Babylon waves, good or not so good?

[darrell]

Hi all,

I've seen some posts about Babylonwaves, but most address some topic other than if it is a good purchase or not.

Any recommendations or disses?

Thanks,
Darrell A.

[HCMarkus]

If you use more than a few key switching (of articulations) libraries, it is very cool. Works well with DP. Great for the composer putting together orchestral mock ups.

If you just use a couple of libraries and don't need more than a single VI instance to cover your required articulations, you can just set up yourself in DP using articulation management.

[Michael Canavan]

Markus is dead on here. I had something like 25 libraries that it covers so it was worth it at under $80. I try to remember with tasks like this to give myself a wage, something like $50 an hour, if it's less than it would cost for me to do it myself at a decent wage then I buy it.

[cuttime]

Just a note to add: Audio Modeling claims that their expression maps are coming to Cubase, which I assume can be imported into DP. I initially tried to create some DP AM string maps and didn’t have a lot of luck. Remains to be seen.

[darrell]

Thanks guys! Really helpful!

[Rubens]

Not good with VSL libraries (especially with strings) and unneeded, as DP recognizes Synchron player vst3 version loading all the articulations.
With libraries with not so many shorts, legato variations, and so on, can be useful although despite I have it I still prefer to use the ones I have myself created.

[darrell]

[dewdman42]

I can't speak for whether the price is worth it to you or not, but what I can talk about is what it is exactly. It is a set of articulation manager presets. You can build these presets yourself, but it could be time consuming if you have a lot of libraries. If you're only using a few libraries, then it probably won't take you that long to create these presets yourself.

Also, this product has organized all of these presets in a consistent way so that, for example, the same input keyswitche is always used for staccato or whatever. Now that being said its somehow lowest common denominator. A more advanced library with many relevant articulations will simply not be able to fit into that model. But a large number of libraries can certainly function sometimes fully or at least partially within that model where, for example, there is one key switch to call up staccato notes and no need to specify alternatives, etc.. The advantage of this is that you can pull up all your libraries and always use the same input remote key switches no matter which library you're using.

In the case of DP, they also named the articulations in a consistent manner so that if you were decide to change a track from say Spitfire oboe to VSL clarinet, the articulations would still work because of the consistent naming.

In short they did a very very good job of thinking through these presets and setting them all up in a consistent way to work with numerous libraries.

I bought it on sale, and I think it was worth it for me, though sometimes I have gone on to extend or change them to fit my own purposes for some libraries, I still appreciate using the basic consistent input remotes and naming...and provides a good platform to start from. That being said, their upgrade fee after the first year or two is kind of high. It includes all new libraries that have been added since the last version, but in my case it would literally cost $60 to get the only-one new library that I actually have, which for me is not worth it, I will just create my own on that library using the same framework as the others, which will be a little time consuming, so then the question is whether its worth $60 to avoid that effort...which I'm still on the fence about.

[Gone To Lunch]

I like it.

An unexptected advantage is that it made it very easy for me to experiment with articulations I was less familiar with, so for me it is a fascinating learning tool also.