Scoring Central

Hi everyone!
I came across here after reading the Mattias Westlund articles, which are the best that I have found on the internet regarding Virtual Orchestration. 
Some years ago I bought EW Hollywood Orchestra Gold during the Black Friday sales but soon I realised that it was too big for me (specially in size and in cpu/ram consumption ). Also, I have bought some effect bundles from Waves and other trendy audio brands... It took me few months to understand that any of these purchases was helping me to be a better musician but to distract me from becoming one as I was absorbed by the consumerist loop.
Now I only have an ultrabook (i5 8250u, 8 DDR4, 256 SSD) and I would like to continue making music even with the technical constraints so I am looking for recommendations considering that I am going to sell the most of the shiny things that I have bought.
¿Which freeware do you recommend nowadays? the article "freeware favorites" is now long in the tooth. Regarding reverb, I love the Valhalla DSP ones so I am going to stick with them (Dragonfly Reverbs are not sounding bad thought), not sure about the effects cause the TDR free collection and Voxengo Span seem sufficient for me ¿any other recommendations regarding effects? I also need a Virtual Orchestra, a Choir and a Synth, all of them lightweight and not very expensive because my laptop has to handle them (I also have a Roland Juno DS which is the only thing that I am using these days as sound bank).
Thank you to all and I hope you well!

(03-05-2020, 10:15 AM)payoak Wrote: [ -> ]I also need a Virtual Orchestra, a Choir and a Synth, all of them lightweight and not very expensive because my laptop has to handle them

You could try VSCO 2 the free Chamber Orchestra.

Check out bigcat instruments where he hosts a variety of free Kontakt instruments.

There is my free Virtual Playing Orchestra

I haven't used it but Amadeus Symphonic Orchestra for $149, looks interesting to me and received a lot of attention when it came out a little over a year ago. It seems to meet your criteria for size and cost.

Hi Paul!
Thank you, I just downloaded your library and I am testing it with Sforzando.
The Amadeus Symphonic Orchestra seems very good value How is it compared to VSCO 2, GPO 5 or MP 2 CE? AFAIK Amadeus is the only one that includes a choir but that is not essential for me cause I really like the Lite/Light choirs from Soundiron.

(03-05-2020, 01:05 PM)payoak Wrote: [ -> ]The Amadeus Symphonic Orchestra seems very good value How is it compared to VSCO 2, GPO 5 or MP 2 CE?

I don't know. I've only ever used 2 orchestral sample libraries, Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra and my own Virtual Playing Orchestra, though, by using my own orchestra, I'm also using pieces of a variety of other free sample libraries including Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra and VSCO2. My understanding of Amadeus Orchestra is that they did the same as I did, in that they built their library from multiple other sources, except those sources were professional paid libraries instead of free libraries and free samples.

Hi Paul! I am trying to use your library with TX16Wx sampler (free version) and It is not loading the SFZ files properly cause it is adding "_________" at the end of every Wav file and I have to search for them manually.
Did you test the library with this plugin? With Sforzando is loading great.
Thank you!

I haven't tried loading sfz files into TX16Wx sampler because that seems to be asking for trouble. According to the TX16Wx manual, there is only limited sfz support so I wouldn't expect the instruments to work properly anyway.

A couple of other good libraries to try out:

Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra
Versilian Community Sample Library

The latter isn't exactly an orchestral library, but it has quite a large variety of solo instruments.