Orchestral Samples

[gen5020]

I'm looking at some orchestal sample libraries and would love to know what you folks are using and your feedback on them. I'm looking at fairly inexpensive stuff (under $500) and running them on protools using a Mac Pro. Here's what I've researched:Steinberg's Halion - I don't think they have the Intel chip ready yet but I would wait if everyone loved it.MOTU Symphonic libraryEast West Silver (probably can't afford much more)Reason String refill???Garritan Personal OrchestraIK Multimedia PhilharmonikI know there are many more and would love to hear about them as well.Basically, I'm not trying to do a Beethoven symphony BUT I do need realistic strings, brass, woodwinds for sports rockers, ballads and the like. My Triton and Motif just aren't cutting it anymore.Also, ease of use is important. I want something I can use as a RTAS plug in, midi it up and go.Am I asking for too much?Thanks. . . by the way, I know I ask all the questions around here. One of these days someone will ask something I know about and I promise I will answer, in the meantime thanks for all the advice you give.Dave

[davewalton]

Hi Dave,Of the ones you listed, EWQL Silver is the only one I'd get. I started with Silver and it's an outstanding product - especially for $200. Having said that, if the top level of your budget is really around $500, I'd STRONGLY recommend raising that to $595 and getting EWQL Gold. For the extra money, you'll be getting yourself into the pro quality level of orchestral packages - great sound and lots of articulations. There's really no downside to Gold in my opinion and by far and away is the best value for the money. You might not ever need to do this, but there's also the advantage of their upgrade path where you can go to the next level (Gold Expanded), the next level (Platinum), etc without breaking your existing projects. Plus it's used by the holy trinity of Hollywood's A-list composers - me, Matto, and Ernstinen. Dave

[hummingbird]

Hi Dave - I just got the East West Silver Edition (based on Daves recommendation). I think it's a great idea, if you have a budget, to start with the Silver to get a feel for it, cause the great thing is that you can easily expand to the larger Gold when you are able to. If you have limited ram or disk space, the Silver would be a better choice.Even though I'm starting with Silver, I made sure to get a couple of extra interntal SATA hard drives on my new computer so that when I expand to Gold, I will have the space.In any case, I would check the specs carefully before purchasing.cheersHummin'bird

[zircon]

QLSO Gold can be purchased for less than $500...www.scitscat.comDefinitely worth the money. However, it's not really a "plug and play" instrument. Most modern orchestral libraries require a lot of time and tweaking. It is clumsy and cumbersome to load different patches, plus disk streaming and the large size of the patches often impedes playback and taxes your machine heavily. If you are expecting something like a hardware workstation, where you just select a patch, it's instantly loaded, and you can play it immediately... there's very little like that in the software world.Now all that being said, I strongly recommend Kontakt 2. At $400, it's not cheap. However, it's highly powerful. It comes with 15gb worth of samples, from synths, to drums of all types, pianos, e.pianos, and even some FANTASTIC guitars (including ultra-realistic strumming scripts for rhythm parts!) but most importantly it comes with 7.5gb of orchestral samples culled from Vienna Symphonic Library. Though the range of articulations and instruments is not as wide as QLSO, the recording quality is very good and they are recorded dry so they are easier to process.The main reason for getting Kontakt 2 is not just the samples. It lets you EDIT your samples, create multis of up to 64 instruments (vs. 8 with QLSO's built in sampler), heavily tweak your disk streaming performance, and also load just about any kind of sample CD known to man - including QLSO. With K2, you can create a patch of 12 orchestral instruments, with each part of your keyboard representing a different instrument - including overlaps. You can program velocity and key fades so they get louder or softer depending on where you are. In other words, you can create patches that are more similar to 'plug and play' hardware.Just my 2 cents... Kontakt 2 is probably the most important tool in my arsenal. If this sounds like too much for you, IK Philharmonik may be your best bet. It is highly playable and requires little tweaking, though the recording quality is slightly dated.

[davewalton]

