06-08-2018, 09:14 PM
I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I have no great love for the Miroslav Philharmonik library, as I have done a lot of complaining about it over the years. Now don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for Miroslav Vitous and all the work that went into creating the original samples -- especially considering it was all done in the early nineties. I just happen to think that the samples have become very dated-sounding and their usefulness limited. That's why it has irked me to no end seeing IK Multimedia passing the library off as some kind of magical, natural-sounding wonder of technology after they aquired the rights to it (some decade after the samples actually were cutting edge!).
As for my personal experience with these samples, I got Miroslav Philharmonik CE in... I'm guessing 2011 or so? I don't remember how much I paid for it, but it was on sale for something like $10 or $12. I wasn't too keen on it -- in fact I thought it sounded terrible -- but it had a handful of things that were useable and for that amount of money one can't expect too much. Besides, the CE version was a cut-down, feature-limited budget variant of the full Miroslav Philharmonik which, at the time, still retailed for around $300 or more. You get what you pay for, right? So I always assumed CE was more of a paid demo version of the full library, and it made sense that IK wasn't going to give away all the goodies in the budget version.
About a year later, the full Miroslav Philharmonik went on sale for, I think, $50. I sprung for it immediately, expecting it to have everything that the CE version lacked and much, much more. It weighed in at 7GB of samples as opposed to CE's paltry 2GB. So while I knew the samples were old, there was a ton of stuff in there and my hopes were high. But alas... after having paid for, downloaded and installed the whole thing I quickly realized that the bits missing from the CE version were not significantly better than the stuff that I was already familiar with. Sure, there was a lot more to choose from which made cherry picking useable things easier. But overall it was all the same out of tune, lo-fi-sounding mess. I paid like 1/6th or less of the original cost of the library and still felt ripped off. I feel truly sorry for people who paid full price for it back in the day! And there began, I think, my distaste for IK Multimedia in general and the Miroslav library in particular.
Anyway, with that bit of background out of the way, let us move on.
Last year I was kindly gifted Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE along with some other IK stuff. When I got it, I wasn't sure what to expect. I'd heard a few demos of IK's new flagship orchestral offering when it was released, and I remember discussing it with Otto a couple of years ago. I don't recall the exact words, but I said something along the lines of "well it does sound good -- but not $650 good!" -- which was roughly the retail price of Miro 2 at that time. It's now down to a bit less than that. Still, that's a lot of money, IK isn't a company I trust with orchestral libraries, and if that's your budget there are probably better alternatives. And given my experiences with the original CE library on top of that... let's just say I wasn't expecting wonders from their new budget-friendly orchestral title.
Surprisingly though, I found that Miro 2 CE is a much more useable affair than the original CE -- which honestly sounds more like a Mellotron than a real orchestra. In fact, once I managed to get my negative expectations in check and give the thing a fair shake, I found myself liking the library a lot. Yes, it has its quirks and limitations, but overall it does more things right than wrong and to be honest I'm a little surprised that it isn't mentioned more often in VO circles. Then again, maybe I'm not the only one with bad experiences as far as IK goes? Still, credit where credit is due and I'm not going to dismiss a good thing because it's from a company I dislike.
First of all, Miroslav 2 is smaller and more intimate-sounding, which is not only refreshing overall but it's also something I'm leaning more and more towards myself as a composer. The UBER-EPIC TRAILER ORCHESTRA ™ thing has been done to death, I'm sick of it and I want no part of it. Most of the big players in the orchestral library department are still going down that road, and I can't tell one library from the next because they all sound more or less the same. Along comes a library that is more honest and... well I'm not going to say real-sounding, because Miro 2 definitely has realism issues (more on that later), but at least it's not jumping on the trailer music bandwagon. And that makes me want to like it despite its flaws. Props also to IK for recording an entire new orchestral sample set rather than licensing an existing one like they did with the old Miroslav sample library. That is no small feat and I honestly wasn't expecting it.
Funny thing is, I remember when the original Miroslav Philharmonik came out, and IK marketed it as an "expressive" and "natural-sounding" orchestral library. In my experience it's anything but that. That is however a pretty good description of Miroslav 2. It's sort of gritty (though not in a lo-fi way as its predecessor) and most instruments/sections actually sound like real instruments/sections rather than a slick, processed version thereof. Did I say that's refreshing? Sure, if you want samples that are 100% set-and-forget then it might not be for you, but I'm a tinkerer and DIY-kind of composer so that's definitely a big plus in my book.
