REQUEST : List of cheap/inexpensive sample libraries

[bigcat1969]

I'm glad we had this conversation. now I want to dig a bit and see if I was hasty with my initial opinion. I remember being very excited about getting the orchestra, trying out some instruments and being heavily let down. I will probably also mess about with making some Kontakt shells to reconfigure the samples to be more user or at least bigcat friendly.

It has the Advanced Orchestra, Classical Choir, Orchestral Colours, Smart Violins, Total Piano, X bonus Trax, X Elements, String Essentials and String Tools. They total 16.9 gigs of files, so probably that is the 26 gigs compressed.

Under Advanced Orchestra are Strings, Brass, Woodwinds, Percussion, Harp, Combinations, Single Instruments and Notation Directories. Classical Choir has directories for Choir Cluster, Choir Morph, Choir Syllables, Classical Choir. Orchestral Colours has Basic Orchestral Sounds, Hit and Finales, Moods and Timbers and Runs and Sequenzes Directories. Smart Violins has Run Tempo Directories labeled 100, 120 and 140 also SV Violins Multisamples. Total Piano has a bunch of piano nkis. X Bonus Trax has Instruments, Nature FX, Orchestral Moods and Synth Ambience Directories. X Elements has a lots of pads.

String Essentials has Ambient, Dry, Light and Optimal. These then have nkis for violins, viola, celli and basses I think in sections and also Advanced Legato and Special Patches directories. String Tools has Chords, Excerpts and Split Excerpts directories.

Brief overview there if you want to know more let me know.

[Nayrb]

Greetings folks! First post here...

This talk of the old Siedlaczek libraries is interesting. I have an old Pro-Samples (or something) disk I bought ten years ago that contained some of the Advanced Orchestra stuff that I got some good use out of, particularly in the percussion and harp departments. But once I started using Kontakt it fell by the wayside. I think I'll bust it out again!

For affordable individual section libraries I've heard good things about the old Westgate Studios stuff. I've been eyeballing the various woodwinds myself. Does anyone have any experience with those? I guess the downside is that it's $50 USD per instrument. Ultimately it ends up being almost the same cost as a newer library if you want them all. Then again, if you only want a few...

As for my two cents on the topic of cheaper libraries, I've been using Soundiron's Olympus Elements Player Edition and it's pretty great for the price. It retails at something like $150 USD but they regularly have sales and I managed to grab it for about $80. It's not a full orchestra but it provides a nice solution if you need bombastic choirs.

[StevenT2112]

I've been playing around with Notion 5 the last few months and that comes with a standard set of orchestral samples. From what I know they were sampled from the London Symphony Orchestra. You can also buy additional sounds from the Presonus website if you need some section sounds, additional articulations, or uncommon instruments. They sound pretty good in my opinion. They have a lot of articulations and multiple velocity layers. Not much in the way of round-robin samples or true legato but if that's not something you would normally use, then it's not that big of a deal. Only bad thing I have to say about it though is that the sounds can only be used with Notion 5. So you won't be able to load them up in another DAW. The software itself is pretty good. It's pretty easy to understand doesn't take long to learn how to use it... at least that was the case for me. The playback can be a little wonky sometimes. Especially when it comes to crecendos and other volume changes. But that seems to be the case with a lot of notation programs. It has VST support too so you can use other libraries instead of (or along with) the LSO samples.

Notion 5 software - 150 bucks
https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion-5

And here are the expansion sets. You can buy the complete bundle for 300, smaller specific bundles, or individual instruments for 15 bucks each.
https://shop.presonus.com/products/softw...on-bundles

[kmlandre]

(06-22-2016, 04:42 AM)StevenT2112 Wrote: The playback can be a little wonky sometimes. Especially when it comes to crecendos and other volume changes...

I've never actually found that to be the case, so long as you do your crescendos underneath the staff (or in between staves in the case of double-staff instruments) and be absolutely certain your crescendos/decrescendos are attached to the note on the staff you intended...

