Overpriced Spitfire products

[Gamma-UT]

The arguments defending this is simply coping and trying to justify having spent a lot of money on things that are actually pretty terrible.

Dude, I don't even own Albion One or any of the other Albions. Nor indeed the Symphobias, so I'm hardly in the position where I need to "cope". Nice try. Cigar is not in the post.

Also, if you're going to play semantics, here's the actual claim made by Spitfire (and not the one you've paraphrased): "Our most renowned orchestral sample library, Albion One is everything you need to make film music in one box."

I reiterate my point: it is not everything you need to make all film music.

But, people have demonstrated it is entirely possible to score a film with it. Not Star Wars but there's a heap of films that use those techniques - which I suspect is the source of your animus. You may also wish to consider that a Moog Modular and a Roland System 100 with a bunch of hardware sequencers is everything you need if you're Tangerine Dream.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

Also, if you're going to play semantics, here's the actual claim made by Spitfire (and not the one you've paraphrased): "Our most renowned orchestral sample library, Albion One is everything you need to make film music in one box."

I reiterate my point: it is not everything you need to make all film music.

"everything you need to make film music"

Yet, no demos of it even seem to exist showcasing a melody with the phrasing of "pop goes the weasle" nevermind anything reminiscent of the most quintessential examples in history of what most know as "film music". Not seeing where the "everything you need" is.

Now, let us proceed to once again rationalize how this isn't actually a failure of this expensive product by moving the goalposts. "Well, just because it says its everything you need to make film music doesn't mean they said it could do all film music!"

[Meffy]

This just in: marketers occasionally exaggerate. Video at eleven.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

Hey, they have a new demo of BBC Orchestra! Try to stay awake through it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=det1cDzTcRc

[koolkeys]

Please don't make yourself look bad by suggesting that HZ Strings can't get better string results than those. It's a whole different beast entirely. I own two of the three (I don't have Inspire), and The Orchestra, while a very fun and cool instrument capable of great things, just simply doesn't pass as a realistic orchestra when compared to most larger libraries. It's made for easy writing, but lacks a boatload of details that prevent it from doing more dynamic orchestral writing.

And as stated, NotePerformer 3 is excellent, but it's not a library like the others being discussed. It's a playback tool with sounds designed to interpret musical notation INSIDE one of the three big notation editors. I really wish they WOULD release it as a "library" or plugin to use in a DAW (which they kind of did with WIVI years ago, which NP3 is based on, but it lacked half the orchestra). But at the moment, it's not a replacement for orchestral libraries unless you ONLY use your notation editor to create fully-finished scores. And most people don't do that.

You have made yourself look bad by suggesting that realistic "sound" trumps authentic-sounding compositions. Sure, a bunch of string pads and slow legato lines with even Orchestral Essentials might "sound" more "realistic" than something else playing it back, but it will put your musicians to sleep if it ever gets recorded; make me a mockup of "Flight To Neverland" with Orchestral Essentials or Albion and see how fast the tables turn.

I never said realistic sound trumps authentic-sounding compositions. There is a lot of variation in what you can do with particular libraries, and in the right hands, they can all "sound" good as well as authentic. They can also sound bad. But I never said that either aspect is more important.

What I did say is that the full libraries are far more capable than many of the "sound in a box" libraries. It doesn't mean they have a better "sound" or that they will automatically sound more authentic. That comes down to the user. You do need to know how to compose the type of music you're wanting to write, and understand voice leading, harmony, player groupings, the physical limitations of "real" instrument players, and much more.

Libraries like "The Orchestra" don't actually solve any of those things. They are there to give a believable composition to the average listener, but they can't accomplish the intricacies of the larger libraries. They don't offer the range of articulations, true legato, etc. of the larger libraries. The Orchestra sounds great until you need more than just basic articulations, or you need to create more intricate counterpoint, or create a rhythm in a time-signature it doesn't support, or you need to assign proper divisi harmonoy across a string section, or any other number of cases.

Yet, in some cases, those simple libraries are absolutely sufficient. But on topic for this thread, that doesn't make the more expensive ones overpriced. If you REALLY think you can get the same results with The Orchestra that you can get with the Spitfire orchestral libraries, or VSL, or whomever, you really and truly don't understand what you are talking about.

(Again though, I love The Orchestra, it's brilliant, but spare me the laugh of assuming it can match larger libraries)

In certain business situations, that may be true that "realistic sound" is most important. But for the craft, and music industry as a whole, it certainly does not.

That's a pretty broad assumption. Realistic sound is first of all at least a little objective, and assuming that the industry as a whole doesn't care about it is a bit presumptive. There is no "right" or "wrong" on this. Every project is different.

Yes, the strings in Albion or the legato in CineBrass sound better than something like NotePerformer. But if a mockup that sounds as good and as consistent as the Star Wars theme does in NotePerformer 3 has been made with Albion or whatever, I have yet to find one. At a certain point, you've to start asking why that is.

When they're equally-priced, there's just no sensible reason to suggest Cinesamples over The Cinematic Studio Series, or Albion One over The Orchestra.

The Cinematic Studio Series is great, but costs as much as the others (recognizing, of course, that it's not a full orchestra yet).

