EastWest purchase?

[Fluffbot]

I was thinking of purchasing EastWest Symphonic Orchestra Gold since I just can't stand the factory Kontakt Library for lots of instruments, but I was reading a toooon of reviews that said while the sample quality is good, the software is outdated, a pain in the ass to update, and the customer service is terrible. These reviewers did, however, seem to not understand how/why iLoks are required, so who knows if they're just incompetent or not.

Does anyone on here have any experience with any EastWest stuff? I trust people on here far more than online retailer review sections. I was interested in the choirs too but after reading all this horrible stuff I'm thinking twice.


EDIT: I read some more that said they got it to work by following the instructions and they weren't as hard as other reviewers made it out to be. That being understood, I still value everyone's input!

As a side note: I'm a huge fan of Wintersun's new style of massive orchestrations and Mr. Townsend's wall of sound, and I'm pretty sure Jari said he used EastWest Symphonic Choir and word builder.

 

[azistenostora]

You can't compare the free Kontakt factory library with to the East West gold. Get the NI symphonic stuff, some of the most realistic sounding stuff out there and you definitely won't run into software issues with that.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

Don't have it myself but I have heard that the "Play" engine likes to crash frequently (dropout) and users wish they would have stuck with the NI engine, then again some have said it wasn't a problem.

 

[Old Man Doom]

I too have heard negative things about the Play engine. Check out CineSamples: great sounds, good pricing, and Kontakt integration. I'll be getting the CineSymphony Lite library soon in order to start learning more about midi orchestration.

http://cinesamples.com/products

 

[MindsinK]

I've got a ton of EastWest libraries (Symphonic included). I like Play better than a lot of the Kontakt based libraries out there. Occasionally my system will bog down when I run 6-7 instances, but those are the only issues I've encountered with Play. Sound quality is excellent, but it's tough to get dry sounds. I still prefer Vienna, but I haven't heard anything that touches EastWest or Vienna for sound quality...

As far as Choirs... I find Wordbuilder tedious to use (and I am a patient man...)

 

[Fluffbot]

I was under the impression that the way to go about it is to load the EastWest Symphonic library .nki or .nks files into Kontakt or another sampler, no? I have the full version of Kontakt (all my plugins are legit) and downloaded an EW library just to see if it would load as a library in Kontakt. It does but I obviously don't have it registered so I couldn't test its stability. Trying to read up on Play right now.

And I wasn't comparing the factory Kontakt libraries to anything by the way Just saying I am sick of having to deal with the horrid sounds that come out of it.

 

[Lasse Lammert]

The software is pretty terrible, the GUI/navigation convoluted, the update process confusing.
the Customerservice is mediocre at best.

But the samples sound great, I own and use pianos and sym orch Gold and Silver and like them a lot.
I'm willing to deal with the shittiness their PLAY software is to get the sounds.

have a look at their page, it's a good representation of the software (not even the web address is what you'd expect it to be, then navigating and finding stuff is a challenge...if the haven't updated it in the last year that is)

 

[GeertSamuel]

Sample wise EWQL is amazing. Software wise...don't get me started, but I deal with that shit, just because of the samples.

I've got Symphony Orchestra and Choirs. Choirs word builder is cool tho!...Really cool.

 

[Cognition]

I have Symphonic Orchestra Gold Plus, Symphonic Choirs, Stormdrum 2 and Monsters of Rock or whatever it is called.

Great sounds, but the Play software demands way more of my computer resources than Kontakt libraries. I don't know if that is because the East West libraries are just so huge, or if it is play itself not being optimised as well as Kontakt, probably it is both.

I recommend East West for the sound, but also recommend that you have a powerful computer to be able to run their software. I wish they were still using Kontakt instead of their own Play software.

For what it's worth, in my collection East West has the best sounds, so I chose to deal with the high resource demand when I need sounds that shine. But I haven't tried out all the competition.

 

[Fluffbot]

Oh ok, so you're saying the updates remove its ability to be loaded into the Kontakt player and instead uses its own "Play" software? I think I'm going to buy it, I suppose I'll just deal with the shitty update/software. I heard some samples and they blew my mind.

Thanks guys!

 

[Cognition]

Oh ok, so you're saying the updates remove its ability to be loaded into the Kontakt player and instead uses its own "Play" software? I think I'm going to buy it, I suppose I'll just deal with the shitty update/software. I heard some samples and they blew my mind.

Thanks guys!

East West was using Kontakt in the beginning, but then about 5-10 years ago, they stopped using Kontakt and instead started shipping their libraries with their own software, which is called Play, and their libraries don't support Kontakt any more.

Good luck!

 

[Fluffbot]

Bah! That's stupid. Thanks! I'm sure I'll be happy as long as the quality of sound is as good as I've heard so far!