dewdman42 wrote:At one time Vienna was the best. It may not be now, but also keep in mind that it was designed in a different way, more to be like the raw instruments with all the articulations and ability to compose anything, with nuance, etc.. Back in the day, East West always had a bit more of that big hollywood blockbuster in your face sound, but vienna was more subtle. Now there are numerous libraries out there, including this one, which are impressive to say the least, but they do take things from a different approach, which is to go for those big, gritty, dramatic sounds. Nothing wrong with that, its just a different approach. Vienna still has a place.
Oh, it's great with its own interface. It's just hard to control in a 3rd party interface like Kontakt. With its own interface it's pretty easy to control how it moves through its velocity layers for expression; that's very hard to do in Kontakt (as far as I could tell). I could make other libraries, like Garritan or Miroslav, respond musically to simple Breath Control or Expression Control, but Vienna just wouldn't seem to move right. Put it in its own interface, adjust the parameters, and suddenly you have something that feels like real fiddles and flutes. Well... to a point. I actually still prefer Wallander Instruments for woodwinds and brass, even though it's about 9 years old now (and quite a few years since an actual update). I just hope he keeps it current, working with new releases of OS X.
My favorite sample libraries are: Vienna for strings, Wallander for all winds except flute, Miroslav for flute, and Miroslav for quick mockups with no time for elaborate setup. I'm not being fair to Michael Patti here in his own thread, but I think it's clear from the video that his CineSymphony Lite is perfect for cinematic composition and mockups. I haven't tried it, but I'm sure I'd use it in as often as Miroslav if I had it. That sounds wrong; Miroslav had gotten a bad rep for a while, because it was old and often used in hardware samplers that didn't offer much control. But the Miroslav Philharmonik had brought it back to life. I'm sure CineSymphony Lite can do far better than that.
Shoosh