You keep mentioning Note Performer, but what you don't realize is how much work went into making it sound that way, and understanding that most people don't create final compositions in notation software. I own NP3, and I'm a fan. Zero complaints about it from me. But it does NOTHING unless you know how to properly write for orchestra, and it's not designed to be used like sample libraries in a DAW. It's just not the same kind of thing.

And Albion was never designed to handle film scores like Star Wars, which was written and orchestrated to even stretch the limits of the real instruments being used in it. Albion is designed as a quick-results library. It helps you to not have to come up with every voicing or instrument combination, and can absolutely create music for film. Can it do Star Wars properly? No, not really (though you can get closer than you think, as Albion is pretty deep).

At the end of the day, and this is where I leave you, you have to ask yourself what kind of composer you want to be. One who limits themselves to whatever some recording snippets played by a machine can do so that you won't be "found out" for using said samples. OR, you can elevate your craft by writing as if you were for real musicians, as the masters of the past, whom we owe everything to, did.

I don't have to choose anything. I write for the project, as most working composers do. They don't get bogged down in this silly semantics game, or in caring whether a random guy on KVR thinks they are creating music properly, or with the right libraries.

It's extremely clear that you don't actually understand the differences between the choices you've discussed concerning libraries. I'm not even sure why I've wasted so much time bothering, because it was obvious from the beginning that you didn't know what these libraries are really capable of, and haven't had needs that match up with what they can do. And that's ok. You're not wrong in how you compose, or which libraries you choose.

You obviously feel like you've got something up on the countless composers who disagree with you, and you obviously don't really have needs that require you to know the difference between an Albion or a BBC orchestra or Note Performer 3. Again, that's ok. But to continue to suggest the insanity of things being overpriced, and instead of looking deeper you choose the patronizing route, is just silly.

Brent

[AngelCityOutlaw]

[Gamma-UT]

Powerful argument. Solid rebuttal.

Have you considered “NO U”? That’s the retort of champions.

[Mr Arkadin]

I think we're about to reach peak-"yo momma".

[AngelCityOutlaw]

Powerful argument. Solid rebuttal.

Have you considered “NO U”? That’s the retort of champions.

I've said all that needed to be said regarding value-for-money. The best that you guys could counter with was moving the goalposts to variations of "but not all" or "muh context" in an effort to justify expensive tools that fail on some of the most basic expectations one would have from a virtual instrument while equally-priced, or considerably-cheaper ones succeed.

Again, enjoy your $500 - 1000 string ostinanti and brahms. If you want to waste money, that's your problem.

[Gamma-UT]

C O P E

EDIT: It really is very curious as to why someone gets bent out of shape over the pricing of a class of products that they don't want. If you don't want something, there is no price at which it makes sense to buy it.

[dandezebra]

I'm super pissed about the price of yachts. Like I need a yacht to go bass fishing. Everyone that owns a yacht wasted money and is an assneck. Bass fishing is the only reason to own any watercraft.

If you want to waste money, that's your problem.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

I'm super pissed about the price of yachts. Like I need a yacht to go bass fishing. Everyone that owns a yacht wasted money and is an assneck. Bass fishing is the only reason to own any watercraft.

If the yacht is supposed to be these Spitfire or whatever other high-price, low-utility products we've talked about in this thread, then to say you've missed the point is an understatement.

[epiphaneia]

There´s simply a huge number of users for whom price is not an issue.

I understand that saving up hard-earned day job-money for a library, only to be disappointed by rubbish like Kepler (Spitfire´s worst so far, imho) must be quite annoying, and I understand the desire to vent and warn...

... but "Go ahead and waste $500 on useless orchestral one-note-chords, haha!" misses by a huge margin: I reckon that the larger part of Spitfire´s target group doesn´t research more than the 1-2 brief video introductions on the product websites before ordering any of their new libraries, and just deletes them when worse than anticipated.

It´s all business expenses anyway, so why waste precious billable hours searching tutorial videos on youtube or venting in comments sections? No point in wasting time with bad tools, no point in wasting time crying over spilled milk.

My dear lady wanted a pair of $1.200 Jimmy Choo shoes for christmas, and she got them. Inevitably, one of her girlfriends told her (with just a sprinkle of barely concealed jealousy) that it´s crazy to spend that amount of money on the brand name alone, and her shoes from the so-and-so store for $150 looked quite similar. Now have I "wasted" the price difference of $1.050? Possibly, but who cares?

[tehlord]

Hands up who actually uses these products professionally here? You know, those guys/gals who pump out 6-8 minutes of music to picture a day. Which is where you really need to be.

Hands up if you know how much money it costs to record real musicians in a high quality environment with high quality gear. Not a TR909 through some outboard, I mean recording 20 people, each holding a £20k instrument, often for days/weeks on end.

I see less hands up than responses. Weird.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

Hands up who actually uses these products professionally here?

Hand up. Also I personally know, have studied and worked with professional film composers. Most of them do an average of 2-3 minutes per day.

Consider that Howard Shore was doing like 7 a day, but that was for LOTR.

Hands up if you know how much money it costs to record real musicians in a high quality environment with high quality gear.

Hand up.

Can I ask where you're going with this?