Product Reviews by KVR Members

I'll give this virtual instrument what may be it's final review as there are other products introduced in the last year which appear to eclipse this one. Or do they?

I bought this shortly after it was introduced and at the time I thought it was going to pretty much be 'it' for me as a virtual orchestra, after 5 frustrating years with a Giga setup and several expensive libraries.

I owned the original Roland library that this was derived from and I have to say that Roland's sound programmers did an excellent job of 'modernizing' the sound quality of those nice old samples. You've heard these samples many times before even if you don't recall as they were a staple of television scoring in the nineties. When I consider what I paid for the original set not to mention a sampler or two to play it....well I'll just say that all of that still makes it a bargin. It seems to be fairly easy on memory and CPU, too, and it has only crashed twice in three years. That might be something of a record!

I have recently reviewed this VI's main competition, The Garritan Personal Orchestra. In terms of sound quality and realism, to say nothing of control and expression, the GPO has left this VI in the dust. Just a year ago, this was definetly NOT the case and there was no real competition. So, is this thing a dinosaur which should be tossed out? NO! Believe it or not I still find use for this VI as some of it's sounds are still quite good and work well as augmentation to your new VIs. The user interface is really good and there is a surprising amount of control over modifiying the programs to your needs. The full sections strings are originally from Siedlaczak's "ORCHESTRA" and they have never sounded better. The "orchestral ensemble" brass section is nearly stunning and works great when you need that type of huge sound. The solo instruments are the weakest, namely solo strings and a few brass, but I still like the solo trumpets and the mute trombone is good The brass are mostly the best sounds here and a few of the string sections. The piano is slightly better than GM, but only slightly. The onboard reverb is a very good one and seems to have been tailored to work well with this sample set.

So the question is: Is this still worth buying? At the moment, no. At it's current price it really is something of a joke. Edirol should really lower the price to like $149. Then it would be a fabulous deal for student composers or owners of the other low-priced orchestral libraries to use as an augmentation, a purpose to which it seems to have been relegated to.

The main 'problem' I have with it is the really annoying copy-protection, which forces you to insert the CD when you load it up, like every THIRD time! I have made an image of the disc and keep it parked on my HD so I don't have to fuss with it, but legal owners should not have to suffer this.

So if Edirol reads this, re-release this still fine VI at $149 with easier copy protection!!!Read Review

I have been using the Garritan Personal Orchestra since it came out last year. In fact, I'm told I'm the first customer, so I have a lot of experience with this. Just let me say up front that I have been waiting most of my adult life for such a product to come along with as much control and sound quality for so little money. Really, its THAT good!
GPO requires that you put in the work to get the most realistic sounding performances of your music, but gee, its not THAT much work! You can be up and running in an hour and though some quibble about the brass being thin, you just apply some eq and reverb and it will sound VERY realistic indeed. My advice is to make heavy use of the excellent 'overlay' patches which use more aggresive samples which also make very good solo instruments by themselves.
Though I use SONAR for my sequencing, I have to use the VSTi version 'wrapped' by Cakewalk's own very good wrapping program. This is to eliminate a 'tempo change bug' problem NI has with ALL their players, including Kontakt. So just don't bother with DXi and you'll be fine.
The strings come from the very excellent Garritan Orchestral Strings collection, but with less sampling and articulations. Really though, for 90% of orchestral composing you won't miss them. But you get really good solo strings that have enough patches to make your own ensembles, and this points up a VERY important aspect of 'GPO' versus other libraries: you approach scoring with GPO just as you would for a real orchestra. You make up your chords and unisons with many solo instruments as a real orchestra is made up of many solo players in ensemble. This adds much subtle variety to unison lines as unlike 'pre-sampled' unisons in other libraries, the attacks and releases and other artifacts of performance aren't locked in and repeated identically for each note. This is something that should not be overlooked and is the personal philosophy of Gary Garritan regarding orchestral mock-ups and in my experience, it works!
There is less of a bombastic instant gratification with this library then others because there are not a myriad of articulations and sampled-in concert hall ambience. GPO does include a fine VST reverb you can use. I prefer to use some other excellent reverbs I have but that is nice because you can get a truly intimate sounding space with this library which has been difficult with those others offering 'built-in' ambience and release trails, etc.
My favorite sections is the woodwinds which I find so well done that often you can forget you are listening to a sampled orchestration. The demos on the Garritan website bear this out and were not 'juiced up' to mask defiencies in the samples. Really.
There are issues with Mac users and Logic, but this is appearing to affect many other sample developers as well.
The bottom line for me is sound quality and ease of use, one of which I got with my old Gigastudio setup but not the other. GPO makes orchestral music fun!Read Review