Chickensys Translator etc for Kronos

apex · Post by **apex** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 12:05 am

Deleted post.

chickeneps · Post by **chickeneps** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 1:14 am

Our company is extremely easy to get a hold of. We are in the office business days 8-6pm Central, and very often outside of that. We can be called directly 800-877-6377 or 320-235-9798, or emailed, or chatted, etc. We respond to emails usually almost immediately.

Regarding any software that doesn't do what it should, again, all that is needed is a simple contact to us to iron out anything. We wouldn't release anything unless it worked AFAIK. Sometimes things break, but all it takes is a phone call or an email or a Bug Report and it gets done in a day.

We have tens of thousands of customers and I'm sure not everyone is pleased at some point.

Apex, if you still have any issue, please get a hold of us and I promise we'll take care of it by the end of the call or communication. We're going into our 25th year in business and we don't have any interest other than customer satisfaction.

Post by **Sharp** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 2:02 pm

Hi Garth.
All due respect, even I gave up on Translator. It never worked right and I spent over a year talking to you about bugs. There are many here who have had the same experience and over the years we have had many heated discussions about your company.

Credit were it's due.
All the negativity towards your software and company were limited to the Universal Edition of Translator.

The special edition you made for KORG and the Triton Series which was limited to export only that format worked for everyone who bought it.

This is why I have hope for your KRONOS edition. If it works, it will be very popular. If it doesn't, you won't last 10 seconds here. The KRONOS users are animals.

Regards
Sharp

jimknopf · Post by **jimknopf** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 2:50 pm

Sharp wrote: ... This is why I have hope for your KRONOS edition. If it works, it will be very popular. If it doesn't, you won't last 10 seconds here. The KRONOS users are animals.

Confirmed

levioter · Post by **levioter** » Thu Nov 22, 2012 7:59 pm

YES I can confirm we are:

And specially me !

Cheers

sigiriuk · Post by **sigiriuk** » Sun Nov 25, 2012 7:15 pm

This company is very easy to get hold of for new activation codes.
However:
1. Their software is in my experience, buggy and crashes on both mac and pc.
2. They still have not sent out a CD/DVD version despite promises....1 year later.
3. I have never been able to use Constructor to create any useful Korg program.
4. If I wish to reinstall the program, I have to email them to get a new activation code.
5. The user interface is poor - it is neither easy to understand or program - and the windows don't enlarge well.

I feel I wasted my money personally.

chickeneps · Post by **chickeneps** » Sun Nov 25, 2012 9:47 pm

Hi, I'd like to make some corrections and clarifications to sigiriuk's post.

1) He is talking about Constructor, not Translator.

2) AFAIK, he is talking about issues experienced a year ago (see below). We followed up on them but never got a response from him.

2) Today, using Constructor, I just tried creating some Triton banks, after using some WAVE files and EXS24 and Kontakt instruments, I made two Triton banks and they worked perfectly. Most problems are file specific, and that's why we encourage users to place Bug Reports and submit files. The Bug Report form strongly recommends submitting files.

3) sigiriuk did put in a Bug Report last January; it was for problems importing EXS24 and Kontakt files. He did not submit any files. We checked using our files plus others, they worked fine (even last January), so them we asked him for the files in question. That was January 23rd, that was the last we heard from him on the matter.

4) All Constructor users have been informed on a monthly basis that 1) the CD will be mass-produced after the new version is released (v1.5, it isn't done yet) and 2) Any customer can request the CD be sent right away, just let us know. The CD is not essential to run the program (for now). To see the reprint, see here: www.chickensys.com/news/20121121/cd.php

We sell tens of thousands of software licenses, and we don't expect everyone to be 100% happy with our software. However, we have zero tolerance for any crashes or bugs. All that's necessary is to contact us properly and get the problem resolved, it takes little time.

We extensively test Constructor, Translator, and all our software frequently and thoroughly. There will be issues sometimes, and we apologize for any and all of them. Again, it just takes some communication to get it handled.

Thank you, we appreciate the feedback.

sigiriuk · Post by **sigiriuk** » Mon Nov 26, 2012 5:59 pm

Just to let members of the forum know, Chicken Systems approached me before posting, politely asking me to modify my post, to stop them posting.

How they got hold of my email address, I don't know.

However, I did not give them permission to divulge personal information to the general public, relating to my dealings and contact with them.

The forum members may wish to consider their level of professionalism and scrupulousness towards their customers, and whether or not that attitude can be extrapolated to their approach towards software development.

They may wish to take legal advice about breaching my confidentiality.

chickeneps · Post by **chickeneps** » Mon Nov 26, 2012 6:38 pm

We knew who you were (but I won't say how, as that would be releasing confidential information). It had nothing to do with KorgForums Corp. =), I'm sure they keep everything confidential.

