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Synful (orchestral library) now FREE


Esteban Villanova

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From its introduction in 2004 until 2023 Synful Orchestra was a copy protected commercial product. It has been used by many concert composers, jazz and rock musicians, film and television composers, electronic musicians, and amateur music creators. Now we want to make it available to everyone without the need for licensing or activation. We hope that it will bring joy and discovery to many

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I've downloaded it and will have a play when I get back from travelling. Demos sound great. Let's see if I can get that kind of sound from them ;)

I wonder why Synful have decided to put it out there for free now? 

Does anyone else get the feeling that many of these older developers are retiring and putting their babies out there for free? Or perhaps they don't have enough of a user base to warrant maintaining a website and payment portal. If you look at the forum, it's not very active, so I'm guessing they are on the tail end of the bell-curve.

I'm certainly not complaining though. It's great to be able to use software that would have previously been outside of my price range, and  I wish all of them the best of luck with whatever they decide to do in the future.

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Free as in

Quote

Copyright 2023  Eric Lindemann

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
 

Seems rather generous considering he hold several patents.  Donations are accepted, though. Impressive resume, too.

 

Edited by User 905133
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I did download it and first impressions were meh to say the least. For starters, their installer doesn't let you select which plugin formats you want to install nor where they'll go. Which means I'll have to accept I'll have a VST2 where it shouldn't be and an AAX I'll never use taking disk space.

As per the plugin itself, I don't know if it installed correctly or not because I only have horns, woodwinds and violins as instruments I can use. Where are the other orchestral instruments?

Edited by Bruno de Souza Lino
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On 8/8/2023 at 11:45 AM, Esteban Villanova said:

Is there a way to change expression from CC11 to CC1?

Doesn't look like it.
Manual implies that if your controller doesn't use C11 that you either need to obtain a different controller or use a utility to remap the controller you're using to C11.

  

On 8/8/2023 at 11:45 AM, Esteban Villanova said:

Also, REAPER sees it but Bitwig doesn't :(

Hmm, It's showing up in my Bitwig. 

 

Edited by TheSteven
fixed several typos
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Seems like it could be a great thing for sketching, esp on a laptop if you compose for solo pieces.  Would be kind of annoying to use for anything bigger.  Requires some esoteric programming to control the playback, and DFE (which is common in notation software, but not DAWs).  Sounds pretty good considering what it is, too.  Probably could have "saved" it if he had shifted focus and competed with NotePerformer at a lower price point ?

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2 hours ago, dubdisciple said:

Hats off to the guys that made the demos. So far it sounds absolutely mediocre for me. I will work on it some more

That's par for the course with pretty much any orchestral library.  They don't sound anywhere near the demos until the music are mixed well.

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3 hours ago, dubdisciple said:

Hats off to the guys that made the demos. So far it sounds absolutely mediocre for me. I will work on it some more

There are MIDI files and Cubase and Protools project files in c:\ProgramData\SynfulOrchestra\Examples for some of the demos including the string quartet.

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4 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

There are some demos from other places, but it seems to be one of those softwares that you have learn to make it sound good

I get what you're saying but...
isn't that true for all DAWs and orchestration libraries?
It's only successful marketing that really make you think otherwise.

Edited by TheSteven
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37 minutes ago, TheSteven said:

isn't that true for all DAWs and orchestration libraries?

Yes, but those have educational material available for them which is easy for people without MIDI knowledge to learn. Let's take BBCSO Discover. Even if you have almost no idea of what you're doing, you can figure out how to get half decent results out of it.

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