Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra

[synkrotron]

Anyone excited about this?

https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/bbc-symphony-orchestra/

I am, and I don't even do orchestral stuff...

[antler]

It certainly sounds good. Do we get individual instrument patches with this one (e.g. strings only, flutes only), or are they combined patches (e.g. strings + flute)? Looking at the web site suggests the former, but I may have missed something.

[Fleer]

Oh yeah. And I’m all over it. Must be the best valued orchestral package in years. 

[Grem]

17 minutes ago, Fleer said:

Oh yeah. And I’m all over it. Must be the best valued orchestral package in years. 

@ $750? I ain't saying it don't sound good. But man!! Out of my league. : )

[Simeon Amburgey]

I was blessed by one of my clients/friends and I was able to pre-order this! I think the lead time between announcing and actually being available was a little long; just about 32 days to go ?

The problem now is that I am now looking to upgrade my computer which is a whole other situation indeed. Looking to build an i9 system so it should hold me for a while. I have been running an i5 setup for many years but over the last little bit have been just hitting the ceiling problem shine so many things and this new library coming is just another reason to look into getting a more powerful system to handle things.

Very excited however and of course will keep everyone up to date on my progress!

 

[Grem]

36 minutes ago, Simeon Amburgey said:

Looking to build an i9 system so it should hold me for a while.

Doing the same Simeon, and for the same reason!! I got the parts, just needing the down time to do it.

[Simeon Amburgey]

5 hours ago, Grem said:

Doing the same Simeon, and for the same reason!! I got the parts, just needing the down time to do it.

Don't want to go too far off topic but what direction (mobo, RAM, etc.) are you looking at? I am still very confused and somewhat sticker shocked at trying to figure out the best route to go to get the most bang and future proofing for my buck.  

[synkrotron]

40 minutes ago, Simeon Amburgey said:

Don't want to go too far off topic but what direction (mobo, RAM, etc.) are you looking at? I am still very confused and somewhat sticker shocked at trying to figure out the best route to go to get the most bang and future proofing for my buck.  

This is what I bought at the start of the year, @Simeon Amburgey :-

Case - BE QUIET! DARK BASE PRO 900 FULL TOWER GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU) - Intel® Core™ i9 Eight Core Processor i9-9900K (3.6GHz) 16MB Cache
Motherboard - ASUS® ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs, WIFI - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM) - 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 16GB)
Graphics Card - ROG STRIX GTX 1050Ti
1st M.2 SSD Drive - 500GB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3200MB/W)
2nd drive - 1TB Samsung 860 QVO 2.5" SSD
Power Supply - CORSAIR 650W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling - Noctua NH-U14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler
 

Of course, things will have moved on a bit since then, but I am still very pleased with it.

[Grem]

I'm very close to what Skytron has too. Not at home right now to look at the boxes.

[Zo]

I clicked on the link , saw 199 , is said "mmm nice price "..then i saw it was the SSD lol lib is actuall 799 !!!

[Cookie Jarvis]

I spent close to $1,000 for the EWSO Platinum Plus library when it came out...it was also the last time I had $1,000 to spend on a sample library

Bill

[Matthew Sorrels]

It's not a Kontakt instrument, it's using Spitfire's own sampler.  That still only loads a single instrument right?  No multis.  I suppose it doesn't really matter that much, but I'm not sure I'd invest that much in their software developer chops just yet.

 

[Zo]

6 hours ago, Cookie Jarvis said:

I spent close to $1,000 for the EWSO Platinum Plus library when it came out...it was also the last time I had $1,000 to spend on a sample library

Bill

Funny because yesturday i was chilling with ex students ... and we were listening to one of my track , then they statred to ask where that this comes from ? 

Me : Albion IV

and this 

Me : keyscape 

and the bass ? 

Drums ? 

Sonicouture Electro acoustic / Revolution from alchemy

Uhe diva 

brass ? 

Albion III ..ect 

lol if we start to count money we spent on sound generation , we could certainly buy a used car !!  Lol 

but quality comes at a price , that for sure ... when i was producing those tracks ... it was fast because of skills and sources  that s the key ...

 

Edited September 23, 2019 by Zo

[Simeon Amburgey]

11 hours ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

It's not a Kontakt instrument, it's using Spitfire's own sampler.  That still only loads a single instrument right?  No multis.  I suppose it doesn't really matter that much, but I'm not sure I'd invest that much in their software developer chops just yet.