There's not a ton of articulations to choose from in the CE version -- unsurprisingly, of course -- but all the meat and potatoes are there and working with the library I've only found myself reaching for other stuff in a handful of cases. Meaning, you can build your project around Miro 2 CE and just substitute the things that are less good with other libraries. As opposed to the original Miro, which was more of a "layering" library than something you'd put front and center in your mix. The samples on offer are by and large very good -- in fact I would go as far as to say they're inspiring and fun to work with, albeit idiosyncratic -- and if you let them do what they're good at rather than forcing them into a style and sound they were never made to reproduce (which should be a rule of thumb for all sample libraries, really), I think you might be surprised at what this $130 library can achieve.
Of course, not everything is rosy in the land of Miroslav. I've tried my best to talk about the overall positive aspects and not get bogged down in details and nitpicking, because I honestly think the library as a whole is good, and complaining about things on a detail level might give you the wrong idea. But some things should definitely be mentioned as a heads-up.
- Tuning is... off, in places. Just like with the original Miro library. How hard can this be to get right?
- Staccato articulations in the strings are not good. If you want to do chugga-chugga definitely look elsewhere, but some RR's are downright bad and sound like dud notes that should have ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak.
- Some articulations have an artificially limited range, e.g. FF trumpets and FF violins.
- There is no rhyme and reason to the ordering of the keyswitches, which makes finding an articulation that you want nigh impossible without opening the Philharmonik UI.
- No legato sampling. Not a deal breaker for me personally, but worth mentioning.
- No disk streaming. If you want to load all KS patches plus whatever extra libraries you might want, you're going to need 16GB RAM at the bare minimum.
- All percussion as well as some other instruments are plucked straight out of the original Miroslav library.
All things considered, Miroslav 2 was kind of dated even on its release just a few years ago. While it may be fairly modern in terms of sample content, technologically it hearkens back to an age where two velocity layers and two round-robins were considered state of the art. I'm completely fine with that, as I have a thing for older libraries and I think the obsession with realism in in modern stuff is a little over the top. Still, IK pretends like nothing has happened in the past 15 years and set their prices accordingly, hoping that their customers won't know better until they have paid and it's too late. Just like with Miroslav Philharmonik. Which annoys me, but still. That's capitalism for you.
Big question I guess is, would I consider getting the full Miro 2 library? In fact, I definitely would if the price is right. My crossgrade price right now is listed at $199, which is maybe a bit too much as I don't know exactly how much better the upgrade would turn out to be (like last time around). But if the price goes down a little bit, I'd go for it. Miro 2 might be primitive compared to other stuff around these days, but it's sort of honest and doesn't sound like everything else out there, and that's worth a whole lot to me.
As for my personal experience with these samples, I got Miroslav Philharmonik CE in... I'm guessing 2011 or so? I don't remember how much I paid for it, but it was on sale for something like $10 or $12. I wasn't too keen on it -- in fact I thought it sounded terrible -- but it had a handful of things that were useable and for that amount of money one can't expect too much. Besides, the CE version was a cut-down, feature-limited budget variant of the full Miroslav Philharmonik which, at the time, still retailed for around $300 or more. You get what you pay for, right? So I always assumed CE was more of a paid demo version of the full library, and it made sense that IK wasn't going to give away all the goodies in the budget version.
About a year later, the full Miroslav Philharmonik went on sale for, I think, $50. I sprung for it immediately, expecting it to have everything that the CE version lacked and much, much more. It weighed in at 7GB of samples as opposed to CE's paltry 2GB. So while I knew the samples were old, there was a ton of stuff in there and my hopes were high. But alas... after having paid for, downloaded and installed the whole thing I quickly realized that the bits missing from the CE version were not significantly better than the stuff that I was already familiar with. Sure, there was a lot more to choose from which made cherry picking useable things easier. But overall it was all the same out of tune, lo-fi-sounding mess. I paid like 1/6th or less of the original cost of the library and still felt ripped off. I feel truly sorry for people who paid full price for it back in the day! And there began, I think, my distaste for IK Multimedia in general and the Miroslav library in particular.
Anyway, with that bit of background out of the way, let us move on.
Last year I was kindly gifted Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE along with some other IK stuff. When I got it, I wasn't sure what to expect. I'd heard a few demos of IK's new flagship orchestral offering when it was released, and I remember discussing it with Otto a couple of years ago. I don't recall the exact words, but I said something along the lines of "well it does sound good -- but not $650 good!" -- which was roughly the retail price of Miro 2 at that time. It's now down to a bit less than that. Still, that's a lot of money, IK isn't a company I trust with orchestral libraries, and if that's your budget there are probably better alternatives. And given my experiences with the original CE library on top of that... let's just say I wasn't expecting wonders from their new budget-friendly orchestral title.
