quite some internal pitching), the EXS is still aliasing. And by now it's the worst sampler on the market (and I think, back in the days, only some early version of Kontakt has been worse). - Virtual memory. Why oh why has this got to be a global setting? It just doesn't make any sense to stress your harddisk for small patches that would easily fit into your RAM. Or to leave it off entirely - in that case being unable to load any larger patches. Kontakt (and Battery) are doing this on a per patch base. Heck, you can even set it per group. - The GUI. Don't get me wrong, I still love it's simplicity and the filters are still some of the best around IMO. But it could surely do with something more advanced, such as a syncable multibreakpoint envelope, a small step sequencer or arpeggiator of some sorts, whatever. It could as well be nice to have more than just one filter availble, so one could use different filters for different groups or so. But admittedly, the GUI is the least thing I'd complain about. At least it's dead easy to deal with and everything's working as supposed as well. Alright, that was it for now, straight from my head. Cheers Sascha