Spitfire black friday save up to 75% off

[PavlovsCat]

Just now, Carl Ewing said:

Unless you're making a soundtrack for a gloomy British detective TV series, most of their stuff has minimal range. I think they listened to an Olafur Arnold's album and thought "everything should like that! including our epic percussion!" 

Okay, not that bad. I just find all their libraries very dull, and at this point, extremely dated sounding, as they really went overboard with that warm & airy soundtrack style - think felt pianos, string harmonics, tape this, tape that, muted percussion, Max Richter, Olafur Arnolds, Nihl Frahm, Jon Hopkins, etc. which was very much in style in 2018 but is now relegated to terrible "slow burn" low budget Netflix dramas. I was also extremely disappointed in Hammers and HZP. It's unbelievable the amount of hype put behind those products, and they are not produced well IMO. I think their string and brass (with the exception of BBC) sound like the orchestra was on heavy doses of Ambien, and the legatos all sound awful.

That's my opinion anyway. I understand a lot of people love their stuff, and a lot of great music gets made with their libraries. I just personally fall asleep every time I load one of their libraries. Zzzz.

(Also - LABS is seriously an incredible free library of instruments. Major props to them for making all that available for free. It's really a wonderful series, especially for composers just starting out. That alone makes me feel bad for criticizing their products.)

Thanks for sharing that.

I was interested in your perspective as a professional composer, and always am interested in it, and that explanation really was insightful. 

I totally get where you're coming from for feeling bad about criticism. Although,  from consulting to developers, I'm well aware of why Spitfire focuses so many resources to free instruments. It's simply because that is a path to getting hobbyists and students hooked and becoming future paying customers. It's a smart strategy and it's consistent with how some orchestral library developers market heavily to the education industry. 

I think criticism,  like you've shared,  has enormous value to the community,  particularly to less experienced musicians who can take what your insights and focus in on the aforementioned areas to assess these libraries more critically, and decide for themselves if these characteristics are to their liking or not. 

[kitekrazy1]

10 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Thanks for sharing that.

I was interested in your perspective as a professional composer, and always am interested in it, and that explanation really was insightful. 

I totally get where you're coming from for feeling bad about criticism. Although,  from consulting to developers, I'm well aware of why Spitfire focuses so many resources to free instruments. It's simply because that is a path to getting hobbyists and students hooked and becoming future paying customers. It's a smart strategy and it's consistent with how some orchestral library developers market heavily to the education industry. 

I think criticism,  like you've shared,  has enormous value to the community,  particularly to less experienced musicians who can take what your insights and focus in on the aforementioned areas to assess these libraries more critically, and decide for themselves if these characteristics are to their liking or not. 

 Well it hasn't worked on me so far.  I can never really afford their libraries.  The plus on these sales is they are their Kontakt instruments.  Meanwhile I've been collecting VSL in small doses.

[Fleer]

Happy to have jumped on the Ton with Kepler Orchestra and Wondrous Flutes. 
Heck, I’m a wondrous flute player. 
 

(Edith, I didn’t say wonderful, okay?)

[PavlovsCat]

1 hour ago, kitekrazy said:

 Well it hasn't worked on me so far.  I can never really afford their libraries.  The plus on these sales is they are their Kontakt instruments.  Meanwhile I've been collecting VSL in small doses.

If you've caught Carl's posts here and in a couple of threads, he's been giving some great advice. He  isn't a big fan of Spitfire stuff, as per his earlier post. He clearly loves the Audio Bros stuff and it sounds beautiful  to my ears, has a good opinion of Cinesamples -- maybe Musio would be a good fit for you? -- and wrote that 8Dio has the best quality to price ratio in the market. I don't know much but the VSL and Orchestra Tools libraries I've heard sound excellent to me. But I know nothing about workflows that's obviously important to choosing these kinds of libraries. To quote Animal (Muppets): "I bang de drum."  

Edited November 24, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[kitekrazy1]

12 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

If you've caught Carl's posts here and in a couple of threads, he's been giving some great advice. He  isn't a big fan of Spitfire stuff, as per his earlier post. He clearly loves the Audio Bros stuff and it sounds beautiful  to my ears, has a good opinion of Cinesamples -- maybe Musio would be a good fit for you? -- and wrote that 8Dio has the best quality to price ratio in the market. I don't know much but the VSL and Orchestra Tools libraries I've heard sound excellent to me. But I know nothing about workflows that's obviously important to choosing these kinds of libraries. To quote Animal (Muppets): "I bang de drum."  

  I'm done (yeah right) with buying more libraries.   I tend to value the not go with the flow opinions.

Edited November 24, 2023 by kitekrazy

[Amicus717]

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.

Edited November 24, 2023 by Amicus717

[PavlovsCat]

1 hour ago, Amicus717 said:

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 creatie 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.

