Just wanted everyone's opinions so far on what you've gotten to playtest. I'd like to see which ones are worth getting and playing. A best "All arounder" or if you could only use one on your harddrive which?

I'm not looking to add a terabyte of them lol. Really just want to get a good string. Brass. winds. maybe percussion.

 

The two symphonic studio vol1 essential (27GB) and vol2 extended (20GB) are the only ones I have grabbed so far. They are pretty good - full orchestra. On a lesser par with the Spitfire studio stuff but the VSL libs are smaller... The studio recordings are sans the big concert hall ambience that is printed on the regular sample recordings so you can add your own ambience (or not) with the VSL reverb device or any other verb device. Having the dry recordings over the ambient give more room to experiment without having to deal with big hall ambience.

 

honestly, if I had to have one library and couldn't have any other? likely the Duality Strings Professional bundle, it's both a symphonic string section and a chamber string section as they recorded 2 string sections for it so you can get both an intimate and a big sound, as well as having plenty of articulations, it sounds great

 

I feel like Big Bang Orchestra and Synchron Prime complete each other and can easily replace the Spitfire and Orchestral Tools stuff.

All this with a much lighter footprint on the SSD.

 

Truthfully, their synchron player has more features than most if not all of the other library providers for control, dynamics, phrasing, configuring to your own playing style, and touch, articulations and too much to list. I was skeptical at first, but after playing with it, there doesn't seem to be much if anything that is missing. So while it's not a library per se, it is what I found makes each shine as they intended. The massive pop-up menu on the bottom left + button in control, I am still wading through...

 

The studio volumes (1-4) are samples recorded almost 20 years ago, and they're still amazing. Special Edition 1 has been the only orchestral library I've consistently used for the past 6 years and while it doesn't sound super realistic it's definitely easy to use and sounds good enough for what I'm doing.