Amicus717

I find with 8Dio, it's all-or-nothing. I have some 8Dio libraries that have some great components, and I use them regularly; and I have too many that disappointed me greatly and have never been put into a project. There's nothing in between. And for the libraries that work, even they are hit-and-miss when considered on a patch by patch basis. The Century Brass and Anthology Strings are the ones I use most often, but only specific patches, and only for specific purposes. The above-linked Majestica does not interest me in the slightest. I have not heard a lot of good things about it...

I use a Samsung 43" 4K television, and it's great - tons of monitor space, you can pack a lot of tracks onto the screen. There was a time when you had to be careful which model TV you bought if you wanted to use it as a computer monitor: you needed one with 4:4:4 chroma subsampling in order to prevent text blurriness, and had a game input setting to reduce mouse lag, etc, but I think pretty much all 4K tv's cover those bases, these days. The RTings site linked above by fitzroy is a great resource, and I used them when I bought my TV. I've had mine for a year, and for me it's mostly pros rather than cons: love the image quality and the screen-space, and it all works just great. The only downside is more related to my video card: I have a low-end Asus graphics card with no fan and four HDMI outputs, which works great for everything except video in 4K. If I try to watch a YouTube video in fullscreen on the 4K monitor, it chugs like crazy. My smaller side monitors work fine, in that regard, so if I'm watching something on YouTube, I leave it there. Rob

Expires Jan 5th...

This is a very preliminary take, but after listening to a bunch of walk-thrus and reviews online, I opted for the High Strings Large, which includes playable runs, plus the chord patches and a bunch of other stuff which could be useful. Basically, 20 Euro for a pretty good grab-bag of interesting bits and pieces. I'm gonna mess around with the patches tonight. So far, I like them but the real test is fitting them into a project and seeing how they perform. FWIW, my thinking was that runs, fast movements and chord arpeggios tend to occur more often in the high strings than the low, and this particular set of patches had the most flexibility. Either way, for $28 Cdn, I'm not gonna complain There is bound to be something useful in here... Rob

I'm not a huge Sine fan, and I own the Kontakt version of the first two Arks, but these yearly little OT coupons are kind of useful. I don't need any huge additions to my overall library set (to put it mildly), but I do have some strategic requirements that I'd like to fill -- stuff like the moving chord articulations or playable runs from Ark 5, etc. These vouchers are a pretty good way to fill in those gaps in my template without spending too much.

The phrase-based libraries really do a nice job with agile string lines and stuff with movement or tonal elements that just don't come easy to traditional libs. I've started to really find ways to get Sonokinetic's stuff into my workflow, and often it involves using interesting phrases as texture elements alongside my other libraries like CineStrings and BBCSO. Usually, it's one specific phrase out of the chord that I'll use -- I mute two of the layers and use one of the layers to enhance an arrangement, give an interesting texture to it. It helps a lot that Sonokinetic's sound blends really easily with other libraries.

It's fun to use, and I actually find it most useful as an idea generator. Vivace's actual phrases don't often end up in any of my projects, but auditioning them usually provides food for thought and suggests arrangement ideas.

Vivace Legacy is an older library they don't actually even sell anymore. It's full orchestral phrases, textures and transitions, all very old-school soundtrack type stuff. It's pretty good, for what it is, but not hugely flexible in terms of its overall vibe and usefulness. Basically, if you're doing 70/80's full orchestral sci-fi scoring or something, then it's got a lot of useful bits and pieces. You can switch sections on and off, use different mic mixes, etc.

That's how you know the holidays are coming -- the annual Sonokinetic 504 gateway timeout.

Email I just got says Vivace Legacy is today's freebie. I have it -- it's a really specific phrase library, classic orchestral stuff, kind of limited in how much material is in it.

Took me a while, but I am beginning to find ways to integrate their stuff into my projects. It's almost always in full-on orchetral arrangements when I need instrument lines that are particularily nimble, or for passages that are fundamentally unsuited to being performed realistically by programmed multisamples. Sonokinetic's phrase libraries are really good at filling in those gaps, and I find them pretty easy to blend with other libraries. When they work, they really work, in that role. Worth having, at least for me. The deal today is for their Orchestral Strings multisample library, which I also have. It's pretty good, with lots of articulations and a nice sound, although I find that it's not really for quick or easy arrangements; in my view, it's a finishing library better suited for arrangements that are already worked out in a fair amount of detail. Also, I totally dislike their instrument interfaces, and the Orchestral Strings one is no different. Very stylish. But also annoying, and they require a bit more work to operate than I want to spend when I'm working on music. However, if you can deal with that then $99 is a really good deal for a full-featured and good-sounding set of orchestral strings.

Hi folks, the same interface upgrade that was applied to Symphobia 1 & 2 has now been applied to Symphobia 3 Lumina. Info here: https://projectsam.com/libraries/symphobia-3-lumina/ This is a nice update that is free for existing users. I really like what this interface style did for the first two Symphobias. From the Project SAM site: Completely new engine and spacious design All-in-One instrument browser Filter by genre, instrument category and articulation New Multis 10 slot mixer to arrange and design your own Multis New legato engine Adaptive Sync for crescendos and runs All-new envelopes, filters and modulators Mentioned on the homepage but not on the actual Lumina page is this added note: 30% off Celebration Sale, use coupon LUMINA2022 Rob

Voices of War - Men of the North for $79 is a really good deal, also. However, it should also be noted that it's the kind of library that you'll either use often or never.