Surprisingly though, I found that Miro 2 CE is a much more useable affair than the original CE -- which honestly sounds more like a Mellotron than a real orchestra. In fact, once I managed to get my negative expectations in check and give the thing a fair shake, I found myself liking the library a lot. Yes, it has its quirks and limitations, but overall it does more things right than wrong and to be honest I'm a little surprised that it isn't mentioned more often in VO circles. Then again, maybe I'm not the only one with bad experiences as far as IK goes? Still, credit where credit is due and I'm not going to dismiss a good thing because it's from a company I dislike.
First of all, Miroslav 2 is smaller and more intimate-sounding, which is not only refreshing overall but it's also something I'm leaning more and more towards myself as a composer. The UBER-EPIC TRAILER ORCHESTRA ™ thing has been done to death, I'm sick of it and I want no part of it. Most of the big players in the orchestral library department are still going down that road, and I can't tell one library from the next because they all sound more or less the same. Along comes a library that is more honest and... well I'm not going to say real-sounding, because Miro 2 definitely has realism issues (more on that later), but at least it's not jumping on the trailer music bandwagon. And that makes me want to like it despite its flaws. Props also to IK for recording an entire new orchestral sample set rather than licensing an existing one like they did with the old Miroslav sample library. That is no small feat and I honestly wasn't expecting it.
Funny thing is, I remember when the original Miroslav Philharmonik came out, and IK marketed it as an "expressive" and "natural-sounding" orchestral library. In my experience it's anything but that. That is however a pretty good description of Miroslav 2. It's sort of gritty (though not in a lo-fi way as its predecessor) and most instruments/sections actually sound like real instruments/sections rather than a slick, processed version thereof. Did I say that's refreshing? Sure, if you want samples that are 100% set-and-forget then it might not be for you, but I'm a tinkerer and DIY-kind of composer so that's definitely a big plus in my book.
There's not a ton of articulations to choose from in the CE version -- unsurprisingly, of course -- but all the meat and potatoes are there and working with the library I've only found myself reaching for other stuff in a handful of cases. Meaning, you can build your project around Miro 2 CE and just substitute the things that are less good with other libraries. As opposed to the original Miro, which was more of a "layering" library than something you'd put front and center in your mix. The samples on offer are by and large very good -- in fact I would go as far as to say they're inspiring and fun to work with, albeit idiosyncratic -- and if you let them do what they're good at rather than forcing them into a style and sound they were never made to reproduce (which should be a rule of thumb for all sample libraries, really), I think you might be surprised at what this $130 library can achieve.
Of course, not everything is rosy in the land of Miroslav. I've tried my best to talk about the overall positive aspects and not get bogged down in details and nitpicking, because I honestly think the library as a whole is good, and complaining about things on a detail level might give you the wrong idea. But some things should definitely be mentioned as a heads-up.
- Tuning is... off, in places. Just like with the original Miro library. How hard can this be to get right?
- Staccato articulations in the strings are not good. If you want to do chugga-chugga definitely look elsewhere, but some RR's are downright bad and sound like dud notes that should have ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak.
- Some articulations have an artificially limited range, e.g. FF trumpets and FF violins.
- There is no rhyme and reason to the ordering of the keyswitches, which makes finding an articulation that you want nigh impossible without opening the Philharmonik UI.
- No legato sampling. Not a deal breaker for me personally, but worth mentioning.
- No disk streaming. If you want to load all KS patches plus whatever extra libraries you might want, you're going to need 16GB RAM at the bare minimum.
- All percussion as well as some other instruments are plucked straight out of the original Miroslav library.
All things considered, Miroslav 2 was kind of dated even on its release just a few years ago. While it may be fairly modern in terms of sample content, technologically it hearkens back to an age where two velocity layers and two round-robins were considered state of the art. I'm completely fine with that, as I have a thing for older libraries and I think the obsession with realism in in modern stuff is a little over the top. Still, IK pretends like nothing has happened in the past 15 years and set their prices accordingly, hoping that their customers won't know better until they have paid and it's too late. Just like with Miroslav Philharmonik. Which annoys me, but still. That's capitalism for you.
Big question I guess is, would I consider getting the full Miro 2 library? In fact, I definitely would if the price is right. My crossgrade price right now is listed at $199, which is maybe a bit too much as I don't know exactly how much better the upgrade would turn out to be (like last time around). But if the price goes down a little bit, I'd go for it. Miro 2 might be primitive compared to other stuff around these days, but it's sort of honest and doesn't sound like everything else out there, and that's worth a whole lot to me.
