Old, tired, and frustrated.. (Orchestra SW Content)

[EnGee]

@atya: This is a crazy price!!! Even cheap for a demo!

@zzz00m:
I thought there are some solos there in the strings! But anyway, some presets sound like solo in the upper octaves

Sonivox_Strings.jpg

The Kirk Hunter's library is really good. I have listened to the video! Impressive especially with the discount
I thought to buy it! But, I played with the Strings of Sonivox today. Man this is really a good library. I won't make pure orchestra work, but for film/movie/game like or whatever, this is more than enough for me

I don't like Kontakt and I did succeed to avoid it till now (not even player I have ) The Sonivox libraries are light on the cpu while Kontakt is not that light.

[atya]

The Kirk Hunter's library is really good. I have listened to the video! Impressive especially with the discount

Can't wait for the next $99 sale on the Kirk Hunter Diamond lib.

I don't like Kontakt and I did succeed to avoid it till now (not even player I have )

Now we're two even though I'm using the player with some NI and 3rd party libs quite a bit but if one thing turns me off it's that sort of bundle business and paying for stuff I don't need.

[zzz00m]

I have avoided the full Kontakt as well, have the player but haven't bought anything for it yet. Kontakt seems more like a money pit to me, so you will end up buying a bunch of stuff on sale that you don't really need.

I got the Sonivox Orchestral Companion Strings for $1, then upgraded to their everything bundle for less than $100. So I guess I am stuck with that, which should be enough for what I want to do for now. It should be good enough for orchestral backgrounds in any arrangement. The sample libraries for the 3 Orchestral Companions, plus Big Bang Cinematic Percussion, and the Eighty-Eight Ensemble piano, weigh in at 45+GB.

Sonivox is really not bad, but the lack of multis is the only thing I really wish it had. You have to use separate instances of the plugins for each instrument section you need. And you will still need to look elsewhere for serious solo instruments.

[3rdstone]

Well, Kontakt cross-grade has just been purchased for $124.50, (DruMic'a cross-grade offer ,plus 50% off Thanksgiving sale)...now I don't feel so bad about buying into the 'gateway'.

Now if only Berlin Inspire would have a sale, I'd be set (for now).
And just waiting with baited breath for Hunter's software to go on sale again. Hopefully a Black Friday sale soon... *crosses fingers*

[jancivil]

If you're really old... I'm old, and I find the EWQL Play interface shortens the life span unnecessarily. And I rather mean that. It's just lame.


VSL because of the power of the interface. Certain developers have done some nice things with the Kontakt interface; but for instance Berlin did a weak copy of the dimensional approach to organizing articulations VSL has done for a long while, and by many if not most reports that was buggy. I have acquired a couple of older VSL libraries (which IMO have not been surpassed) for Kontakt and what has to happen here is to use Groups in order to create keyswitches (this stuff originally relied on the Performance Tool in Gigastudio back in the day, which does not translate to Kontakt) and then Orange Tree Samples 'Mind Control' using Kontakt Banks for the higher level Matrices organization, where a Matrix contains one or more dimensions of cells (patches). Dimensions meaning Horizontally = keyswitched (in a row) and Vertically = CC (further H rows), typically. Or H = velocity or speed switching. Making these things work like VSL does out-of-the-box gets old. There is nothing approaching this in Play. Berlin did nothing towards the Matrix idea, you could get one H. row and one more row stacked and accessed by a Vertical switch up, IIRC. I don't believe there is anything more to be done in Kontakt than this way provides for.

SO. For serious creators of realistic-seeming music from the virtual instruments/samples libs side it's a lot more power just in terms of your organization. Then there are other factors which would make this a terribly long post to even get started into.

Then, the thing about both EW and VSL is there is only the proprietary stuff even available. Kontakt pretty essential here, afaic.

Another factor in convincing people of reality is the employment of space, reverb. Spitfire, Berlin and others are very proud of the room they record in. So, how much do you love that room, because that's where you live unless you want to cloud that issue (or work around it, or maybe you get weird with space and it's one part of it. & good luck with that.). IME Berlin and Spitfire are very different spaces. Many things to think about here. To be candid, I'm not a fan of EWQL on several different fronts, but first there is the Play engine which I don't even have time for. I tend to doubt they make anything which isn't eminently substitutable by several other options.

[3rdstone]

Wow jancivil,
Your post is so informative here, I copied, pasted, and printed it.

And between my last post and now (after perusing/shopping once again), I've decided to hold off on buying anything until I get a better grasp on all aspects of utilizing any of these libraries..
Yes, functionality does matter (along with a lot of other considerations)

Thanks again...