SwarPlug

This is quite versatile multi-instrument / sampler that pretty much covers the gamut as far as Indian / Sub continental instruments go. It has a whopping 74 instruments including melodic, percussive and drone instruments. The price is a bit steep, but if you plan on using such sounds, it is worth it.

The download is a meager 174 MB and the installation was quite easy. The instrument was detected by the DAW (Reaper in this place) and ran quite smoothly and without a single crash or bug for the duration of my testing. It does not use any known player, but has its own and well functioning player.

There are a substantial number of MIDI melodic lines and grooves provided to give you an idea, with the Indian naming featured, so it is good for learning as well as using. The loops are easily dragged and dropped into the main DAW for tweaking as per your requirement.

My single beef with SwarPlug is the lack of depth in sampling (single layers, no round robins) and the resulting artificial sounding performance of some of the instruments. If you are familiar with Indian Classical music, you just may slit your wrists after hearing the sarangi and the sarod. I expected more for the price in this regard.

However at least half of the instruments here sound great, even for a single layer, and work well in mix, if you know the articulation required.

Product support was 10/10 all the way.

So all in all, its a good product, but a new version with proper muti-sampling and better performance scripting for instruments like Sarangi would be much appreciated. The world needs more of these, instead of the yawn-inducing plethora of western instruments.