Amicus717

Either way, that is an epic steal.

Nimbus is a beast -- a smooth, clear, polished beast of exceptional transparency. In my very humble opinion, the best reverb for orchestral work or similar. 

Gotta confess, I don't recall hearing about this developer before. Does anyone have any experience with their stuff? A few of those libraries have piqued my interest...

Listening to the walkthru. Great sounds, Tapsa!

I should consider adding Phase Plant to my arsenal, it seems....

I ditched all the Abbey Road, Scarbee and Session Strings stuff, plus DrumLab, and just about anything related to pop, rock or similar (except Session Guitarists acoustic libraries).

Kept the pianos, ditched the Symphony Essentials for the full versions, only have a few of the synth relates libraries installed. I find that the more 3rd party libraries I acquire, the less Komplete stuff I tend to use or keep installed. 

Hi folks,

Have a bit of an odd bug going on here, and I'm wondering if anyone else can reproduce this. I noticed when building a new template in my DAW that a few of my Kontakt libraries were behaving badly. In particular, the interfaces for a few them had become unworkable: whenever I tried to adjust any one slider or dial on the library, every other dial and slider on the interface also changed. I first noticed this when I uploaded the "VSL Celeste" patch from the Kontakt Factory library, and tried to adjust the reverb mix. Every other dial on the Celeste interface started changing also, and I wasn't able to work any of the controls separately. 

After a bit of experimentation, I discovered this happened whenever I had multiple patches loaded in an instance of Kontakt after a copy of the Symphony Series Percussion patch "Cymbal 1" was already loaded up. When loaded after the "Cymbal 1" patch, some libraries (but not all) would suddenly start exhibiting this behaviour (including most of the Factory Library patches, Albion One patches, and a few others).

Patches loaded up before the "Cymbal 1" patch would not have this problem. I tested this with the same "VSL Celeste" library, and if I loaded it up before "Cymbals 1", no problem. If I loaded it up after "Cymbal 1", it would become unworkable. 

Last night I was able to reproduce this behaviour in both my main DAWS (Cakewalk and Cubase) on two separate machines with independent installs of Kontakt 6 and all the above libraries.  

Can anyone else reproduce this on their own machines?

Thanks,

Rob

Of note: this is the full version of Symphony Series Percussion that I am using, not the Symphony Essentials one. 

4 hours ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

The original UVI World Library was not supposed to be very good.  I believe it was ported from MOTU.

When they made it into World Suite they added a ton of new instruments.  I think all of them were from Precision Sound.  If you look at Precision Sound, you'll see that the stuff added is the same.  There are some super gems in there.   I love the accordions.  If you were to buy them at the Precision Sound half price sale, it would cost you a lot.  Of course, the PS instruments are Kontakt.

The same thing happened with World Suite 2. They added a lot more new instruments.  I'm not sure from where.  Maybe their own?

If you look at EthnoWorld it's very similar.  The stuff from EthnoWorld 1 is not as good as the stuff from the newer versions.  There is a variability in quality with libraries as huge as these.

I'm pretty familiar with both and I think EthnoWorld 6 is MUCH better, both in quality of sound  and features.   I don't know what the price is for you to upgrade, but if anybody is deciding between one and the other, EthnoWorld 6 (instruments only) will be cheaper on Black Friday.   It lists at $259 and with 40% off it's about $155. 

The only issue I can thing of with EthnoWorld is that 6 came out 4 years ago and I wouldn't be too surprised if version 7 would turn up before too long.  Currently, upgrading for 4 or 5  to 6 is $159, which is more than 6 costs new during the sale.  Every now and then they have sales on upgrades.

I like having both.  Each has instruments the other one doesn't have.  Also World Suite was my first one, and it started my exploration of world music. 

Thanks, Reid. 

UVI World Traditions (I think was the name...) was so comically bad it was in a class by itself when it came to buyer's regret: there were samples with loop points so close together and artlessly done that the looping went full machine-gun after maybe a second or two; misspelled headings and instrument names scattered throughout the various menus; and my personal favorite, under Balkan Instruments they had an Alto Sax - a very vanilla set of soundfont-worthy alto sax samples, with no explanation as to how exactly the alto sax was considered a Eastern European classic. The entire package was seriously bush-league.

