east west owners, ever regret a library?

[zerocrossing]

I bought RA a long time ago and somehow I managed to sell it. I think it was because I never registered it... not sure. I remember them telling me I couldn't sell it but I did. I was ignorant of the whole thing as it was a time when I had just started dabbling with software instruments and I couldn't grok the idea that with something so expensive that had no demo there was no way of getting a refund or selling it. Even now, writing that, it seems ludicrous.

I can't totally remember why I didn't like RA, but I didn't. It bugged me on every level, but it was before the Play Engine, so it was some Kontakt player. I think now I remember that doing something like assigning pitch to aftertouch to modulate a sitar was impossible with it. RAtarded. I also have to admit that at the time I was on a laptop so memory was an issue for me. Anyway, I vowed to never buy anything from them again, and I haven't.

[kbaccki]

Shredage is not sampled with distortion

That's its best part! I hate pre-recorded distortions! Makes things so much less flexible.

Lyrical Distortion guitars and basses are all DI as well, in addition to a few of the guitars having a amped version. The LP and and Charvel power chord libs are good for rock/metal rhythm stuff, and a couple of the lead instruments like Ripper are definately good value for the money, IMO. I've recently started using their basses more as well, and they sound pretty good too, esp. for the money! Big fan of the OTS Evolution as well...

[bill45]

dragon,
I agree , I was pointing out that shreddage does not come with an amp sim.
Shreddage is definatly more realistic than MOR for rythm.
Budwiser,
You can get seprate outputs for each drum , by running a seprate instance for
each drum.Just deactivate and unload the drums you are not using in each instance.It is apain to do it like that !

[GMusic]

G,
What other instruments do You have?
What is You're budget?MOR is Half off until July 31.It's a great sounding library.It will take time to get realistic results.If you do fast repeated notes Mor may fall short.There aren't enough drum hits for fast metal and
fast unmuted chors have the machine gun effect.The samples Don't always sound
consistant across the keyboard.

Not much for guitar. I figured the newer Kontakt instruments would be a better bet these days.

[C-note]

No

[bill45]

G
Check out vir2 electri6ity, I just got it ,so far , it's awesome !
The prominy SC and lpc are awesome , but hard to use.Trillian is an exellent choice for rock bass.The sustain 2 mode gives you realistic repeated notes!

[jancivil]

are there any libraries you own that you just don't use much? which do you regret buying, only first buying them because of a "wow" factor?

EW Quantum Leap Symphony Ork, Silver Edition.

Not much money, but basically not very good either. And impossible to sell. It poisoned me against everything else they've done. That, and the insane hyperbole of their ads...

Yeah, that's my one, too. :loss leader:

[Caco]

are there any libraries you own that you just don't use much? which do you regret buying, only first buying them because of a "wow" factor?

EW Quantum Leap Symphony Ork, Silver Edition.

Not much money, but basically not very good either. And impossible to sell. It poisoned me against everything else they've done. That, and the insane hyperbole of their ads...

Yeah, that's my one, too. :loss leader:

I made that mistake as well, will never be buying from EW again either.

[jancivil]

I have used RA in one project, which I really enjoyed. Shortly afterwards, I started moving all of my instruments into Vienna Ensemble Pro and a slave situation, via LAN gigabit. Kontakt, BFD2, my main workhouses worked in it early on... Play engine did not work for too many people in VE Pro, and worked for no one on a Mac system with that host.

So I was near to regretting this purchase...
the thing is, Doug Rogers at EWQL had a bad, bad attitude from the get-go, as soon as he heard of VE Pro I would guess. I posted a question, nice as you please, on their forum which got instantly relegated to an irrelevant board there, 'hardware' - it seems he had some vague plan for a network, server farm software which requires the same setup as the old way, a sound card on each machine and lightpipe. And was of the firm opinion that VE Pro won't work. So, when Play did not work in VE Pro, he did not want to address it. He wasn't trying to see any questions about it on that forum, relegated to a board he felt free to opine that his was by far the better way to go - never mind that it didn't, still doesn't, and isn't likely ever to exist. He claimed that it was basically incompatible, and said - which was demonstrated within minutes to be false, and he had to walk it back - that he'd heard nothing from VSL's developers, and that it's their problem to fix in any case.