I wish we had a permanent section in this forum that featured the reviews from the regulars here, like you, like Carl, like kitkrazy, giving their honest reviews. That is why I started doing it, because except for Cory Pellazari -- who I regret to say is no longer with us -- influencers are a terrible outlet to research sample libraries.  They're influenced by free products, developer sponsorships and direct cash from the developers whose products they review. Even when nano-influencers review libraries, they're getting free product and hoping to get more free product in the future, so they're not going to trash a library they know isn't very good from a developer they have a relationship with. Whereas we're going to be honest. I've written some pretty savage reviews on libraries at this forum and you just shared your honest disappointment with a library. You'd never see that from an influencer for a product from a developer given them NFRs, sponsorship money or direct cash -- even when they're not getting cash payments, because going that far and saying that a library was a flat out disappointment will damage their relationship with a developer (the standard influencer grift is stating a couple of things about a library you're not crazy about, to create the appearance of honesty and build trust with followers). The best source of honest reviews are people right here. And while we don't really know one another, I think an indicator of someone's objectivity is often revealed when they don't praise everything. When they find some libraries that they feel were disappointments. 

Edited November 24, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[Fleer]

I’ve got BBCSO Pro, Albion One, Albion Tundra, Albion Neo, eDNA, British Drama Toolkit, Kepler Orchestra, plus a few smaller ones. 
Quite happy with these. Pretty pretty happy. But I hate to see they even don’t mention Christian Henson in their 15 years retrospective. He’s the anonymous co-founder, apparently. 

[Nick Blanc]

54 minutes ago, Fleer said:

I’ve got BBCSO Pro, Albion One, Albion Tundra, Albion Neo, eDNA, British Drama Toolkit, Kepler Orchestra, plus a few smaller ones. 
Quite happy with these. Pretty pretty happy. But I hate to see they even don’t mention Christian Henson in their 15 years retrospective. He’s the anonymous co-founder, apparently. 

Really? That's a d*ck move.

Ontopic: at the moment they have nothing that interests me or is still too expensive for what I would use it for.

[Amicus717]

1 hour ago, Fleer said:

I’ve got BBCSO Pro, Albion One, Albion Tundra...

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...

[Fleer]

19 minutes ago, Amicus717 said:

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...

Unless if it’s your kind of sound … at the edge of silence

Best of the Albions for me. 

[Amicus717]

11 minutes ago, Fleer said:

Unless if it’s your kind of sound … at the edge of silence

Best of the Albions for me. 

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

[kitekrazy1]

I'm wondering about the Albion Legacy 

[BTP]

Sale extended. Now ends on Sunday.

[Kirean]

In the history of the Internet, has anyone ever recorded someone winning something from the Spitfire spinning wheel?

[Fleer]

 

[jngnz]

58 minutes ago, Kirean said:

In the history of the Internet, has anyone ever recorded someone winning something from the Spitfire spinning wheel?

Yeah, last year someone on VI-C won something. Some really big library as well, iirc. But the win rate is very clearly like 0.000001%.

[Zolton]

24 minutes ago, jngnz said:

Yeah, last year someone on VI-C won something. Some really big library as well, iirc. But the win rate is very clearly like 0.000001%.

Yeah, I can vouch (as a one-time winner and a part-time math nerd) for the tombola drawing. Not only were your odds quite reasonable with that one -- around 1.5% of winning something, if you'd scored one of each color ticket -- they were also calculable.

(Or estimable, in the sense of "able to be estimated", as the pool of tickets was 6000 total for ~30 giveaway prizes and holding one or more tickets makes you eligible for all.)

If the spinnywheel rules are the same as last time, it's much more of a crapshoot. If I understand correctly:

Every two hours, there's a "magic time"; whoever spins closest (and presumably prior to, unless Spitfire has an accurate-to-the-millisecond time machine handy) the magic time wins that time slot. But you can only spin once a day (i.e., every 12 "contests"), you don't know how many (thousands of?) people are participating each round (without access to the server logs) and you can't know whether the magic time for your current spin already happened half an hour ago, and you're well and truly oozing out your lifeforce watching the pixels go 'round.

Which is perhaps less estimable, in the sense of "worthy of great respect".

On the other hand, it is probably more "democratic", in the sense that a greater pool of people has some (small) chance to win, rather than just obsessive clickhounds setting alarms for half-four in the gloaming to Pokemon up their precious e-tix for a chance at some free bitcrushed bow scrapes recorded in a coffin in the back of a lorry speeding down the M1.

As such a clickhound myself, I miss the tombola. Also, I resent the characterization. Also also, the bow scrapes are divine.

 

[PavlovsCat]

1 hour ago, Kirean said:

In the history of the Internet, has anyone ever recorded someone winning something from the Spitfire spinning wheel?

Haha! Someone probably won, just not us. Probably a decade ago Sampletekk had some kind of sweepstakes giveaway on VI-CONTROL and I won that. I had already been a customer with a lot of their libraries by that point.  I think that's the last time I won something in a sweepstakes or contest.