Kurt

[Mattias Westlund]

Looking through the libs I have and doing a bit of googling I realize that many of them aren't available anymore, so I don't know how useful my input might be in this matter. Advanced Orchestra doesn't exist as a separate entity, only as a part of the Complete Orchestral Collection discusssed above, and I have no experience with the rest of it. I don't even have the full set of AO discs! The ProSessions (stripped-down and M-Audio-branded versions of the Sonivox libraries) discs doesn't appear to be available either. The Roland libs are long gone from the market, though Roland Cloud gives me hope, even though I'm not a fan of subscription services. EWQL Silver is still around of course, but I don't use it much as I prefer working with samplers and not black box solutions like the Play engine.

Aside from that, Miroslav (V1) is crap, the Prosonus libs are overpriced for what they are, as are the Digital Sound Factory samples, and my only firsthand experience with Garritan is the Pocket Orchestra lib that came with Dimension LE (paid $9 for it, and for the price I guess it's not bad )

[Mattias Westlund]

DSF has some cheaper stuff in sf2 format here though. Doesn't exactly cover all bases but there's some useful stuff in there if you just want more samples to play with without breaking the bank. Sf2 can easily be converted to sfz format with sfzed.

[StevenT2112]

(06-22-2016, 07:47 AM)kmlandre Wrote:

(06-22-2016, 04:42 AM)StevenT2112 Wrote: The playback can be a little wonky sometimes. Especially when it comes to crecendos and other volume changes...

I've never actually found that to be the case, so long as you do your crescendos underneath the staff (or in between staves in the case of double-staff instruments) and be absolutely certain your crescendos/decrescendos are attached to the note on the staff you intended...

Kurt

That's usually how I do dynamics and crescendo/decrescendo articulations. But I still have issues with the volume changes during playback. Like sudden jumps in volume during or right after the crescendo/decrescendo. Or they just don't have any effect at all. I don't know maybe I'm still messing up somewhere. Could be some of the instruments I'm using too.

---

(06-22-2016, 05:03 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Looking through the libs I have and doing a bit of googling I realize that many of them aren't available anymore, so I don't know how useful my input might be in this matter. Advanced Orchestra doesn't exist as a separate entity, only as a part of the Complete Orchestral Collection discusssed above, and I have no experience with the rest of it. I don't even have the full set of AO discs! The ProSessions (stripped-down and M-Audio-branded versions of the Sonivox libraries) discs doesn't appear to be available either. The Roland libs are long gone from the market, though Roland Cloud gives me hope, even though I'm not a fan of subscription services. EWQL Silver is still around of course, but I don't use it much as I prefer working with samplers and not black box solutions like the Play engine.

Aside from that, Miroslav (V1) is crap, the Prosonus libs are overpriced for what they are, as are the Digital Sound Factory samples, and my only firsthand experience with Garritan is the Pocket Orchestra lib that came with Dimension LE (paid $9 for it, and for the price I guess it's not bad )

"...the Prosonus libs are overpriced for what they are..."

Okay, so it's not just me then. I already own the strings, brass, and woodwinds. And judging by what I already have, they are indeed overpriced for what you get. Especially when it comes to the brass and woodwinds.

[Mattias Westlund]

(06-22-2016, 05:40 PM)StevenT2112 Wrote: Okay, so it's not just me then. I already own the strings, brass, and woodwinds. And judging by what I already have, they are indeed overpriced for what you get. Especially when it comes to the brass and woodwinds.

To be clear I was talking about these libraries, not anything from PreSonus. Just so there's no confusion.

[StevenT2112]

(06-23-2016, 07:43 AM)Mattias Westlund Wrote:

(06-22-2016, 05:40 PM)StevenT2112 Wrote: Okay, so it's not just me then. I already own the strings, brass, and woodwinds. And judging by what I already have, they are indeed overpriced for what you get. Especially when it comes to the brass and woodwinds.

To be clear I was talking about these libraries, not anything from PreSonus. Just so there's no confusion.

Don't worry. I knew which ones you were talking about

[Mattias Westlund]

(06-23-2016, 07:55 AM)StevenT2112 Wrote: Don't worry. I knew which ones you were talking about

Good. Just thought I'd mention it as you were discussing Notion 5 just a few posts earlier

Anyway, I have just the Prosonus Strings and while I have found the occasional use for some of it, $49 is a bit much. I mean, if you're going to get the whole Prosonus orchestra you'll be paying the same amount you would for EWQLSO Silver. And Prosonus is nowhere near that kind of quality.