Yeah, looks like a variant of the LABS interface. I am very surprised as it seems there is so much wasted space in the GUI.  

It seems Spitfire is positioning this as a collaborative product somehow to help users share compositions. They also mention creating template libraries for users to exchange as well; most of what I have seen center around Logic users. They have a couple of recent videos where they build a “giant” template and a contest to guess the amount of RAM that is being used. So yes it appears there could potentially be many instances of the Spitfire plugin running in any given project.

It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop.

 

Edited September 23, 2019 by Simeon Amburgey

[Leizer]

23 hours ago, synkrotron said:

This is what I bought at the start of the year, @Simeon Amburgey :-

Case - BE QUIET! DARK BASE PRO 900 FULL TOWER GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU) - Intel® Core™ i9 Eight Core Processor i9-9900K (3.6GHz) 16MB Cache
Motherboard - ASUS® ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs, WIFI - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM) - 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 16GB)
Graphics Card - ROG STRIX GTX 1050Ti
1st M.2 SSD Drive - 500GB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3200MB/W)
2nd drive - 1TB Samsung 860 QVO 2.5" SSD
Power Supply - CORSAIR 650W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling - Noctua NH-U14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler
 

Of course, things will have moved on a bit since then, but I am still very pleased with it.

I'm going to build as new computer as well, and thinking of about the same lineup as you, but maybe with 64GB memory if afforded. Now I'm still on a i7-2600 with 16GB and EWHO Platinum is often slow and almost of of memory if I use all the mic positions.

[Fleer]

I’m dead. 
 

Edith: yep

Edited September 29, 2019 by Fleer

[antler]

That library sounds gorgeous

[Matthew Sorrels]

So against my better judgement I picked this up yesterday.  Downloaded reasonably fast (I have gigabit FiOS) but was dead on arrival.  Would crash Cubase on insert, Cakewalk it wouldn't crash but there were no instruments or presets at all.  My version of the plugin was 1.0.2 even though they released 1.0.3 on Friday.  But with no way to manually download and the Spitfire app claiming 1.0.2 was the only version, I was pretty much hosed.

This morning the Spitfire app let me see and download the 1.0.3 build, but that only fixed the crashing.  I had to manually repair all the sections (Winds/Brass/Strings/Perc) in order to get presets/instruments to show up.  They finally got back to me on the support this afternoon with completely unhelpful advice, pretty much let me solve the problems myself.  I'm still kind of pissed off about it.  If getting my money back was an option I would have returned it last night.

Every fear I had about their plugin is pretty much true.  It doesn't load/stream very effectively.  No way you could even think of using this without having the samples on a fast SSD (takes up 527 GB for me).  Some poor soul converted the Logic template Spitfire made available to Cubase.  (Seems like if you aren't on a Mac running Logic they don't care about you at all).  Using the converted template and loading/enabling every track the whole things takes about 25-35gigs of ram (I think that's just the Mix 1 mic).  Some notes seem to get cut off and just stop playing then you release the key and the release tail plays.  Maybe it's a streaming issue but that's with the whole instrument loaded.

I placed a two bar ostinato on every track, tweaked all the tracks to use short notes and moved the notes into the right ranges.  Playing that back in Cubase it is pretty clear they aren't multi-threading really well.  One thread gets pegged at 100% and the rest are barely moving (it's possible this is a Cubase problem, Cubase isn't very good at breaking up soft synths to multiple threads).  Reaper would be interesting, I bet it would do better.  Not sure about Cakewalk yet, since I have no template.  In any case even though they force you to load separate instances of the plugin for each track, it's not helping spread the CPU load at all.  Which is kind of like the only advantage not being a multi-tembral instrument has.  DLL's on Windows can share memory (so if multiple apps load the same DLL or a single app loads multiple copies of a DLL) they can all use the same pool of memory (they don't have to).  It appears BBCSO may be doing that (every plugin instance reports the same ram usage and shows the same loading even if that instance isn't being changed), which may kill the advantage having all these separate plugin instances would have with spreading the CPU.  May be very different on the Mac, again I suspect they have never used a Windows PC, ever.

I'll admit I'm a little confused when I load up the Violin 1 Leader (the solo violin 1) and enable just one of the mic options (like the mono mic) and play a single note, the UI shows 6 voices active (with the legato articulation, other articulations have a different voice count, but still not just 1).  I'm not 100% sure what all those voices are doing exactly but having that much mixing going on with a single note is unlikely to scale well with a full orchestral template.