There was literally one or two patches in the entire library that were actually useable, and "useable" in this context is a very generous assessment. I didn't pay a lot for it ($39 bucks on sale, I believe) but I was very unhappy that they still offered a product so obviously out-of-date and unsuitable even as an entry-level library.  Judging by the tech and programming used to create it, World Traditions should have been removed from their catalog around, oh, say 1995.   

I haven't touched their stuff since, and it sounds to me like I have no real reason to change that. Even minus the World Traditions fiasco, I have never been overly keen on the UVI Player and it's workflow, and all things being equal, I'd rather have EthnoWorld 6 anyway. 

Info here: https://www.uvi.net/world-suite-2

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who has this. I bought the original World Instruments library from UVI a few years ago, and it was a complete disaster (maybe the worst library I ever bought), and I've not bought a single UVI product since.

But I have heard rumours that World Suite 2 is pretty good...

Musical Sampling's latest: https://musicalsampling.com/anthemchoir/

This interests me. I’ve been intrigued by The Orchestra for a while, but I don’t know if that sort of library will work for me, so I’ve been a bit hesitant…

Yeah, tried that, but didn't work.

I did, however, get a letter from NI Support, saying this: 

"Dear customer, we are aware of an issue where certain effect plugins remain in DEMO despite of being activated as full version in Native Access.

The issue is known (bug: DAEM-1570 - Effects keep asking for activation) and our colleagues in development are aware of it.
We have found the root cause of the issue and we are expecting to release a hot fix at the middle of next week."

So, it's a bug! And NI is on the case. 

Hi folks,

I've just completed building a new PC, and have just reinstalled Komplete, including all the various effects. For some reason, every time I try to load one of the effects in Cakewalk (or any of my other DAWS) , I get a popup saying I have to "activate", "buy" or "demo" the plugin.

When I hit "Activate", it opens Native Access, and then I can use the plug-in. But this happens every single time I try to add it in. I own all the plugns, Native Access says they are installed, etc. But I gotta "activate" them every time. 

Has anyone experienced this? Any idea what the problem could be?

Thanks,

Rob

Watching the walk-thru by Paul Thomson, and it looks and sounds very intriguing, so far. 

A library for re-scoring The Wicker Man (the original 1973 movie, not the 2006 remake, which could be rescored with a kazoo)... 

I just noticed that RME released an updated driver for Fireface UFX, 802, UCX, UCX II, UC and Babyface/Pro on May 4th, 2021. I never seem to get notices for this, so for any RME users who might have missed it:

https://www.rme-audio.de/downloads.html

PS: there is also a firmware update from March 2021...

"During the month of June, pick three or more libraries of your choice, and get a whopping 40% discount. This is your chance to assemble your own pack of your favorite instruments. This offer does not apply to bundles or new product releases."

https://cinesamples.com/

1 minute ago, cclarry said:

I think $199 is the cheapest I've seen Voxos...

Agreed. That's a good deal. 

FWIW, the product page at Cinesamples has some good walkthrus. I've been watching them this morning, because that price is very tempting...

https://cinesamples.com/product/voxos-epic-choirs

I have "Voices of War: Men of the North" from this collection of libraries, and it's great. It's a very specific library, in terms of the vibe and purpose, but its got a great sound and some nice features.

Basically, if you're after that "Norse-pagan-dark-age-snow-and-raging-seas-under-the-aurora-borealis" kind of cinematic sound, it's a beauty of a library, and $79 is a great price.

However, if that is not your thing, then you probably won't find a ton of useful stuff in it. 

Just FYI.

I grabbed this because I qualified for the $49 crossgrade price, and it's actually pretty cool. I don't traditionally use a ton of plug-ins on my projects, but I can see MixBox being pretty useful, and I think it does have some effects not found in T-Racks(?). 

For hybrid-orchestral projects, where I'm mixing synths and traditional orchestral stuff (and where I often try for a rather ethereal kind of sound), I think MixBox will be extremely handy. 

Thanks, Matt, really appreciate the info.

I'm a really heavy Albion ONE user, and I have Albion 2: Leogria which I pull out every now and then. Beyond that, I don't have a lot of interest in the other Albions aside from Tundra, which I may try to pick up next. 

