If you had to choose just one Orchestra Sample Library, Which one is it?

[Mathematics]

Vienna is my absolute choice. VEP is brilliant. I would make the same choice again and again.

[jancivil]

Garritan sounds horrible to my ears. I mean absolutely horrible. If you want cheap, buy East West's Symphonic Orchestra Silver. It's old but it sounds leagues better than Garritan.

I bought GPO before I bought anything else in samples. At the time the thing you coveted was VSL Cube which cost 8 bazillion dollars.

Out-of-the-box some of it is better than other things in it. OTB some of it is just 'tubby' and dull-seeming. By 'tubby' I mean needing some significant cuts in the mid-lows. (Dull; use the VSL Exciter. ) But it's not a professional sort of a deal really.

Some of it is of limited use but sounds really good, like the bass flute in it with no legato. That's a stumbling block past which I can't recommend, frankly.
I know nothing of GPO 5, I have whatever resulted of updating it to the Kontakt 2 version back then. The harps are good, you won't need legato for that one. (The percussion is good; so is the perc in EWQL SO Silver.) Not as good as Gigaharp which I used a Kontakt conversion of a couple yrs back. But if you want harps, the Garritan ARIA product is superb.

But I like to present this as a GPO result :
cello duet

[goldenhelix]

Having not used the Garritan orchestras myself I didn't specifically mean to endorse them. Just offering an alternate perspective. I have heard people get decent results with them for basic stuff, even if I do agree that the instruments themselves are not in the same league as most of the other products that have been mentioned. In fact a lot of libraries might have instruments that aren't amazing by themselves but might be fine in a larger mix.

[clangorous]

Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 is currently $119 at Sweetwater:

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/GPO5

[bosone]

I am a garritan owner (both personal and instant orchestra), and i have it since it was released.
still using it. I like the usability, easiness of use and some sounds. i would not say it's the best out there but, speaking about value for money, it's really a good choice.
you *can* get decent results if you learn how to use it, but you also have to understand its limits.
i have other libraries (miroslav, kontakt5 ultimate, kirk hunter solo strings) but I still rely on garritan for a lot of sounds.
maybe the strings are a bit dull, but i foudn the piano, brass and some woodwinds excellent. also the percussions have their character.
i do not make realistic orchestral mockup nor complex realistic orchestral composition, and i often use orchestral arrangment as a layer in hybrid trailers or in rock/metal productions.

[bigcat1969]

Splurged and got Berlin Woodwinds on clearance plus a coupon... no offense but Garritan to these is your next door neighbor singing in the shower versus Pavarotti singing at the Met.

[clangorous]

Splurged and got Berlin Woodwinds on clearance plus a coupon... no offense but Garritan to these is your next door neighbor singing in the shower versus Pavarotti singing at the Met.

If so, it would help me to know in what way and if it truly matters. I can eq, compress, saturate, delay and reverberate.

That won't fix a crappy recording of a sample, but Garritan samples are not crappy recordings. They are clean, flat eq, and dry. If the built in effects are not right for a piece, I have plenty of other options.

If it is the articulations, then yes I could see needing other libraries. But currently I don't feel limited by the included articulations.

[JonSolo]

It is true that you can do all sorts of things to modify the base sound. But that is where the difference lies. Multiple mic positions, incredible tone, and ambiance are not replaced by EQ, compression, and reverb.

The room these things are sampled in is important. I own a number of older libraries, and almost all of the new. Berlin Woodwinds are incredible. As I have said, they are the best.

But to your point, there is probably not a factor one way or another that would make a difference in your music. That is not a reference (or a slam) to your music, but rather an observation that, if you don't know or can't hear or don't feel limited by what you are missing, then you are likely not missing anything. You have everything you need for your music.

For some, their ear requires them to be picky with their libraries. For me it comes down to my clients and the musical requirements. In some cases, even the best libraries don't work and I find myself looking to hire actual instrumentalists.

Berlin Woodwinds are on sale now, and if you are a heavy woodwinds user, or orchestrate anything other than epic, I would call this a insta-buy. They are what I wish Hollywood Woodwinds were. And this fit well with the Hollywood series.

[clangorous]

Very helpful. Exactly what I was wanting to understand. Totally agree that multiple mic positions and specific rooms cannot be duplicated or worked around by other means. I do find convolution reverbs to be adequate for my needs but agreed, not the same thing.

Thanks for clarifying. Will help me in the decision making process as we always bump into the limitations of our rig at some point and so I will need more sounds. That's a good thing in that it inspires creativity. But sometimes you just need the right thing instead of a creative solution. Both are good at the right time.

Thanks for responding.

[bigcat1969]

Can't compete with the most excellent Jon Solo, so what he said!

I will note that tone to me comes from the performers, the hall and the engineers and if you don't have all three at the highest level you simple cannot fix it later. Berlin has it at the highest level as does Spitfire. Very few others do in my opinion.

I am or at least was a freebie dev, been lazy of late, and I know about trying to get samples to sound better than they are. I recently started learning how to do convo reverbs in Kontakt for that reason. I digitally hand tuned every single sample in my Iowa Orchestra release for instance. There are very real limits.

[clangorous]

Agreed big cat, on both points...the thing for me is not making the samples sound better as much as making them sit better in the mix. And listening to samples in solo wont tell you if they will sound right in a given mix.

An example is a synth piano patch I worked up. It did not sound "good" enough by itself. Not realistic enough. So I spent literally weeks developing it into a more realistic patch and got as close to "real" piano as I could and it sounded so much better.

But for the most recent composition I used the original more "toy" sounding patch and it sounded perfect in the mix while the "better" patch sounded horrible in the mix. I was happy and pissed off at the same time. What works with sound is so empirical sometimes like there is no way to predict it. So I try not to get too caught up in what sounds good until I'm at the console recording or mixing. So acheiving the best results is more play than engineering for me.

[Fleer]

Kirk Hunter Virtuoso Ensembles is $89 instead of $299 until the end of the month. Just got it in and it’s a great sketching composition tool with first and second violins, celli and bass, plus woodwinds, brass and percussion. There’s even a grand piano included that sounds quite decent in the mix.

[jancivil]

The room these things are sampled in is important.

I believe strongly that 'room' is important in music, but I don't believe it has to be there in the samples to be a great sample library. Before the innovations in providing correct spacial synergy in ensembles, VSL used the dry stage. They have a name for it, I forgot. But there is nothing to it, it's dry. It's stereo samples but there is no perceptible ambience. They created MIR, multiple impulse responses which most people here never even heard of. Believe me, people actually have managed ok with VSL dry stage and producing the room themselves.

[jancivil]

listening to samples in solo wont tell you if they will sound right in a given mix.

gospel_truth

[jancivil]

To speak to that, are people actually really using a lot of the Spitfire room mixed with the Berlin room?

I came close to buying Berlin Woodwinds, the demos are so good and there is a kind of extensive look at them by one of the usual suspects on Youtube which really shows them off. I didn't because I do my research. They came up with a poor man's version of the dimensions for articulations in VSL but it was buggy on many, possibly most systems and they actually were very happy with their view that the way you handle multiple artics was to load individual .nkis for each one, because Old School. I decided I couldn't support that. It was a whole lotta money, nota bene.