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Hi guys.... I work with Pro Tools 10 and Mach Five 3, i have buy Mach Five because i have a very old library Akay and Emulator that i love..... Since i need to expand my library, mainly with Symphonic and Ethnic sounds, i'm not sure about the choice. I could buy Motu Synphonic and Ethnic using Mach Five as player, or less or more at the same price i could buy Komplete 9 from Native Instruments that includes a lot of instruments, but in this case i've to use two different players.... Anyone has any suggestion? Consider that i work mainly on broadcast (documentary) and less frequently on pop/rock music, and also that i'm a musician composer that don't like to spend hours on technological issues Thanks in advance for help...

Not much help but MOTU are working on Symphonic Instrument 2 so if you go that route make sure to contact MOTU first to see if you'll get an update to SI2 when it comes out.
I'm pretty sure SI2 will be better than what comes with Kontakt as standard.
But Komplete 9 comes with a lot of stuff... (I'm not a fan of NI's sound, look and feel though).

I'd say go with whichever is cheaper (keeping in mind periodic discounts and sales).

Komplete is huge but does come with Kontakt, which is temporarily the de facto standard for sample libraries (just as Gigasampler was for many years). Many vendors are moving away from Kontakt due to limitations they don't expect NI to address, and I agree with them about the priorities of NI and their overall focus, but do like many of their products (though not the GUI's). But Komplete is overkill for most, and even Kontakt isn't a necessity for everyone.

Of the newer libraries coming out, I am finding that most of the better ones are NOT Kontakt-based. They either use "Best Service Engine" (formerly "Yellow Tools"), proprietary frameworks (VSL, SWARM for SampleModeling, etc.), or UVI (such as MachFive, Ethno, Symphonic Instrument).

Ethno is not my most-used ethnic library but the new version is quite good. It is so much better than Version 1 that I expect a similar leap with Symphonic Instrument when Version 2 finally comes out. MSI also has more coverage of historic instruments than others; though finally some vendors are adding Kontakt libraries to cover that stuff at least a bit.

I personally find the MOTU products easier to work with than the ones from NI. Also, MOTU folk are real musicians (unlike the tweakers at NI) and understand the needs of musicians better than most vendors. They don't do as many major update cycles as others, so after a few years their VI line can fall behind a bit, but then when the updates come, it is a great leap forward. Also, running inside DP using MAS vs. Audio Units, you get multiple MIDI ports and multi-timbrality as on a hardware synth/ROMpler.

mhschmieder wrote:I'd say go with whichever is cheaper (keeping in mind periodic discounts and sales).

In that vein, listen to the samples from Garritan World Instruments. You may or may not like the sound compared to the MOTU library, but it has more variety, particularly for traditional Chinese instruments. And it's a lot cheaper.

Subject headers corrected to change "Ethnic" to "Ethno."

Garritan is on sale at the moment. $300 for the bundle at Hello Music, and $69 each for the libraries. I lost the info though as I can't stand their libraries and deleted the email. Terribly recorded, inconsistent, uneven, and horribly played (so even better programming won't help), not to mention the ARIA engine being significantly inferior and troublesome (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it doesn't seem to get many updates).

Garritan is, however, a cheap way to get a whole lot of instruments quickly, or to flesh out better quality libraries with rare instruments. Fortunately there's enough specialty libraries out there now that I hesitated just long enough not to feel the need to buy any Garritan libraries. And Garritan himself is a fine person; I've met him several times. I can't fault him for the quality, given the price. He's meeting different needs and a different market: students.