The UI is so stylish as to be nearly unusable.  Things you need to know are tiny little blinking dots with no text (only way to tell it's still loading samples is this little led light in the corner, it flashes when loading, what is loaded and selected is often another little tiny led like dot, etc).  The amount of wasted space is near epic, the amount of actually helpful tooltips are minimal.  The mic control options are all on multiple pages(4 pages!), so you can't actually see all the mics and set their levels without paging forward and backward.  Which is crazy stupid on a 4096x2160 monitor and 20+ different mic options.  This is also true for articulations.

The insane number of mics I'm not sure is a big win.  If you load all the mics for the solo violin it consumes 12gigs of ram.  You can't seem to purge articulations you aren't using (just mics).  You load the instrument you get all the articulations, even though that means it eats a bunch of ram you most likely aren't ever going to use --  I think.  With the UI designed by ustwo I'm not sure anyone could tell.

I'm sure none of these things will matter to most of their customers (and even less to their near rabid fans).  What it sounds like will most likely mask any of the engineering and design flaws they have made.  On the sound front, to be honest, it sounds like every other high-end orchestral product I own.  Not worse but also not better.  The VI forum has a number of posts pointing out specific problems, but that's pretty much par for every library ever made.  For very high end users these things may matter.  For me, not so much.  How the keyswitching works, how the plug manages thread, memory and disc -- these things do matter to me a lot.  And on that score they aren't doing so hot.

I got it at the intro discount, but $750 is about double my "acceptable" library expense point.  If I paid MSRP $999 for it I'd feel even more cheated.  This is not a good deal at either price point.

If you are a professional music composer writing music for games, TV, movies, or media you might be able to get your money worth out of this.  Depends on what you already have (people with all the other Spitfire libraries are going to find this is a bit of a step down).  If you are just starting this isn't unreasonable.  It does seem slightly easier to use than EastWest's Hollywood Orchestra.

For me it's going to depend on if their software development is willing to bridge the gap between what the BBCSO plugin is now and what say Kontakt is.  In theory a year or so from now this could be very solid.  Or it could turn out that engineering doesn't mix with composing/art all that well and the plugin doesn't get the kinds of improvements it needs, like what happened to EastWest Play.

Right now as I'm writing this I have the A3 trumpets loaded up and I'm playing on the MIDI keyboard a three note sequence then I play all three notes as a chord.  When I switch from the single note to the chord the whole plugin stops making sounds (a sharp cut off) until I let go, then I hear the release tails.  I'm not sure why it can't play a three note chord with THREE trumpets.  Maybe it's because I have all 19 mics loaded (but I like how that sounds).  I'm not sure a $1k library should fail to play a simple chord, no matter what I did to the mics.

 

[musical]

1 hour ago, Matthew Sorrels said:

So against my better judgement I picked this up yesterday.  Downloaded reasonably fast (I have gigabit FiOS) but was dead on arrival.  Would crash Cubase on insert, Cakewalk it wouldn't crash but there were no instruments or presets at all.  My version of the plugin was 1.0.2 even though they released 1.0.3 on Friday.  But with no way to manually download and the Spitfire app claiming 1.0.2 was the only version, I was pretty much hosed.

This morning the Spitfire app let me see and download the 1.0.3 build, but that only fixed the crashing.  I had to manually repair all the sections (Winds/Brass/Strings/Perc) in order to get presets/instruments to show up.  They finally got back to me on the support this afternoon with completely unhelpful advice, pretty much let me solve the problems myself.  I'm still kind of pissed off about it.  If getting my money back was an option I would have returned it last night.

Every fear I had about their plugin is pretty much true.  It doesn't load/stream very effectively.  No way you could even think of using this without having the samples on a fast SSD (takes up 527 GB for me).  Some poor soul converted the Logic template Spitfire made available to Cubase.  (Seems like if you aren't on a Mac running Logic they don't care about you at all).  Using the converted template and loading/enabling every track the whole things takes about 25-35gigs of ram (I think that's just the Mix 1 mic).  Some notes seem to get cut off and just stop playing then you release the key and the release tail plays.  Maybe it's a streaming issue but that's with the whole instrument loaded.

