eastwest EastWest Play 6 now free!

[Amicus717]

1 hour ago, dcumpian said:

I'll agree that Play isn't that great, but you can get really good results out of the Play libraries once you learn your way around their weird interface.

Dan

And Play 6 is a definite improvement on previous versions, fwiw, although that's not saying a huge amount. 

I found that my total usage of EastWest libraries went way down after I got a full version of Kontakt. Access to all the Kontakt libraries was quite a game changer for me. The only EW library that I fire up on a regular basis is Hollywood Brass. HW Percussion gets a bit of use, and occasionally HW Strings (mainly to use the playable runs patches).  I have a bunch of other EW libraries (EW Woodwinds, Voice of Passion, Pianos, etc), but they rarely see any use at all. 

But the HW Brass library is, to my ears, still a very good library. Excellent horn patches, etc, decent trumpets. I've been searching for reasonably priced NKI alternatives to the HW Brass patches, and haven't really found anything I liked, yet. The NI Symphony Series brass certainly don't sound as good, and the combination brass patches in Albion don't turn my crank either.  The VSL libraries are very nice, and I like the flexibility of the VSL ensemble player, but I'm having second thoughts about getting too deep into the VSL ecosystem, with their draconian licensing issues, etc. So I'll be using Play for the foreseeable future.

Edited March 29, 2019 by Amicus717

[dcumpian]

I still use EWQLSO as well as HW strings, because they complement each other quite well. In many ways, even though HW Strings was touted as "next gen", it really fits as more of a part 2 of SO, because the articulations are so different. Both the brass in SO and HW Brass are really well done also.

However, like you say, I have Ra, Stormdrum, and a few others I can't even remember. I never use them anymore unless I absolutely can't find what I'm looking for in a Kontakt library.

Dan