Quote:QLSO Gold can be purchased for less than $500...www.scitscat.comDefinitely worth the money. However, it's not really a "plug and play" instrument. Most modern orchestral libraries require a lot of time and tweaking. It is clumsy and cumbersome to load different patches, plus disk streaming and the large size of the patches often impedes playback and taxes your machine heavily. If you are expecting something like a hardware workstation, where you just select a patch, it's instantly loaded, and you can play it immediately... there's very little like that in the software world.Now all that being said, I strongly recommend Kontakt 2. So that we don't muddy the waters, it should be pointed out that Gold (and a fair number of other software instruments) are just self-contained versions of Kontakt with a reduced feature set. Out of the box, the functionality in terms of how you load and play an instrument, disk streaming, the resources it takes, it's all the same. However, Kontakt lets you go beyond just loading and playing sample and into the realm of sample programming from basic to advanced.I would generally disagree with the assement of how these things work. Early software instruments like AKAI samples are clunky and cumbersome. Gold (Kontakt or whatever) and other software instruments are self-contained instruments. You select your patches from the various orchestra sections, they load up in a few seconds and you're ready to record. Really straight forward. The time and tweaking comes mostly from creating dynamics to create more realism, but to me that's like the time and tweaking on EQ, compression, etc, that we do to make a recording sound better. I use a home built PC with the AMD equivalent of a 2GHz Pentium 4 with 1.5Gb of RAM. I use software instruments exclusively. Some of my projects are fairly ambitious and I rarely run into problems. Anyway, Kontakt vs Gold (or any of the other Kontakt-based software instruments) pretty much boils down to customization and flexibility. Gold is a self-contained instrument. You won't be able to open other samples with it and you won't be able to do a lot of customization in terms of the samples and instrumentation. I think of Gold as a "read-only" version of Kontakt. So if you get Kontakt, you would want to get it because of the extra samples it comes bundled with (in addition to the fine Vienna Symphony stuff) and/or because you want to do sample editing/programming on some level.Plus, Kontakt is used by the dynamic duo of Hollywood's A-list composers - Zircon and Matto. Quote:If this sounds like too much for you, IK Philharmonik may be your best bet. It is highly playable and requires little tweaking, though the recording quality is slightly dated.Ohhhh... I'm going to get on Zircon's bad side today. Personally I'd go for recording quality (i.e. Kontakt or Gold or Silver) over ease of use. Kontakt and all of it's software instrument "children" are really too easy to use to pass up in favor of a lower quality instrument. Using the combined Zircon/Dave recommendations will give you three good choices - Silver, Gold, or Kontakt. Dave

[mazz]

Hi there,The people that make the libraries under discussion here are coming out with a new interface for their libraries that replaces the Kontakt player, it's called Play. www.soundsonline.comI think you can upgrade to the Play interface when it comes out if you buy one of their libraries now (at pretty steep discounts). Check out their website to find out for sure. They claim to have written an interface that interprets how you play to automatically switch to legato, stacatto, etc. I haven't seen this yet (very few actually have) but I use their library all the time and they make great stuff so I have no reason to doubt it will be great.Kontakt is a very good piece of software. I use it on my workhorse orchestra computers and I have about 32 MIDI channels going on one and it works great. The ability to access seperate outputs (if your hardware accepts it) and 64 MIDI channels (in standalone) were great selling points to me.Good luck,John Mazzei

[ernstinen]

Quote:Plus it's used by the holy trinity of Hollywood's A-list composers - me, Matto, and Ernstinen. LOL! Yes, EWQLSO Gold is really a fine library. Something that I've grown to appreciate is the built-in ambience. I believe Silver is dry, and Platinum has both options.Gold blends in well with other libraries I run on GigaStudio by adding a little reverb to the Giga sounds. You can create a HUGE symphonic sound through trial and error in your orchestrating (orchestration? ).Ern

[matto]

I would recommend Gold, totally worth the money over Silver...HOWEVER Gold won't work on Intel Macs until the new Play engine comes out OR unless you also get Kontakt 2, which is now compatible (as of version 2.2), and load the Gold instruments into that. Which of course puts it out of your price range. Miroslav is okay it's just lacking in dynamic layers.Another budget library that's widely liked is Kirk Hunter Emerald, although I don't own it so I can't comment first hand. You'd also need K2 for this as it's not standalone.

[gen5020]

Thanks for all the input guys.I have read about all the stuff you have told me and I think I have an idea. I can get the K2 program from academic superstore for cheap because I'm a teacher. It will load up on the mac pro (I actually downloaded the trial version) and get the Gold later on because it will play on the K2 sampler, right?Would this be the best of both worlds?Whatcha think?

[davewalton]

Quote:Thanks for all the input guys.I have read about all the stuff you have told me and I think I have an idea. I can get the K2 program from academic superstore for cheap because I'm a teacher. It will load up on the mac pro (I actually downloaded the trial version) and get the Gold later on because it will play on the K2 sampler, right?Would this be the best of both worlds?Whatcha think?That sounds like a great plan to me. I didn't think about the Intel Mac thing. I'm glad Matto brought that up. Since Gold (and a bunch of others) use a smaller version of K2 to run, it loads right up in the full version of K2 and you won't have the Intel Mac issue to deal with.BTW, Soundsonline has 30% off sales (sometimes more) around most major holidays and sometimes just out of the blue. I added the exanded version of Gold for 66% off sometime back. You can sign up for their mailing list at www.soundsonline.comDave