Amicus717

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.

Very easy - click on the gear icon on the bottom left of the thumbnail view, and select the folder you want to add. The one thing you can't do with non-Player libraries is use the new tagging system to sort them -- "bowed strings" or whatever. But you can favorite them, so the ones you use regularly can be made very easy to find.

This ^^ In my brief overview, I didn't mention the ability to 'favorite' presets in the thumbnail view, which is a very nice little detail - especially when you've got a lot of non-Player libraries with complex folder and patch structures.

Info here: https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Synchron_Series/Synchron_World_Winds Standard Library: € 395 € 595 Full Library: € 590 € 850 From the site... "Exceptional instruments, recorded at Synchron Stage Vienna Nine ethnic solo instruments Exceptional level of realism and sonic excellence Multible microphone positions with a variety of pre-configured mixer presets Instrument specific articulations" They do sound pretty nice... It also looks like these new instruments can all be purchased separately, also: https://www.vsl.co.at/en/News/2022-10_WW_Special

I tend to skip versions. Not by design, just based on finances and whether or not the upgrade has stuff I really want.

So far, the hiDPI libraries I’ve loaded up look fine, and to my eyes are non-distracting. However, the only ones I’ve got that have this interface are in Factory Library 2, and none of them are animated. They’re just static. The stand-alone Omnia Choir library has animation that reacts to the mod wheel(?), but I don’t own that one and haven’t experienced it directly..

I bought the Kontakt 7 update. I have Komplete 13 Collector's Edition, but the new stuff in K14 Collector's Edition doesn't interest me enough to pay $700 for it. But the $129 Cdn update for Kontakt 7 was low enough to tempt me into checking out the Factory Library 2 and the new library browser. So far, I like it. I regularly use a mix of Kontakt Player and non-Player libraries, and being able to add non-Player libraries to the browser and see all the patches at a glance in the right side window is actually pretty nice. The patch window can be stretched, and you can expand it out so the various patches display in columns. I find this is particularly useful with libraries like the 8Dio Anthology Strings, which have a ton of articulations broken out a hundred different ways. You can scroll through the patches quickly, and stuff is easier to find. That has been my experience, so far. The new browser windows has already become my preferred view. The Factory Library 2 is a pretty solid upgrade to the aged original. Some pretty nice sounds in here: 1) The orchestral ones (created by Orchestral Tools) are quite good for basic patches, with scripted legatos and the minimum fundamental articulations. Nothing at all fancy, but perfectly useable for mockups or similar. 2) The Choir patches are pretty good, including a nice little set of Strezov-recorded basic vowel sounds. They don't have a ton of character, and I wouldn't use them if the choir was going to be overly exposed in the mix/arrangement, but in a strong, dense passage where you need to pump up the epic vibe, they'd work just fine. 3) I didn't spend a lot of time going through the Band and Acoustic patches, but the ones I did try were good. Not hugely detailed, but good quality samples and they play well. 4) The Synth patches and similar aren't on my radar, for the most part, so haven't even looked in those folders yet. I'll get around to them eventually. As for the high DPI interfaces: I work on a 55" 4K monitor, so bigger interface windows are usually better, and the high DPI ones in the Factory 2 library are nice to look at. But the control elements are not really any different, at least from the perspective of button/dial size and font size -- really just the same size controls, but spaced further apart. I can see this being a useful feature down the road when someone creates instrument panels that utilize it properly. But at the moment its neither here nor there. But overall, I'm happy with the update.

Info here: https://8dio.com/products/the-new-hybrid-tools-1-instrument-for-kontakt-vst-au-aax

I second this: $50 is a steal. For $35?... 8Dio seems to be a polarizing developer, but their flash sales and uber-deals helped me get started with all this midi nonsense and so I have a soft-spot for them. I picked up Anthology Strings pretty early in my library buying days, and since then I've added a lot of great string libaries to my collection, including Cinesamples, Sonokinetic, Orchestral Tools, Spitfire, Musical Sampling, Project SAM, EastWest etc and I use them all quite a bit (well, except for EastWest). But years later I still have Anthology Strings in my template because there is a certain vibe to their patches that I just don't get with other libraries. Not all their patches -- the shorts don't really thrill me (although they are quite useable), and the trems, marcatos and pizzicatos are decent but not spectacular. But to my ears, their legato patches are killer if you want angst and over-the-top schmaltz. Over-the-top schmaltz is kind of what I do, so I rarely finish an orchestral project that doesn't use the Anthology legatos in some capacity. It's not a subtle library, and it's got some age spots, etc. Blending them with other libraries isn't too difficult, although some libraries blend with Anthology easier than others, and it takes a bit of tweaking. But it's a full-throttle set of strings that you can do a LOT with, for the cost of a half-tank of gas. As noted: full Kontakt only.

I resemble that remark.

You are far too kind. Thanks. And yeah the demos for this one sound spectacular, to my ears. Solo clarinet libraries that sound this good are a real treasure. I often find that solo clarinet patches in other libraries don't quite capture the instrument the way I'd like, as the clarinet is really expressive and the contrast between soft and loud playing is pretty big; sometimes the transitions from soft to loud come with phasing effects or sound doubled or similiar. This one sounds like it won't do that. I haven't actually tested it yet -- gotta finish my workday -- but I can't wait to fire it up.

I dropped a quick word to the Spitfire folks via their chat feature, and the live agent told me they are aware, and their "enginners are working on it".

The site is almost unuseable, at the moment. Slower than molasses, and stuff doesn't stay in your cart...

This is right in my wheelhouse. I bought before I even posted the link.