Garritan Personal Orchestra feedback

[Götterfunke]

This is true, but they did ban my IP address. It has an amazingly positive community over at NS because Gary Garritan will personally PM to warn you off if you're not quite 'happy clappy' and Gary Garritan, or his minions, rule it with a rod of iron, deleting posts which they disagree with.

I would have to agree with that. Any criticism of GPO is not allowed at the NS forum.

GPO sounds awful. Some of the worst recorded samples ever.

[Markleford]

GPO sounds awful. Some of the worst recorded samples ever.

And yet, nobody forces people to buy GPO, but they still do. Even after hearing plenty of amateur demos on the website that make no attempt to hide what the library is and what it isn't behind professional production or imprinted reverb and sweetening.

So maybe GPO doesn't sound so awful to everyone, or at the very least it's "passable" and the ease of expression and programming makes up for it.

Perhaps it's not what you're after, but I imagine it rates slightly above the "worst ever" rating your unqualified expert opinion and unsubstantiated historical knowledge allows it.

Then again, I often credit people with the mental capability and emotional maturity to differentiate between what's right for their purposes as opposed to the rest of the world's needs and requirements.

And most often I'm proven wrong.

- m

[Bob Gravy]

This is true, but they did ban my IP address. It has an amazingly positive community over at NS because Gary Garritan will personally PM to warn you off if you're not quite 'happy clappy' and Gary Garritan, or his minions, rule it with a rod of iron, deleting posts which they disagree with.

I would have to agree with that. Any criticism of GPO is not allowed at the NS forum.

GPO sounds awful. Some of the worst recorded samples ever.

Well I didn't get banned for saying I didn't like GPO! I think it's excellent for the money actually.

[kevink]

When I first got started with soft samplers and softsynths, I got Kontakt (1.1 at the time) and the venerable Advanced Orchestra sample set. That was a good start, at the time. A year or so later, the buzz about GPO was so great that I shelled out for it, and found that (a) the samples weren't all necessarily better than the old AO samples but, (b) the dynamics layering and legato programming made for a huge improvement in usability. Then a major group buy opportunity came up for EWQLSO Gold, and at about the same time a really cheap upgrade from AO to the much more usable AO Extended became available. So now I've got 3 low-to-midrange orchestral sets, and I remain of the opinion that you really can never have too many different articulations in your arsenal. EWQLSO Gold is my "go to" orchestral sample set - as a piano player, I find the velocity-based dynamics more intuitive than GPO's modwheel scheme, and the mix and stereo imaging just seem to come out right most of the time. But GPO is a good tool for the price, and I still use it, especially for solo instruments.

[Markleford]

Well I didn't get banned for saying I didn't like GPO!

Yeah, that's one of those reputations probably spread by another developer: "Banned for criticising GPO!" And of course rumors become truth if nobody comes out and dispells it like this!

Really, if you do a search at NSS you'll find its share of GPO criticism. Moreso than here on KVR itself, maybe: I think the "amateur audience" tends to be more laid-back in its opinions.

Of course, there are always the "experts" on any forum that love to chime in with hyperbolic claims...

- m

[Markleford]

EWQLSO Gold is my "go to" orchestral sample set [...] But GPO is a good tool for the price, and I still use it, especially for solo instruments.

I like to see when people can see the merits in music tools on their own, rather than everything being some sort of contest/war/argument.

Sort of like the old Mac vs PC debate, which always seemed extremely silly: just use the tools that get the job done, and don't worry about what others are using!

and I remain of the opinion that you really can never have too many different articulations in your arsenal.

Luckily that attitude is becoming very popular, and greatly benefits those that have it!

The only problem right now is attempting to match reverbs between libraries, which can be a headache. I'm hoping that use of convolution reverbs will make this less of an issue in future libraries: hopefully everything will be recorded dry so that you can put any dev's instrument in the same space.

Then we'll just have to worry about differing control schemes between companies...

- m

[Lunatique]

I think the appeal of GPO has most been because of the amount of stuff offered at the price point--no one else was offering a complete set of orchestral library at such a low price. However, GPO has always sounded the worst to me--thin, unexpressive, clinical, and synthy. Only the best MIDI mockup guys brought out more life from that sample library, while in the hands of the average GPO user, it always sounded fake and synthy. At this point, the low-priced complete orchestral library market has been filled by more than one developer--we now have Miroslav Philharmonik, MOTU Symphonic Instrument, Edirol HQ Orchestral, Kirk Hunter Emerald/Saffire..etc, and some of them have surpassed GPO in quality, content, and pricing (where the quality/content exceeds price), it'll be interesting to see where Garritan will go next with the sequel to GPO.

