KVR Audio

yul · Post by **yul** » Fri Mar 03, 2017 3:59 pm

Hello! Any suggestions from the top of your head?

I feel the recent Halion, ST and Omnisphere offerings to be very bulky and also containt a lot of synthi stuff I can mostly already do.

I remember back in the days with Akai sets they were quite effective and had a lot of bang.

I mostly like natural instruments like the M1 plugin but wonder if there is anything a step up without going into the multi gigabyte..?

I see the EMU, East West and UVI librarires but not sure if this is the right way.

The free VSC orchestra and Xpand2 are really great. Maybe this is the best right now?

I know there is a lot of free stuff out there but auditioning, selecting and looping can be a big pain.

Any suggestions please? I like ambient, electro and pop..

Thanks a lot!

bmrzycki · Post by **bmrzycki** » Fri Mar 03, 2017 4:20 pm

Omnisphere isn't a natural instrument library by any means. You'd have to get keyscape to get more traditional sounds, but you can't edit them without Omnisphere. Combined these two are somewhere around 70GB of hard drive space.

Pianoteq comes to mind for certain modelled instruments, especially piano. I don't own them but their expansions for harp and steel pans are impressive. The average install size of an instrument is around 30MB.

Two libraries come to mind when talking about small size, natural sounds, and a lot of "bang". The Dark Zebra and Corin Neff's Zebra Orchestra. They're both purely synthesis but have tons of patches that don't sound synthy. Both have a bit of the M1 vibe of "close but not quite natural sounds". Both these libraries around 10MB each.

yul · Post by **yul** » Fri Mar 03, 2017 7:51 pm

Thanks a lot for your help! I will look into Pianoteq although I am not a big fan of Pianos (should have mentioned earlier sorry) but it looks like they have other things too. It's very interesting to hear about the Zebra sets, probably not quite what I had in mind but grateful to hear about it. Anyhow much appreciated. Cheers!

yul · Post by **yul** » Fri Mar 03, 2017 7:52 pm

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bigcat1969 · Post by **bigcat1969** » Sat Mar 04, 2017 6:01 am

I happen to know that the Virtual Playing Orchestra is going to be updating with all kinds of great features eventually. It will be a very good free SFZ orchestra when Paul gets it all done.

If you have Kontakt, the factory library is actually quite passable given its age. I'd also check the Alpine Project instruments if you have Kontakt.

Most compact and efficient commercial all-rounder library?