Well, the market spoke, you know, people using all kinds of things bought VE Pro, and a lot of people in the EWQL camp. They had to deal with reality, because people find VE Pro useful enough to set their system up around.

Well, today it works, Play hosted in VE Pro. I just tested it on my slave. Reportedly works basically in all of the previous versions, so *all* of the fix was at EWQL's end to do. Still, DR's talking point is: 'it did require cooperation on both ends'. I think that they never communicated once actually, based on this guy's 'tude.

So, it's just not the kind of company, on one too many levels I'm at all motivated to buy from. (The dongle's too big as well. Not x64 capable here due to, PACE 64-bit coding not ready... which seems strange as 'what kernel booted' has no effect on Syncrosoft's dongle.)

[wankwinkel]

been burned too many times.

symphonic orchestras -- very expensive and way to unwieldy. Don't use.

Fab Four -- never could get it to work, support from them was basically non-existent.

There aren't many manufacturers who really make my sh** list, but they are one of them. The other is Synthax, which distributes RME in the United States, and seems to me to be singularly ill-equipped to do so. In my opinion, they made owning a Fireface 800 a miserable experience.

If only people could see how companies like u-he, Ableton (despite their recent stability problems), Apogee (just to name a few) handle customers.

[echophex]

I just purchased Silk.
I went for a week and a half trying to install it on my main (its old now) 32bit DAW...with no luck.

Come to find out my processors are not supported..due to age.

The computer is a workhorse but its not supported.

I was frustrated but mainly because it was a smack in the face of the inevitable fact that my handbuilt daw is getting old.

So I installed PLAY/Silk on my laptop brandnew and hooked up an extra soundcard and midi keyboard I had laying around.

ITS BEAUTIFUL.
So far its working wonderfully..

granted its a pain routing the audio into my main daw but thats my only option at this point.

Their tech support was prompt and friendly.

[Compyfox]

are there any libraries you own that you just don't use much? which do you regret buying, only first buying them because of a "wow" factor?

I somewhat regret buying Rare Instruments in GIGA format.

Why? It was on sale, and only a couple of weeks later came EWQL RA. And no upgrade option. Now it's only available as (buggy/CPU intensive) Play Version for the price of a left kidney...

I miss the days where EWQL was still supporting Kontakt. Less trouble, all in one box.


Though I still enjoy this pack for adding more sound scapes to productions, and thanks to Kontakt 4's AET implementation, I enjoy EWQL Brass (also GIGA) once more.

Dissapointing was the up and down with the Steinway and Bosendorfer pianos, the rereleases and licensing drama... I rather stick to my Pianos from Sampletekk - IIRC, the same stuff, just with a tad more samples.

[zArt]

Hi.
I'm thinking of purchasing EastWest Composers Collection but i read this thread and now i'm a bit concerned. It seems that most of the issues with EastWest products is Play. But what about the samples are they really worth it for the price? I have a desktop PC with a 3Ghz Dualcore with 4Gb of RAM at 1000mhz and sata drives and a laptop HP G61, with a Core2duo 2.2Ghz 2Mb L2 cache and 4Gb of RAM at 800mhz with a 500Gb drive, are they good enough to run Play without issues?

Cya.

[tropicalontour]

So sounds like the verdict of the thread is: fair to good samples on average (but some poor), not a nice company to deal with, not good technology.

Maybe I will stay away. I've got some really nice things from Bolder Sounds, Heavyocity and Zero-G anyway. That will do me.

[EvilDragon]

Hi.
I'm thinking of purchasing EastWest Composers Collection but i read this thread and now i'm a bit concerned. It seems that most of the issues with EastWest products is Play. But what about the samples are they really worth it for the price? I have a desktop PC with a 3Ghz Dualcore with 4Gb of RAM at 1000mhz and sata drives and a laptop HP G61, with a Core2duo 2.2Ghz 2Mb L2 cache and 4Gb of RAM at 800mhz with a 500Gb drive, are they good enough to run Play without issues?

Dualcore will work relatively ok (don't hope to load an awful lot of PLAY instances), but for best performance you should have a quadcore and at least 8 GB of RAM.