LASS vs Hollywood Strings

[rpittelman]

I know I'm a bit late on this post but I think reading this has now pushed me into the LASS corner as well. Now all I need is the money to purchase it

Some really good points that you guys made here

[pboss]

Thanks to all you guys for adding your experiences and insights here. The whole topic of scripting is really interesting and like it was pointed out, may be the what moves us into the next level of how and why these libraries are useful.

I'm about to purchase one of these any minute now, and had decided upon LASS. I was made aware of the new VSL string library - http://forums.taxi.com/post353410.html - and now would like to research how much that one has been user-tested. There is a great discount currently, but perhaps it's too soon to know. I realized this topic is only HS vs LASS, but it seems like this new VSL may be a contender. Any of you have any thoughts on this?

Thanks again for all of the info on HS vs LASS.

[mazz]

I've not been enamored of vsls player engine. Maybe it's better now. I have a couple of their specific libraries, fanfare trumpets and heroic horns (or something like that), and I never use them. I think they sound good but the interface is just not intuitive to me.

Lass runs in kontakt which is more "open" to developers, vsls system is their own code and as such is not pushed from the outside to progress, it progresses as Vsl has the time and energy to. From the time I first purchased lass until now, it has undergone a few revs that have greatly improved it and a lot of those were directly from user feedback. The developer is on the forums and is constantly dialoging with his customers. For me, that access to the makers of the library is huge. Try that with closed systems like vsl or ew.

Plus when native instruments improves kontakt (most likely with input from their developer community), we all benefit. I'm not saying that kontakt is super intuitive to use under the hood, but with the developers having so much flexibility in the scripting and interface design, it really doesn't matter because the developers can turn it into almost whatever they want.

Most importantly, to my ears, lass sounds like strings. It takes a bit more work sometimes to get that produced sound but the range of what they can do is more flexible and more importantly scalable than the larger more "Hollywood-ized" libraries (IMO).

I fully expect lass to continue to improve over the years and if history is any indicator, it will improve several times before the larger guys do another rev.

Cheers,

Mazz

[pboss]

Lass runs in kontakt which is more "open" to developers...
Mazz

Thanks for your insights on the new VSL, and pointing out the potential for faster improvement in LASS. Andrew is to be commended for his view of having created a, "living library" as he put it in one of the LASS videos I watched - it looks as though part of that philosophy included not charging for some of the upgrades until more recently.

It's a really good point you're making, Mazz, about what will happen to the library one invests in, going forward; Is it going to stay relatively as-is, or is it going to evolve significantly over time?