We only wanted to straighten things out with you since you had some facts wrong. Normally customers appreciate companies following up with them. However, it doesn't look like you appreciated it, and we recognize that. We apologize to you publicly, as we did a couple times privately.

That said, we did not divulge any personal information of yours, such as your name or email address. We only clarified the information you posted, which we felt important since it related to our company and products. Your information was based on year-old experiences, plus we did follow up with you at that time, both facts you omitted.

neomad · Post by **neomad** » Mon Nov 26, 2012 8:30 pm

My CD was just shipped, almost 5 years later

Anyway customer support is very good at chicken sys

Scott · Post by **Scott** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 3:32 am

jimknopf wrote:Sample Robot (they are just working on Kronos export for their coming version: they offer the best tool for auto-looping and automatic crossfading from my view)

I assume you are talking about the optional WaveRobot program there, yes?

chickeneps · Post by **chickeneps** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 9:36 am

jimknopf wrote: - Extreme Sample Converter (the by far most convenient converter, especially for VSTi import)
- Chicken Systems Translator 6

I only would like to respond to Knopf's "by far" statement, which isn't worded as an opinion but rather as a review of fact. I would strongly disagree. There is nothing ESC does of importance that Translator hadn't already done before ESC even existed (the exception being autosampling), and Translator does important many things ESC doesn't. (Ironically, we also provided Korg with the ability to load SoundFonts in the first place.) Below is a partial list.

-Has supported converting into Korg Triton since 2002 (ESC never did)
-Better ->SoundFont support (ability to build banks easily, supports 24-bit)
-Mac-native compatible
-Supports many more import formats, and we can show better accuracy
-Is fully and continuously supported

Translator will include autosampling the next version, should be released in December 2012. But auto-sampling is probably 2% of most peoples work; conversion of files is by far the greatest interest to people.

As far as convenience, with Translator you don't even have to open the programs interface to convert something. I don't mind anyones statement of preference, but "by far the most convenient" probably isn't true.

Scott · Post by **Scott** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 2:23 pm

chickeneps wrote:Translator will include autosampling the next version, should be released in December 2012.

I kinda wish I knew that about 8 hours ago, when I finally broke down and bought SampleRobot, because I still do want a file converter, and think it is likely that I will buy Translator at some point anyway. Since "December 2012" is already upon us, I really could have waited. Any chance you guys may have a competitive cross-grade discount?

As for Translator vs. ESC, it seems that almost everyone who has posted anywhere about ESC thinks it's great, but it appears to be abandonware... not just because the long promised-upgrade has not appeared, but also the web site has had no updates in going on two years, and it looks like everyone's emails have gone unanswered. (Perhaps the developer is sadly no longer with us?) Apart from that, for my own purposes, I'd rather run a Mac program if possible.

Posts on the web about Translator are more of a mixed bag than those about ESC, with probably at least as many complaints as success stories, though the relevance of the complaints can be hard to discern without knowing exactly what the poster was trying to do... i.e. the fact that it has problems doing X may not matter if you're trying to do Y.

The fact that it turns out that Chicken supplied the code for Kronos' own SF2 support is something of a dubious point on their resume, as SF2 import was a source of major issues on the Kronos prior to the 2.x OS upgrade... for many people, it was a feature that simply never worked right, and there were plenty of posts here about that at the time... I found it to be the flakiest aspect of the board, and a major disappointment. But it does look like they eventually got it all sorted out, everyone seems to say it works well now, which is great. To those of us on this forum who care specifically about bringing sounds into Kronos, whatever shortcomings Chicken may have, at least at this point they seem particularly well positioned to make sure it works well with the Kronos.

chickeneps · Post by **chickeneps** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 3:19 pm

Forums operate under "mob rules". The people on them (mostly talking KVR, just one) go with a favorite, and the same people post on the forums year after year. People post their opinions with relatively little to support it, mostly it's their opinion, regardless if they've had valid comparisons. There's 50,000 Translator licenses out there, we get lots of excellent feedback, reality isn't like what is portrayed on forums.

There's always demos where you can try things, for both programs. We just rely on that.

Regarding SoundFont and Korg, we supplied the starter code many years ago, in the Triton Studio days (2004?). We tested it back them, as the Triton has different requirements. The Korg engineers actually had everything to do with what happened to the code afterwards.

Scott, contact me private at garth AT chickensys.com, perhaps we can work something out.

Post by **Sharp** » Sun Dec 02, 2012 3:37 pm

reality isn't like what is portrayed on forums.

In your opinion.
My experience of Translator tied in exactly with everything bad I read online about it everywhere I looked.

I am curious though to see if things have moved on and evolved much since then as it was a very long time ago. I think it's 2.0 I had on CD with patch updates that got me over v2.5 or something like that. Can that be freely upgraded to the latest version ?

If so, I might root out the CD and fire her up again to see where things stand now.

Regards
Sharp.