Amicus717

Available here: https://8dio.com/instrument/harmonium/

VSL Special editions 4,5,6 & 7, hopefully the next time they do their semi-regular 30% off deal...

Really enjoyed this one. Clear and clean mix, and nice overall production with good polish. Also, nice writing. Lyrics are entertaining.

I really like it. Nice combination of sounds, and the mix is really good.

Sounds very nice! And you can't argue with the price.

I have Symphonic Sketchpad. It's not bad at all, and is pretty much exactly what it says it is: a sketchpad for orchestral ideas. The sounds are decent and useable, including some minor gems -- the piano is quite nice, for example. The sounds are fairly dry, and the mix of microphones are quite useful for blending this library with others. The interface is quite configurable and easy to use. It's pretty efficiently put together, and you've got everything you need to make fairly comprehensive sketches with it. I sort of look on it as a really no-frills Albion ONE (well, kind of...), and plan to use it on my laptop when I travel. I doubt it will ever make a regular appearance in the orchestral template on my main DAW -- I have too many glossier and more specialized libraries to draw from. But when I visit my parents in Florida, or whatever, I can see this being a really useful tool for working on new music ideas. It sounds good enough that you could make some pretty nice sketches with it, and it's fast and easy to use. I like to write music really quickly and with minimal fuss, and Sketchpad has been pretty good at that, so far. For what it's worth, at $99 its great. I would have been somewhat unhappy if I'd paid $299. As always, YMMV...

It's a pretty harsh copy protection scheme, and I'm irritated by their "we'll meet you in the middle and you can purchase replacement licences for a 50% discount" rhetoric if your dongle goes missing. Making folks re-purchase something they've already bought because there were unlucky isn't "meeting in the middle". FWIW, if your dongle breaks but you still have it, you can return the broken dongle to VSL. If it was out of warranty, you can recover your licenses for 20 Euro per license. If the dongle broke within its 2 year warranty period, you get your licenses back for free and a new dongle to go along with it. Regardless, it's rather a cash-grab, and made me pretty reluctant to keep buying into their ecosystem. But their stuff sounds good enough that I did anyway, and I now own enough VSL licenses that getting the $70 copy protection scheme was something of an irritating no-brainer.

Terrible, terrible news...

Looking forward to trying this. Gotta admit, the VSL stuff is really growing on me - I find that I'm using their libraries more and more as I go along, especially their woodwinds, brass and percussion, despite the fact that I don't like their licensing policies and copy protection. I still use a lot of Kontakt libraries (all my goto string libraries are Kontakt), but VSL's Special Editions (both the originals and the newly Synchronized ones) have elbowed their way into my template and pushed aside some of my old mainstays, like the EastWest libraries. I almost never fire up Play anymore. The VSL stuff sounds very good to my ears, and it's really configurable - you can setup the patches in all sorts of ways to suit your preferred playing style, etc. And Ensemble Pro is great; I picked up VEP 7 during their last sale, and offloaded some of my libraries to my second PC (some of my kontakt libraries, ironically), and VEP has run them flawlessly.

Available here -https://cinesamples.com/product/cinesymphony-lite Also comes with a $50 off coupon for any CineSymphony Core product...

Available here: https://projectsam.com/library-category/the-free-orchestra/

Available here: https://soundiron.com/products/hyperion-strings-elements Of note: Those who bought Micro should see a discount code in their email, for additional savings...

I think that sounds pretty damn good! The playing is tight, of course, and its a great piece of music. But I'm really astonished at how good the little Behringer digital mixer sounds. The whole recording has a super-polished sound to it. Nice bass solo, by the way

Matt, FYI: 8Dio has released a new version of Anthology Strings that seems to have fixed the issue that I was experiencing. You should have a free upgrade available via email, I think...

Thanks folks. Tried those things, but no luck. Odd. They worked flawlessly the first night. For what it’s worth, we had a thunder storm here the previous night and it seems my PC has been acting a bit odd since then. Maybe that has something to do with it. Just my luck...

Hi folks, Owners of 8Dio's Anthology (or Adagio) Strings instruments might want to check their inboxes for an upgrade code to their newest release. I got one yesterday that gave me 48 hours to download the latest edition of Anthology Strings, and I think it might be the updated version that fixes an issue I was having with Kontakt 6 and the Anthology GUI. I'm not actually completely sure about that, mind you, as I find 8Dio's update methodology to be a bit obscure (not to mention their product naming and packaging schemes), and I am still downloading the current edition and haven't tried it out yet. This new version seems to have a bunch of new patches and additional content, and has been named "The New Adagio Bundle - Anthology Strings", which I think is a different name from the original Anthology Strings. I won't likely get a chance to take a look at it for a day or two, due to busyness, so I figured I'd give folks a heads up on the 48 hour deadline, in case this arrived in their spam folders or something. Regards, Rob

I'm not exactly thrilled with IK myself, at the moment. I finally figured out the (unnecessarily convoluted) process for getting the Tape plugins into Try mode, and they worked great the first night. Tried them again tonight (a day and a half later), and for whatever reason they are in demo mode, and keep asking me if I want to Try or Buy when I load them up. But I can't seem to get them back into Try mode, and so they have that intermittent white noise thing every 30 seconds or whatever, and it is really irritating. But when I go into my Custom Shop account, they are showing as on a 15 day trial mode. But they aren't. Or maybe they are, I have no idea. Maybe they don't mean 15 days all in a row! I have no idea, but I'm not buying these until I can give them a good try, and I can't give them a good try if I can't get them into the Try mode.

I believe his exclusivity agreement with EverQuest was for EverQuest Next, which was intended to be the sequel to EverQuest 2. It was cancelled in 2014. I think his EQ work came to an end, at that point.

Available here: https://cinesamples.com/category/keyboards Of note: Piano In Blue - $69 (reg $99) - https://cinesamples.com/product/piano-in-blue CinePiano - $139 (reg $199) - https://cinesamples.com/product/cinepiano

Thanks, Larry.

I am not seeing a "Try" button anywhere...?

Sample Library Review has a 45 min walk-thru. I've just started listening to it, but it seems like a decent overview... https://www.samplelibraryreview.com/the-reviews/checking-out-vikings-bunlde-by-keepforest-currently-66-off/

Ah jeez...when will I ever learn not to come to the deals forum...?

Available here: https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Synchronized_Special_Edition_Bundle/Synchronized_Special_Edition_Vol5 Both standard and Sychronized versions available...

You and me both, Lars.