MOTUnation.com

Anyone compare the two, aside from price? Will the couple hundred extra for RA be worth it?

Thanks.

They're really two different animals, with only a small amount of overlap. If you do a forum search from up to a year ago, you'll find a comparison thread that lists the instruments and features of both.

I think the conclusion was that Ethno is a bit stronger for percussion and RA is somewhat stronger for melodic instruments, with Ethno also having more support for loops and grooves. This is in quantitative terms only (counting the number of instruments and variations in each category).

I cannot afford RA at this time, and Ethno has more than earned back its cost. It does not have the fiddliness of Symphonic (which has strengths that have kept me from selling it... YET).

Recently I retracked a banjo part that sounded dreadful using every other source that I had (whether DX7 clone, Kurzweil, or other). The selection of banjos in Ethno is a bit of a surprise, in spite of the instrument's African origin, and is very welcome as it is generally overlooked.

good info...thanks for the reply.

You're welcome. There were also a couple of new world libraries at NAMM, but I was so focused on work-related contacts that I only had two hours yesterday to race through the exhibits for personal stuff. If I re-find the information I will try to remember to post here. Neither product showed up on harmony-central or sonicstate.com, so it may be awhile before they show up in the trades or even the forums.

Check out Project SAM's True Strike library (especially volume II, which focuses on world percussion, but note that volume I includes latin percussion). I am blown away by the demos and hope to buy the package deal soon (along with their brass libraries, so I may hold out until I can afford the full package).

It wouldn't really be a replacement for Ethno, as it is percussion-only. I'm actually finding in real-world usage that Ethno's melodic instruments (and chromatic percussion) are easier to work with than stuff like congas, where I have to constantly try different MIDI note mappings to get the best response on pre-existing tracks. I wish they had fully documented the mapping of the articulations to the limited key range of each instrument.

I listened to the demos of "RA" at the East West website tonight and thought they were all dreadful! Too "Hollywood" and over-produced. I can't trust that the raw samples arden't dripping with unwanted reverb and "ambience". I have now scratched this product off of my long-term "buy" list, alongside the "Ethno World" and other products from east West whose demos were equally unimpressive to my ears.

I love Ethno, and am using it more and more. I forced myself to re-evaluate it and other options as I have decided to sell MOTU Symphonic Instrument due to my overall disastisfaction with its core sample set (and I have now found alternatives for the "extra" voices like harpsichord). I figured the production standards must have been the same on both products, so how could I have had such varied experiences between them?

Tonight, I just got done comparing some renderings of latin percussion tracks using Ethno vs. ones using Battery 3. I had to do a lot of MIDI re-mapping, and did take the time to find the best balance and best choices (including note mappings) for both products, but concluded (with one caveat, which I will put in a separate post) that Ethno has more natural dynamics and timbre and blends better with other instruments in the mix.

I truly feel that MOTU Ethno is one of the biggest bargains in the industry right now. I still feel that MSI is properly priced for what it is as well, but everyone knows that strings are one of the hardest thing to reproduce accurately with ANY technology (whether sampling or physical modeling), so it is no surprise that a low-end ethnic product reaches higher standards in its overall rendition.

Just as an update, RA has been a bit of a disappointment for me.

Like Ethno, it has strengths and weaknesses. The Big Problem is that the instruments I most wanted it for (e.g. hurdy-gurdy) are its weaknesses.

I am now focusing on individual specialised libraries, such as the excellent Sitar Nation from Impact Soundworks (a spinoff of SWAR), that just came out in Kontakt format.

I did eventually sell Ethno, as I was using it primarily for percussion and found it too indirect a way of working with those instruments once I bought into BFD and its Percussion expansion pack.

But please note that it was BFD that obsoletised MOTU Ethno for me; not Quantum Leap RA!

There ARE a few very good instruments in RA, but they tend to be ones that are relatively easy to find. The truly rare instruments were an afterthought.

I'm now looking at Version 4 of Ethno World from Best Services, as it seems to cover a LOT of rare instruments that are unavailable elsewhere; including many of the ones that E-Mu has frustrated us with for years by being a Windows-only solution.

I still maintain that MOTU Ethno is an excellent entry point for world instruments, and great value (both RA and Ethno World are overpriced).

For individual instruments, I'm finding precisionsound to be an excellent source, and they also cover some hard-to-find stuff like Swedish Keyharp.

Certainly if MOTU issues an updated version of Ethno that is greatly enhanced with additional instruments, I might reconsider it. But not for percussion. I need percussion to be well-documented (especially articulation key-mappings), as time is money. I think a more complete manual would go a long way towards improving MOTU Ethno. For hints on how to do a good job of this, look at Vienna Instruments manuals.

I have both and RA seems far superior ... there are much more instruments and drums .... but i do use both equally and ethno is still great!

I may go ahead and do the PLAY upgrade of RA after all, but it's pricey for just a small handful of usable instruments.

Remember, my standards are VERY high for this stuff as I use world instruments in a much more exposed way than people using them to colour soundtrack work or in the background.

Thus, my reference points are no longer other world libraries, but single instrument libraries from specialty vendors.

I have heard negative feedback about Ethno World 4 though, from those who have all three. And I doubt garritan's forthcoming world library will have good sampling quality (or at least consistent quality), based on other Garritan products.

There are probably at most a half dozen instruments in RA that I can't find elsewhere in more detailed form. None of them were in MOTU Ethno, but the latter has quite a few instruments that aren't covered elsewhere. I have no regrets though.

As I said, I still recommend MOTU Ethno to others, as for most people it will be their first taste and will help them better determine how seriously they want to invest in world instrument libraries. It's also much drier than most of the competition.

I've been using the PLAY update to RA the past few days, and it represents a 400% improvement over the Kompakt version. Everything is smoother, more detailed, more fluid, and organic. They really put a lot of work into the scripting -- especially for round robin, and legato.