Orb Composer vs. Rapidcomposer

[JerGoertz]

I'm considering these compositional assistants; my needs are not genre-specific. Anyone with experience with either/both is welcome to submit their opinions!

[Digivolt]

I went with Rapid Composer as it has a greater depth to things you can do in terms of composition as opposed to Orb Composer, if you don't know music theory then I'd go with Orb Composer

[JerGoertz]

How do you find Rapidcomposer's user interface and general usability?

[Boone777]

I find the interface user friendly. It is packed with options and that's where it gets complicated but the way it is laid out is pretty intuitive. There is a few quirks to get used to I was a bit frustrated at start but there is usually a good way to do things even if I did'nt figure it out at first. Attila is very responsive and that is a huge plus for this type of software.

I do experience crashes though not enough to not get work done and it always saves the work before crash and opens back up quickly.
My experience with similar software is that they all crash at some point but this one by far has been better for me on all points.
It's been much more stable as standalone I might have a conflict going on in Reaper with some heavy plugins or routing.

[GreyLion]

Big thumbs up for Attila and his responsiveness. When I emailed him with a few suggestions for making the GUI more HiDPI-friendly, he implemented changes within a few days that made RC much easier for me to use on a 4K monitor. I haven't actually used RC heavily, but so far so good.

[Topcheese]

I don't think Orb supports plugins. The RC dev seems to provide timely support and updates of it, and it's the more mature product of the two. I think where you would want to pick Orb over RC is if you did a lot of orchestral work it would serve you better than RC.
I also think that Orb requires you to have pretty robust knowledge of music to make full use of it. They are both great products, and I thought RC was expensive, but Orb set me straight on that.

[DJ Warmonger]

Orb Composer supports plugins from last update (S), however it's half-assed. For each type of articulation you need to load separate plugin instance, which is impratical and completely incompatible with typical synths.

...or maybe there's a way, but I didn't find it yet?

[Mineralhillsworkshop]

How do you find Rapidcomposer's user interface and general usability?

If you are interested, I attempted to create a more modern UI and posted it on this thread.
viewtopic.php?f=168&t=430812&sid=94f046 ... a&start=30

I am working on improving it even more and will have a new version posted soon.

I love this program!

[silenthill2006]

Orb Composer supports plugins from last update (S), however it's half-assed. For each type of articulation you need to load separate plugin instance, which is impratical and completely incompatible with typical synths.

...or maybe there's a way, but I didn't find it yet?

I agree. It is a pain in the ass. It also exports midi in separate tracks per articulation which you can see when you route to a DAW in earlier versions. That might be okay for DAW (or not), but definitely not for Notation programs. They seriously need Music XML support that will have single staves with multiple articulations on that stave. I love the idea of Orb Composer, but it has a way to go. I mainly want to use Orb Composer for orchestral music, but it needs more templates for different styles such as R&B, hip-hop, blues, and jazz.

I love RapidComposer and I'm waiting for Atilla to improve the melody generator to include variations and call and response type melodies. Also, I would love more orchestra generators.

[dopet]

Hi!

Here is what I Iove about Orb Composer: Once you get a melody track that you are satisfied with (violin I, for example) you can generate counter melodies/ in subsequent tracks (violin II, Viola, Cello) and they are all based around the 'original seed' idea in violin I. I work on my laptop quite often away from my music desk (like tonight for example, sitting in a chair next to my fireplace keeping the damp cold of the Pacific Northwest at bay) and will generate a bunch of material in Orb Composer as I described above to retool in the DAW.

What I like about Rapid Composer: Pretty much everything else! Okay, that's a bit over the top, but i do like all the variables in the generators when I feel like going for a deep dive. It's also a really nice program to come up with variations for chord progressions. I also use it quite a bit to load in midi tracks and re-harmonize them / vary them with the tools.

In all honesty, neither tool is a 'use everyday all the time' tool for me. They have their strengths and their moments. If I really think about it, Orb Composer would get the nod as most useful, most quickly. I like being able to use it to sketch out 2-4 additional parts very quickly.