BBC sounds amazing in the walk-thrus, but I have reservations about the Spitfire player. The quality of the samples is meaningless if the player can't keep up.

I'd be really interested to hear from anyone who has used the BBC Symphony Core library. I recall some folk saying it had issues in Windows -- poor resource management or similar, and so glitchy and a major resource hog. I got the impression it was really only optimized for MacOS.

It certainly sounds nice, and that price is tempting, but I don't wanna get saddled with a library I can barely use.

I've yet to come across anyone praising the Opus stuff in any significant way, and lots of folks expressing disappointment. I was hoping it would be at least an interesting additional color to add to my library set, but judging by what limited experience I was able to get, they don't really offer anything revolutionary compared to EastWest's other libraries.  

I have these, and they are ok. Some nice patches, especially the curated stuff like the Big Hits, Harvested Hits, etc.

The smaller percussion patches sound good, as do the metals, cymbals and gongs. 

I don't like the snares or the timpani -- they're not bad, per se, but I personally don't like how upfront and in-your-face they are, especially the snare drums. The timpani samples are nicely recorded, but to my ears there aren't nearly enough velocity layers and so they change way too abruptly. I also don't like the timpani crescendo or roll patches. Most other orchestral timpani libraries offer way more useable options. 

I'd definitely buy these as a set, as they don't overlap much and each library has fairly essential patches in it: eg, Orchestral Percussion has the timpani and snares, but Cinematic Percussion has the suspended cymbals. There are also some nice loops in each library, also, and I have found those quite useful. 

YMMV, as always, but I think $25 each is a pretty good price for these. 

I signed up for Composer Cloud so I could give Opus a try, and see if the Opus Editions were anything to write home about. 

I quit before I got far enough to tell. To start with, the installation process was a huge fail, with most of the Opus editions refusing to install with the error message "Disk is full", even though it wasn't. To their credit, EastWest support was prompt in offering help -- and I appreciated that -- but their solution was byzantine: manually delete select product chunk files in the Program Data folder, download and unzip barebones installation folders (minus the actual sample data) from EastWest, "fake" install the libraries by asking the installer to find the location where these bare-bones installation folders are located, then uninstall the libraries via the installer, then reinstall the libraries from scratch using the installer. Sounds a bit confusing, but for what it's worth, it almost worked. I managed to get HW Brass Gold Opus Edition installed. I played around with it, concluded it sounded pretty much exactly the same as the original, and offered nothing I didn't already have in a bunch of other brass libraries.

I never did manage to get HW String Opus edition installed. I went through the kabuki-theatre process outlined above, and HW Strings Opus edition looked like it was installed, but refused to actually show up in the Opus player, no matter how many times I tried, re-tried and re-tried again. After two or three hours of downloading, installing, uninstalling, deleting, reinstalling, folder copying and (yes) drinking, I decided life was too short and just deleted the whole collection, cancelled my subscription and got on with my life. 

There was a time when I used the EastWest libraries quite a bit, but as my library collection got deeper, I began to shift away from their products -- I never really liked their granular patch setup, and their midi control setup, and I always thought Play was pretty awful. Possibly Opus may have changed my mind about that, but I'll never know.

As always, YMMV...

Does anyone have any of these libraries? This is very tempting, and the walk-thrus sound pretty good.

However, a few years ago I bought Cornucopia Strings 2 and didn't particularly like them, so I'm a bit hesitant about the Strezov stuff...

Hi folks,

Has anyone had problems installing the Opus libraries using the EastWest Installation Center? I signed on to Composer Cloud this week in order to give them a try, and every time I attempt to download and install via the app, I get a "Disk is Full" message.

The drive in question has 4 TB free, so I'm pretty sure that's not the problem. All of the other drives in my system are not full either, so I have no idea why I'd be seeing this. Other large libraries (like 83gb Stormdrum 3 library) will start to install without a problem. But any of the Opus Libraries..."Disk Is full."

I've opened a case with EastWest, but have not heard back yet. Curious if anyone here has experienced this.

Thanks,

Rob

Thanks a lot, folks. Great information. 

Jürgen - great review of both devices, really appreciated the input.