Hi folks, I'm not sure who would be interested in this, but James Horner's full conductor's score for Willow is available as a digital download from Omni Music Publishing. See here: https://omnimusicpublishing.com/product/willow-score-only/ For soundtrack fans like me, this is something of a major surprise. Omni had previously released the full score in printed form, which sold out quickly. They then lost the rights to print any more copies, and so it looked liked the opportunity to acquire it was gone. I was not even aware the score was available until far too late, and so figured I'd never get a good look at it unless I lucked into a used copy on Ebay or something (and that never happened, despite a lot of searching over the last few years). I wandered by the Omni site yesterday to see what new scores they were queuing up and was shocked to see Willow available as a digital-only download via Sheet Music Plus -- which I bought immediately, of course. I'm pretty stoked. It's a good quality PDF, and seems to cover the score as broken out on Intrada's expanded 2 CD release. There are a few instances of score sections broken out by name in the sheet music that are combined as one track on the CD, but aside from that curating difference all the scoring music (minus the Willow's Theme concert arrangement) matches up to this recording: https://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.12619/.f I'm a total soundtrack geek, so this is a really nice surprise, and I figured there must be at least a couple of folks like me around here Rob

PavlovsCat contributes a lot of great stuff on this forum, including the excellent review at the top. I appreciate him writing it up.

I like their Vikings libraries a lot. They are very specific in what they do, and serve a really particular kind of sound - either you'll need them often, or you'll never use them at all, I suspect. But they do sound great.

I don't have BBCSO but I do have EW Brass. I prefer Cinesamples Brass over EW, but that's personal taste. Both libraries will produce great results, and its more a matter of which one suits your workflow better. I like Cinesamples flexible control features and their basic approach to building instruments, compared to EW. I'm not fond of EW Play, and I find EW's granular patch/articulation setup to be kind of annoying and cumbersome. But that's just me. So, I'd say: having the Cinesamples libraries won't give you something you don't already have with EW, for the most part, but it may give you stuff you'll enjoy using more. That's a personal taste thing, and probably depends on the genre of music you're doing, also. I do cinematic stuff almost exclusively, and I'm a pretty heavy Kontakt user, and my EW Play usage dropped off a cliff after I got full Kontakt and a decent set of Kontakt libraries, so Cinesamples is in a fair amount my projects, EW Brass is not. Hope that helps.

That's a killer deal. These are very good libraries.

This is a pretty good little library, although smaller than his Era ones. Worth noting, owning this library gives you a discount when buying it's big brother, Ancient Era Persia: https://www.bestservice.com/ancient_era_persia_upgrade.html

Done!

Happy to help. It's good to build up a store of solutions folks can search for later. I do think it's kind of odd that a library pathway issue could cause the app to crash, and bring my DAW with it. It's the last thing I'd have expected when trying to troubleshoot the issue. But it was the first thing the IK Multimedia support person asked me. Very helpful, but it makes me think they've seen this issue before...

Thanks for the replies and suggestions, folks. Much appreciated. However, I got a weird solution that seems to have fixed the issue... I contacted IK Multimedia support last night, and they got back to me today via email. They asked for a screenshot of the library paths in ST4. So I opened SampleTank 4 in standalone mode, clicked the gear icon and checked what path(s) SampleTank was showing for my sounds and libraries. All my SampleTank libs are on a large 2GB WD Black drive, and I noticed that same path was listed twice. No idea how that happened, but when I deleted the duplicate path and then checked SampleTank in my DAWs, the problem went away. I can now close the GUI in Cubase (11 and 12), Cakewalk and Reaper, without the program crashing. I can delete SampleTank from a project, add it back, mess around with it, etc, and all seems fine. So, problem solved...maybe? I think it's kind of weird that a duplicate library path would crash the program and/or my DAW...

Has anyone started experiencing problems with ST4 crashing their DAWs? I have been having issues the last day or so: ST4 loads just fine, runs instruments just fine, but if I close the GUI, it crashes Cakewalk immediately. Does the same to Cubase 12 (and 11), Studio One 5 Artist and Reaper 6. So far, I can make it happen without fail, every time. And in every DAW I own. I'm running the most recent install of SampleTank 4, the most recent update of Cakewalk (and Cubase 12, Cubase 11 and the other DAWs also), on Windows 10 Pro 64 bit. I've already deleted the ST4 app and reinstalled it at least twice, and I went through the mind-numbing task of re-installing the libraries, too. None of it has helped. Anyone else experiencing this? Update: I initially said this happens when I close the GUI or remove the instrument, but actually it happens when the GUI window is closed. It does NOT happen if I minimize the GUI or just remove the instrument without closing the GUI. But if I click the upper right hand "X" and close the GUI window, every DAW crashes without fail...

It's good, for what it is. Any purpose-built library will outperform a factory patch in a hundred different ways, but for a general purpose tool, the new Factory 2 patches are well-made and sound pretty good. And they are 100% a long-overdue upgrade to the original Factory library. The difference is pretty big, to my ears. They have the kind of strengths and limitations you'd expect: not a huge amount of detail or flexibility, but quality samples and easy-to-run scripting. I'd use the Factory 2 library for doing fast sketches on my laptop any day, and I probably will. They're perfect for that role.

Same for me. Cremona Strings are top-notch, and going from 11U to 13CE was a pretty nice upgrade. 14CE doesn't thrill me. I am indifferent to Ashlight, and while Choir Omnia looks pretty nice, I've already got a half-dozen choir libraries I don't use (and a few that I do), including most of George Strezov's. So I don't see a real advantage to having this one -- at least, not $700 worth of advantage, anyway.