[xbitz]

RapidComposer, just a remark, seems Scaler has much more usable chord recognition algorithm worth to use it with RC

[bharris22]

Big thumbs up for Attila and his responsiveness. When I emailed him with a few suggestions for making the GUI more HiDPI-friendly, he implemented changes within a few days that made RC much easier for me to use on a 4K monitor. I haven't actually used RC heavily, but so far so good.

Sorry to raise this thread from the dead, but could you please elaborate upon the best way to make RC Hi-DPI friendly? I want to install it on my new Surface Go, and this would be very helpful.

Thanks!

[Mdsys]

Revitalizing this thread....

I cannot speak for older versions of either products but, Orb-Composer S (1.5) is clearly and without a doubt the more professional, more powerful and most complete product of the two.
I find the UI and workflow much clearer and intuitive.
You need very little guidence to get to a decent result than with any other, similar products.
I’ve owned Orb-Composer for about 6 months now and just bought, Rapidcomposer, WaveDNA Liquid Music and Synfire Pro (they were on sale )...
Synfire Pro is the most expensive of the four and Liquid Music the cheapest.
All can be categorized as compositional aids.
Synfire Pro seems to have a load of feaures but, the learning curve is very high.
Orb-Composer, as mentioned above is very intuitive and has the most modern interface of the lot. (Very DAW-like)
Previous versions worked within your DAW. Since v1.4, Orb-Composer S is completely Standalone, hence the ”S”.
Its biggest draw-back is the VST instrument assignments. It is understandable but, annoying and could be improved upon. This is particulary true for Orchestral templates, where you need to assign a vst instrument/instance (e.g. Kontakt with an Orchestral Library) per articulation, per instrument which means you will load a lot of kontakt instances if you want to setup a complete orchestral template. This WILL require a LOT of RAM in your computer.
I initially tried EW Hollywood Orchestra Diamond Edition and ended up, using more than 32 GB of RAM.
Switching to Vienna Special Edition reduced it to about 16GB.
So it’s clear that using Orb-Composer for Orchestral composition, requires a lot from your system.
Even the CPU is quite heavily loaded. (Quad-core is the bare minimum, needed in such a scenario)
The cool thing is that you can either start from scratch and let the software create a whole piece of music or load a midi file with a melody and have the software come up with the chord progression or visa versa.
Orb composer allows you to load vst effects per instrument as well as global effects (advisable).
RapidComposer is still a mystery to me. The workflow is not very clear. The same goes for Liquid Music. RapidComposer can work within a DAW as well as completely standalone.
The Liquid Music product consists of the Liquid Music/Liquid Rhythm plugin. The Latter (Liquid Rhythm) also works standalone.
Liquid Music is assigned as a VST instrument to a track in your DAW. You can then assign its output to another instrument track with some VST plugin (e.g. Pianoteq)
This works pretty easy
I know this ”review” is a bit strange and jumping from one bit of info to another.
I guess it’s a work in progress.
These are only first impressions.
I can only say that Orb-Composer, for me, is the best/easiest of the 4 products with a clear, modern and intuitive interface and workflow and tons of features, easily accessible.
The initial learning curve is short and quick but, there are a lot of powerful features, hidden away, that will allow you to further tweak the results. There are multiple randomizing options, either per part of global for the whole piece.
I still need to play with Synfire Pro which also seems very powerful but, my first impression was that it was very complex as opposed to Orb-Composer but I guess that, once you learn how Synfire works it, will prove very useful.
To end, I’m not trying to criticise RC, LM or Synfire. I just haven’t worked enough with them yet to form a proper opinion yet. I’m sure they all have a lot to offer.
Price isn’t always the vital factor. Orb is using AI but, is that really an added value, giving it an edge , compared with other tools or not?
I have looked at several youtube reviews of RapidComposer and Although it seems pretty cool, the number of windows you need to open to set different values is quite annoying.