I placed a two bar ostinato on every track, tweaked all the tracks to use short notes and moved the notes into the right ranges.  Playing that back in Cubase it is pretty clear they aren't multi-threading really well.  One thread gets pegged at 100% and the rest are barely moving (it's possible this is a Cubase problem, Cubase isn't very good at breaking up soft synths to multiple threads).  Reaper would be interesting, I bet it would do better.  Not sure about Cakewalk yet, since I have no template.  In any case even though they force you to load separate instances of the plugin for each track, it's not helping spread the CPU load at all.  Which is kind of like the only advantage not being a multi-tembral instrument has.  DLL's on Windows can share memory (so if multiple apps load the same DLL or a single app loads multiple copies of a DLL) they can all use the same pool of memory (they don't have to).  It appears BBCSO may be doing that (every plugin instance reports the same ram usage and shows the same loading even if that instance isn't being changed), which may kill the advantage having all these separate plugin instances would have with spreading the CPU.  May be very different on the Mac, again I suspect they have never used a Windows PC, ever.

I'll admit I'm a little confused when I load up the Violin 1 Leader (the solo violin 1) and enable just one of the mic options (like the mono mic) and play a single note, the UI shows 6 voices active (with the legato articulation, other articulations have a different voice count, but still not just 1).  I'm not 100% sure what all those voices are doing exactly but having that much mixing going on with a single note is unlikely to scale well with a full orchestral template.

The UI is so stylish as to be nearly unusable.  Things you need to know are tiny little blinking dots with no text (only way to tell it's still loading samples is this little led light in the corner, it flashes when loading, what is loaded and selected is often another little tiny led like dot, etc).  The amount of wasted space is near epic, the amount of actually helpful tooltips are minimal.  The mic control options are all on multiple pages(4 pages!), so you can't actually see all the mics and set their levels without paging forward and backward.  Which is crazy stupid on a 4096x2160 monitor and 20+ different mic options.  This is also true for articulations.

The insane number of mics I'm not sure is a big win.  If you load all the mics for the solo violin it consumes 12gigs of ram.  You can't seem to purge articulations you aren't using (just mics).  You load the instrument you get all the articulations, even though that means it eats a bunch of ram you most likely aren't ever going to use --  I think.  With the UI designed by ustwo I'm not sure anyone could tell.

I'm sure none of these things will matter to most of their customers (and even less to their near rabid fans).  What it sounds like will most likely mask any of the engineering and design flaws they have made.  On the sound front, to be honest, it sounds like every other high-end orchestral product I own.  Not worse but also not better.  The VI forum has a number of posts pointing out specific problems, but that's pretty much par for every library ever made.  For very high end users these things may matter.  For me, not so much.  How the keyswitching works, how the plug manages thread, memory and disc -- these things do matter to me a lot.  And on that score they aren't doing so hot.

I got it at the intro discount, but $750 is about double my "acceptable" library expense point.  If I paid MSRP $999 for it I'd feel even more cheated.  This is not a good deal at either price point.

If you are a professional music composer writing music for games, TV, movies, or media you might be able to get your money worth out of this.  Depends on what you already have (people with all the other Spitfire libraries are going to find this is a bit of a step down).  If you are just starting this isn't unreasonable.  It does seem slightly easier to use than EastWest's Hollywood Orchestra.

For me it's going to depend on if their software development is willing to bridge the gap between what the BBCSO plugin is now and what say Kontakt is.  In theory a year or so from now this could be very solid.  Or it could turn out that engineering doesn't mix with composing/art all that well and the plugin doesn't get the kinds of improvements it needs, like what happened to EastWest Play.

Right now as I'm writing this I have the A3 trumpets loaded up and I'm playing on the MIDI keyboard a three note sequence then I play all three notes as a chord.  When I switch from the single note to the chord the whole plugin stops making sounds (a sharp cut off) until I let go, then I hear the release tails.  I'm not sure why it can't play a three note chord with THREE trumpets.  Maybe it's because I have all 19 mics loaded (but I like how that sounds).  I'm not sure a $1k library should fail to play a simple chord, no matter what I did to the mics.

 

This is an extremely useful review.

I'm not sure I'd be as polite and reasonable as you if I had wasted $750 on this.

Let us know whether they are honourable and give you a refund.

[kitekrazy1]

 EWHO Gold will probably be my last library to get.   I can deal with Play, Synchron, but I still prefer Kontakt.   I do not like the Spitfire player.  Time will tell if this is a good direction for them.   You are also safe on this forum from any Spitfire criticisms.