Help me decide: Dimension Pro or JABB

Mic, I've got a Novation myself, and Dimension Pro. I also have some experience with Garritan products, but only in passing for researching a purchase. The Garritan stuff is great, but I was turned off by how the MIDI messages were used, specifically the Mod Wheel hijacking for expression. I think that this may have been chnaged now to make it easier to override; I've just telling you what my experience was at that time.

Now to the Pro: This is something that I know about. First off, there's a small Garritan library included with it, and it looks as though there's a relationship developing with Garritan and Cakewalk for future add-on llibraries. Overall, I find the DP samples to be excellent. They're a little bland and dry to some people, because they were presented to be as universal as possible across user applications. It's real easy to dress them up with FX and EQ, if that's what you're after. But it's really not necessary unless you need that.

The saxes, brass, strings: I find them to be most useful. I'm sure you know that the realism comes in from a proper approach and playing techniques. Sax is always tough. I've coaxed some great acoustic guitar sounds out of it, as one example. Piano; upright bass; solo wind & reeds. And having a Novation controller helps.

The presets just about all have some kind of binding to MIDI messages built-in. Usually the mod wheel and aftertouch as a rule. Occasionally, the mod wheel implementation will be imbedded within the companion .sfz text file, but it doesn't have to be. There's a real easy way to do it with the MIDI Matrix. Click on a button, and it pops up, showing what's been pre-programmed. There are 16 slots to fill with your own messages. Just about any MIDI control source that you can think of (PB, all the CC#s; channel and poly aftertouch, velocity, release velocity), and a few unexpected ones (random sources, alternate note ons, keyboard gate & position).

And you can steer these to any destination, at any depth (positive & negative), with a smoothing curve if you like. The Matrix settings get saved with the program. This sample synth is super-adjustable. If that wasn't enough, the upcoming 1.1 update (due out before April) will feature MIDI Learn on every parameter. And new editing, new reverb algorithims; even Scala.

So, listen again to both applications, but know that Dimension Pro strives to contain the best of both worlds.
HTH

Mike, that's cool. I love that controller; I guess it shows. <g> And it's only a 25. Gotta' work those octave switches.

As for latency, I'm not sure what that refers to. Dimension Pro doesn't support program changes, ansd it takes a second to load up those huge files.
One piano is 230MB, for example. Maybe that's what was meant.

But once up, the memory allocation scheme is really efficient. If you have a multisample loaded (into memory), it's only referenced in other Elements, or even across multiple instances of Dimension. So that's a lot of bang for the buck, considering that you can use the same multisample, and adjust it to sound like several, with 4 Element adjustments. And that's with using only one instance.

Other than that, it is sample-based (not exclusively; in the main), so you're going to eat some memory with the larger sets. That hasn't proven problematic to me from a latency point-of-view, and I tend to really load on up.
HTH

Latency, refering to the time between pressing the key and hearing the sample. I have the latency in Sonar set at 4ms and I don't notice any latency playing any of the soft synths I have which are the ones bundled with Sonar 5, Art Vista Grand Piano and DFHS.

I'm just asking because one person posted that, but nobody else seems to be having that problem.

Latency, refering to the time between pressing the key and hearing the sample.

I was pretty sure of what you meant, Mike, but I was trying to cover the other possibilities that another poster might've considered.
So we're talking the true defintion of latency.

Let me give you my own experience: I'm nurse-maiding an aging DAW setup while I build another. The current one: 2800+; 1 gig; separate app/audio [fast access] drives, and audio/MIDI over Firewire [mLan]. The mLan drivers offload the real work, but they carve out a chunk of CPU in the process. I run ASIO hovering at 6 ms. as an average, with WDM monitoring. 18 out of the DAW, and 24 channels back in. I might have to bump to 10 or 20 ms. on a real heavy project, or freeze some tracks. I usually drop way down to 2 or 4 ms. for live monitoring for external instruments through FX. Sonar; Acid; Project5; a few others.

I don't consider that to be a problem, especially taking the setup into consideration. With your rig, you shouldn't skip a beat. I wouldn't expect that Dimension Pro would be any hungrier than any other large sample-based library. In fact, I'd expect that it comes out ahead from an efficiency standpoint.