east west owners, ever regret a library?

[Ah_Dziz]

I finally had a chance to sit down with play at a friends studio. He's a big fan of their stuff and I really would love to buy SD2. The samples are still high quality but the play software is unusable to me. I was on a machine that is as fast as you can buy with ssd's and 24 gigs of ram and It was struggling with an instrument load that my cpu with kontakt can handle with less than 10% CPU usage. I find it hard to believe that play offers any features that make it so a 10 year old library can't run smoothly on a 1 month old top of the line DAW.

That being said their hollywood strings library sounds amazing and if they ever switch back to kontakt I'll be first in line to buy it. Until then I'll stick with all my old Kontakt EW libraries and look elsewhere for new sounds.

[JPQ]

Shredage is not sampled with distortion

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

I dont hate i like them becouse these modellings what i can use with software sounds much poorer than good old amplifier but truth is both have own places... and all can like what they like...

[JPQ]

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.

I want know what samples are poor to your taste ? and fair is better or worse than good if worse i want know them too. and what are stuff what you really like ?
ps. i heared solo strings (important area to me) are crap in ewql symphonic orchestra. in truth i avoid this comppany. i think i found better solutions my all orchestral,etc needs. also other users (or people what is tested and even demo based comments are nice hear). btw i tested their free orchestra and somehow i dislike all others than crotale,and marimba sounds and few others but basic timbre is bit ugly to my taste. i prefer vienna symphonic library and miroslav. and few old synth patches more....

[bill45]

IF you're into jazz and funk , I'd recomend Garritan jazz and big band , omnisphere and trillian.halion sonic has some great sounding funk stuff and really cool horn sections. also check out session string from NI.
You might struggle to get realistic sounding jazz and funk from the EW stuff.
Their Basses drums and guitars aren't as detailed as say Trillian , BFD 2 and
electri6ity. The EW libs sound good and would make a great compliment to more detailled libraries

[Krakatau]

The EW libs sound good and would make a great compliment to more detailled libraries

True for a lib like RA IMO, the soundtakes and sample editing are top quality, by not related to the playing technique of many instruments AFAIK...

...but i may admit that the choosen area is particulary vast

[JPQ]

IF you're into jazz and funk , I'd recomend Garritan jazz and big band , omnisphere and trillian.halion sonic has some great sounding funk stuff and really cool horn sections. also check out session string from NI.
You might struggle to get realistic sounding jazz and funk from the EW stuff.
Their Basses drums and guitars aren't as detailed as say Trillian , BFD 2 and
electri6ity. The EW libs sound good and would make a great compliment to more detailled libraries

I dont talk funk type if you write to me.

[the_grimace]

I own gypsy and ministry of rock for PLAY, and have used colloussus and EWQL SO Gold for Kontakt. I am torn on the libraries. For starters, I wish they would have stayed with kontakt as the patches load MUCH faster and ran way more efficiently. I only have a decent macbok pro, but damn, all my other plugs and instruments run fine except PLAY. I can maybe get away with just two instances of it, before I need to bounce and start something else. It sucks

As for the quality of samples. It's excellent. The guitars in ministry of rock sort of suck, but I love it's basses and drums. Gypsy is all around excellent. I really want to purchase the COmposer's collection, because the orchestra is one of my favorites, but its a much better deal to get the CCC then buy them individually. It sucks though because the deals they run on the CCC are wonky, especially sales on the customized edition where swapping out items replaces them with full priced items rather then discounted items.

I have heard voices of passion and fab four and I do not like them. Goliath is more or less the same as Colossus, and very hit or miss. I recall liking the pianos a lot, and some of the drum kits and acoustic guitars. The new age pads were really great too. Most other stuff sucked though. And stanger, it was a lot of the same from its other libraries. It seems like an extraneous buy. at least if you own, or are planning on buying other libraries.

Either way, I think the best ones are the choir, SO, silk, and RA, and pianos.

[rverne10]

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 would have to say never buy anything from East West or any virtual instrument maker
the documentation is horrific.
The buyer is never given access to anything that will allow a full understanding of what they are buying with East West, Steinberg, or Vienna Symphony Library.

[susiwong]

Hardcore Bass XP cured all my East West interest the moment I first tried it out - unfortunately it was already non-returnable then.
What a pathetic POS library, but we weren't exactly spoilt for choice in those days.
EW - never again here, the switch from Kontakt to Play would have achieved the same result btw.
Kinda hard to sell this to the user as a step forward ...
Ymmv,
susiwong

[mgpqa1]

I only own one of their products (SO Gold with the mic upgrades). Love the library, HATE the sample player. It's the one piece of software I'm always super hesitant about installing/upgrading.

[budweiser]

Play is the worse engine on the market. Ridiculous.

[the_grimace]

Play is the worse engine on the market. Ridiculous.

word. it really is horrible. Its so unfortunate as the sample quality is excellent, but it doesn't matter when the engine makes the experience tedious, problematic, and awful. Despite how great these libs sound, I stay away from them at all costs.

The worst part is that EastWest refuses to admit there's any issues with PLAY. I contacted them numerous times about problems and instead of getting "oh yea, were fixing that" I get a "I'm sorry for the problems your experiencing. Some users computer's have difficulty using PLAY. We suggest you change your buffer sizes or upgrade your computer"

RETARDED!!!

[EvilDragon]

Well, PLAY 2 update solved a lot of performance issues. Perhaps you should try that.


And yeah, having EastWest stuff on a moderate configuration isn't really going to cut it.

[Hitchcock Bell]

EW gets a lot of shit from some people on some forums... I'm beginning to smell the rat of corporate warfare.

Personally, I have no stake in EW, and I don't know anyone there. I just use their products, including Play. Guess what? I have ZERO complaints. Great samples, extremely musical and natural, and Play works fine on my system - a 3 year old quad core running XP Pro on 4 gigs. I use Play simultaneously with GigaStudio, Kontakt and a bunch of other vsts in Cubase, sometimes with multiple instances of each plug... and everything works.

I would advise people having legit problems with Play or any other intensive music software to either upgrade your computers, or get them recalibrated by a specialist music tech company... or both. That's exactly what I did and, like I said, everything works.

[kbaccki]

EW gets a lot of shit from some people on some forums... I'm beginning to smell the rat of corporate warfare.

This should be good...