[Kim Lajoie]

To be fair, all orchestral libraries require some work to get best results from them. For example, pulling up a string ensemble patch and playing fat two-handed piano-style chords will always sound dumb, no matter how good the samples are.

Also, I'm not quite sure that Miroslav Philharmonik counts as "low-priced". At $599 (MSRP) it's not quite on the same shelf as GPO or Kirk Hunter's Emerald.

-Kim.

[lavoll]

for what it's worth, i scored a little cartoon with GPO:
http://jorn.lavoll.no/fairytale/

Cool

It would be interesting to see how the music sits with the animation.

i only have a clip from a sketch:
http://jorn.lavoll.no/showreel/afairytaleclip.wmv

hehe, but you get to hear my wonderful song for the bard: lalalaa-coo-coo
I want to record just that song sometime, hehehe, it's incredibly.. silly.

[Blank_Frank]

GPO doesn't work so well with Kontakt (Kontakt 2 not at all really)

I know there were major tuning issues with GPO in the initial release of Kontakt 2, but I'm convinced these were resolved in a later patch (2.0.2), under the fix:

Library issues with incorrect glide default value have been fixed

I've just loaded a few instruments in, and they all seem to work fine under Kontakt 2.0.2.

I've got GPO, EWQLSO Gold and the VSL library that comes with Kontakt 2, and I find all of them useful at different times. EWQLSO Gold can provide instant gratification, but most of the instruments include release samples with hall ambience, which I'd prefer to add myself with convolution. Also there are some strange gaps in the instrumentation, e.g. solo violin and cello, but no viola and contrabass (you need to buy the upcoming EWQLSO Gold Pro add-on to get these). GPO takes a bit more work, but can still produce some good sounds - it's also far less memory-hungry than other libraries, which may affect your decision depending on your setup.

[msorrels]

I'm still getting the popping and clicking with 2.0.2, but perhaps my test isn't fair. I load say "Violin 1 Gagli KS Solo", throw the mod wheel to the top and play a C major cord/triad and hold it. It starts popping and clicking. Sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, but very annoyingly. Play a few more random triads, hear even more poping/clicking. Doing the same thing with Kontakt 1.5 I don't get the popping and clicking. I'm pretty sure I've heard the popping/clicking without a cord being played as well, just single notes. But I think it's harder to reproduce.

As for 1.5, I can't find the docs but there is some feature that's only available if you use the player. It didn't seem like that big a deal, but it certainly meant to me that Kontakt wasn't really the right tool to use the GPO library with.

[Markleford]

I'm still getting the popping and clicking with 2.0.2, but perhaps my test isn't fair. I load say "Violin 1 Gagli KS Solo", throw the mod wheel to the top and play a C major cord/triad and hold it. It starts popping and clicking. Sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, but very annoyingly.

Actually, I get that same result (clicking, sometimes loud popping) with the included VSL sounds (mod wheel patches) if my latency is too low. I think that K2 might have some mod wheel handling issues that spikes CPU?

- m

[msorrels]

Pretty sure it's not my latency, I tried upping the settings on the ASIO driver to 2048 samples (I normally run at 512 samples or 10ms) with no change. And I doubt it's CPU, this is a dual Opteron 250, the CPU light in K2 doesn't even blink when playing one chord with one loaded instrument. I couldn't get the VSL's mod instruments to pop, but it certainly could be a mod wheel bug.

[kovacs]

I have Kontakt 2 and prefer the GPO Steinway to the one in K2. I haven't really used a lot of the other patches in GPO but for my needs it's a great product! Yeah, I did get it at group buy price but I cannot say that anything about it sucks.

It did make me up my ram to 2GB though...which was a good thing after all.

[Blank_Frank]

I'm still getting the popping and clicking with 2.0.2, but perhaps my test isn't fair. I load say "Violin 1 Gagli KS Solo", throw the mod wheel to the top and play a C major cord/triad and hold it.

I've tried to replicate this but I don't get any problems, either in normal (sampler) mode or using DFD - it barely registers on the CPU meter. I'm using Kontakt 2.0.2, Cubase SX3, Audiophile 2496 PCI (running at 256 samples) in an Athlon XP 2600 PC with 1Gb memory.

I'm not sure if this helps you, but I thought I'd let you know.