Amicus717

Their GUIs are awful, frankly. Stylish and clever and occasionally intuitive. Overall I think their stuff is a very mixed bag, and I would never pay full-freight for them.

I use Sonokinetic’s libraries as accents to my main template. Basically, if I need a particularly agile string line or some bowing pattern, brass flare or woodwind noodling that simply isn’t possible with conventional samples, I will dig through my Sonokinetic libs for a sample loop that does the trick. It can be effective at pushing the illusion of a live orchestra, but it took me a while to figure out how to do that. So, I see Sonokinetic’s stuff as useful supplements to my main tools. I’d never try to build a track using nothing but their loops and overall they don’t get a ton of use — but when I find a way to drop them into a project I really appreciate what they can do.

It turns out my sound spends more time at the edge of bombastic. Tundra would probably be wasted on me.

I have to admit, Tundra has intriuged me. It sounds like an interesting library, but I worry it would be good for one kind of sound that you might need twice a decade, and otherwise would sit unused taking up HD space...

I can understand the polarizing nature of the Spitfire products. I don't own a ton of their stuff -- Albion ONE, Solstice, Loegria, Appassionata Strings and BBC Core -- and even with that small selection, it's a really mixed bag that goes from great to useless. I got a lot of use out of Albion ONE, although it's fallen out of my template as I've gotten more expressive libraries. But for a while it was one of my desert island libs. I do think it's a great starter tool for folks wanting to create trailer music or similar. You can do a lot with it in that genre, but it really isn't useful outside of it. Loegria has some nice patches, but the overall product is really uneven, and has weird stuff like the horribly tuned recorder patches that I have yet to successfully use in any project. I actually thought they had retired Loegria, as I bought it cheap when they were putting it out to pasture, but it seems to be back. Solstice seemed like a good idea, but I was dissappointed with it. It's got a few good patches if you're doing the music for Wicker Man II, but beyond that... However, BBC Core has become my main goto for orchestral fundamentals and currently forms the heart of my template. I think it's outstanding and for the price offers a lot of great stuff. The Appassionata Strings meld with BBC pretty nicely if you play around with the mic settings, and I use it as a supplement to the BBC strings if I need to punch up the schmaltz. They are great for that.

Those sound amazing. I don't need another string library, but now I need another string library.

I agree about Sonokinetic's interfaces, for the most part. I like their libraries, and I've developed ways to make good use of them (for a while I found them fun to play around with but it took a while to figure how to fit them into my template and workflow). But their interfaces drive me nuts. I sometimes think they emphasize style over intuitiveness and ease of use, and it irritates me. Making orchestral music is hard enough without having to decipher the interface along the way.

I have all of Tarilonte’s Era libs. They are in a class by themselves and worth it, regardless of the player. Persia is great, Forest Kingdom 3 is even better (one of my favs). I use them both regularly. In particular, FK3 is my current goto for ethnic flute sounds. As for Engine - the interface is ancient and clumsy, but its otherwise perfectly useable. I’ve never had any issues with it.

My fav game of all time. I have retail box versions of this, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and HL2. But I don't have a t-shirt. I'm envious :)

Check! Can't help myself. I am so well-libraried, I could never purchase another library ever and want for nothing. But where is the fun in that? Holding on to your money is so overrated...

90215 hit when I was in high school, and my buddies and I thought it was the greatest thing. It introduced us to Yes' music, and we went on to become major fans. Love this album, have listened to it end to end maybe a million times, and hope to do so a million more before I shuffle off...

I noticed they finally fixed the spiccato repetition keyswitches in the 2.0 versions of Cinestrings. They did not work before, and Cinesamples confirmed this and gave me the impression it might take a while to get patched, but I downloaded the most recent update and it's all better...

Yeah, I'm in the same frame of mind. I think this is going to be really interesting. Very curious to know what the new Sonar will offer and what Next will be like. I don't hold BandLab responsible for the Lifetime Sub fiasco, and while I felt like a bit of a sucker after I bought one and Gibson pulled the plug, getting an actively supported Cakewalk for free all these years has been a nice way to get over it. If BandLab has enough confidence in these new products (and the market) that they think they can charge for them, well it makes me really curious to know what will be on offer.

Me, also. No luck... The NI site in general is brutally slow right now, so maybe it's just backlog...

I have Metropolis Ark 1 & 2, and Inspire 1 & 2 (all for Kontakt), and they're quite good. They work from a different mindset than BBCSO (or EW, VSL etc), and I've had success using them for projects that I wanted to finish fast. To my mind, that is their key strength, and I use them in the same way I use my Albion libraries: to do great-sounding work very quickly, and with a heavy cinematic vibe. So, I think how much you like them will have a lot to do with headspace - either you'll find their patch design useful and intuitive, or you won't really enjoy using them at all. And the cinematic sound is really baked in; it's go big, or find another library. They are really pricey, and I think the average hobbyist could find alternatives that do similar things but won't cost nearly as much. I spend a huge portion of my downtime working on music, so I don't mind shelling out for this stuff, personally. I like having lots of options, and I just plain enjoy using libraries like these, so to me it's worth the money (although I only ever buy stuff on sale - I cannot remember the last time I paid full price for anything relating to music or software).

