Ok, some of you are concerned on exactly how good Garritan's orchestra might sound because it's only on 4 CD's. We'll have examples soon enough to show us, but I thought I'd do a little test.

http://www.panicnow.net/~devonb/Violins.mp3

This has pizz violin ensembes, staccato violin ensembes, then legato, stac, and pizz combined together. I threw it together in about 10 minutes, so I was not up on 'perfection' here.

Now I want you to guess the actual size of the three sounds in here in megs for the 3 banks.

Your guesses please? Bonus points if you can name the library this came out of.

Devon

OK, i'll guess that's from the Orchestral Expansion board for the Roland JV/XV series.....? Certainly sounds familiar and only 8Mb per board if i remember rightly.

sounds exactly like aphex twin boy/girl song. lol he claims that he sampled those strings himself.

Nope, not the Roland stuff. Keep guessing

Devon

OOps! it's Garritan Orch lib

Nope! I'll give another hint. The copyright on the packaging says 1993.

Devon

Aahh come on, I was 12 years old at that time, playing with tapedecks!

I don't have the set myself, but I'm guessing at Miroslav

vic_france wrote:

I don't have the set myself, but I'm guessing at Miroslav

Bingo! It's Miroslav Violin Ensembles. The pizz are 876k, the staccato is 3.6 megs, and the legato is 8.2 megs. Not huge samples, just good quality recordings. That artform seems to have disappeared.

Devon

LOL: 1993 isn't that the year aphex twin's Richard D James albulm came out?

Very nice. I've wondered if I'd ever find an orchestral package I liked in my price range.

Do you plan to do others to complement this package? It would really be nice to be able to build up an orchestral library withous having to fork over $1500 on a "budget" version (whose budget is that anyway?).

Who's budget? I spent more than $1500 on samples this year alone. But it all depends what you want to do with your music. Music isn't just a hobby for me either though. I don't mind paying when it's good.

Devon

So now that some people have spent some time with this set, what is the best "cheap" collection? So far I have been using the two Roland SRX boards along with the Roland orechestral CD's loaded into a XV-5080.

Robert