My dad was part of a folk quartet way back in the day (early 60s), and they opened for Mr Lightfoot on four separate occasions when he played at The Riverboat in Toronto, a legendary coffeehouse (closed way back in 1978) that hosted many folk acts over the years. He said Lightfoot was the nicest man -- zero edge, friendly, very supportive of his fellow artists, and a first-class live performer. My dad's adventures as a touring musician during the mid-century folk revival are part of our family folklore, and my dad mentioned it to me this morning on a Zoom call. He was quite upset to learn the Gordon had passed away. He recalled the time they had finished their opening set and Gordon was on stage doing his, when a string broke on his guitar. Gordon decided to call my dad's quartet back to the stage while he got it fixed. As my dad recalls it: "he looked into the audience to where we were sitting enjoying the show, and said 'hey, let's get the boys back up here to do a few more numbers", at which point he smiled and gave my dad and his bandmates a friendly "c'mon get up here" wave. My dad says he and his buddies looked at each other with a "ugh, do we even have a few more songs we can do?" and then got back up, pulled some unrehearsed charts from their repertoire and just went for it. He said it was a great experience, and Mr. Lightfoot was very complimentary after the show. His passing is a real loss. I think my dad and I will be listening to Gordon Lightfoot recordings a lot over the coming days...

Core 2.0 sounds pretty good, and I like the legato more than I did with the previous version. The only issue I have with the upgrade is the short articulation repetition keys no longer seem to work. These are the green keyswitches that trigger a double or triple repetition in the sample -- very useful for fast ostinato passages and the like. The keyswitches are still there, but I can't get them to function. I contacted Cinesamples about this, and they agreed with me: they don't work like they are supposed to. The support person added that they'd send a note to their development team, see if it was something they could work on down the road. They suggested a workaround, but that doesn't work for me either. I guess I'm one of the few who uses those keyswitches, so it's not a high priority to fix. That's frustrating. I use them often enough that I have older projects that are now going to need some major adjustments, possibly by swapping in another library.

Nice setup! I'm a stickler for being organized, and that looks like a nice, productive workspace with no distractions. I cound't survive using only one monitor, though. That's old school

I’ve been doing this with my sample libraries: creating short, quick arrangements using only one library or library sets from the same developer (where possible). The idea was to force myself to learn how to use my libraries properly. It’s takes time to master the nuances and tricks that make libs work, especially orchestral ones. It’s been a surprising experience, and pretty constructive.

Yeah, I reached the same conclusion. The extra instruments in the Pro version are not must-haves (I have them many times over in other libs), and the mic positions are ludicrously space consuming.

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Yeah, I'm not interested in Musio. I already had most of CineSamples major libraries, so for me this was a free upgrade. I agree with your general take on it. I don't like subscription models in general, and have ditched all of them (I had Composer Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud for a bit, but cancelled them and have had no regrets about it).

So, this morning I re-installed CineStrings Core via Native Access, as per Cinesamples instructions, and have been trying out the revised library... My five cents, so far... Much nicer interface, and the legato is more pleasing to my ears and more natural sounding, IMHO. They mention on the site they've applied new sonic treatment to the samples, including better trimming etc. The overall sound seems smoother and cleaner, although I find the samples are still rather noisy, frankly. It's one of the gripes I've had with Cinesamples: their samples can be really scratchy when the mod wheel is dialed low, and there has always been a ton of ambient rumble and fidget noises (foot shuffles, clothing rustle, etc). That kind of stuff is still present, although it is reduced. I tested the new ensemble spiccato patch in a project I had worked on a few months back. With the original CineStrings Core patch, I noticed a lot of low end rumble that really sounded awful and was hard to tame, and it forced me to swap it for another library (Musical Sampling's Adventure Strings). I figured this would be a good test of their revisions, so re-opened the project and dropped the new CineStrings ensemble patch in there. It sounds much better to my ears - less rumble and not quite as thick on the low end. It's really early in my testing, but I do find the mapping feature to be a bit confusing. I'm currently watching the new walkthru on the CineSamples site, so hopefully that will help. But I didn't find the settings intuitive. I also can't seem to get the "double repetition" and "triple repetition" keys working for the short articulations, no matter what I do. I use this feature a fair amount, as it's great for really fast ostinato passages. I've reached out to Cinesamples support for help. Overall, I think this revision is an improvement, although the basic character of the library is the same (in ways good and bad). That's just my opinion, of course. I've still got stuff to figure out with the new interface, and it's one thing to test a library on its own, and another thing to place it in the context of a big project and see how it performs. So, YMMV.

I tend to stay away from making hard recommendations for stuff -- it is such a subjective thing, and someone's "greatest-library-ever!" is someone else's "unuseable-mess-of-a-library". For further reading on this issue, see: VI Control - pretty much every Sample Talk thread ever made. However, if I were doing an Eleanor Rigby cover, then I'd fire up Tina Gua 2. But that's just my two cents (actually, I'm Canadian, so that would be 1.5 cents). I honestly don't know if that will work for you, but it would be the library I'd start out with.

Tina Guo 1 has a very emotional vibrato and, to my ears, a laggier legato transition. If you're doing a faster passage, it drags and blurs a bit. Tina Guo 2 has minimal vibrato and the legato transitions are faster. It's more nimble to play for faster passages.