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I’ve held off because of reports that the EW Hollywood series is a power glutton, because of the number of mic positions (5). I’d need to buy another computer!
I wouldn’t waste your money. I bought these full price and haven’t used them because a) they are very biiiiiiig and slooooow (compare top LASS which sounds better and loads in an instant) and b) because, to me ears, they sound crap.
Talking HS Strings btw. Not the others.
I wouldn’t waste your money. I bought these full price and haven’t used them because a) they are very biiiiiiig and slooooow (compare top LASS which sounds better and loads in an instant) and b) because, to me ears, they sound crap.
I wouldn’t say that Hollywood strings sounds like “crap.” But I do think you are stuck with the “Hollywood” sound, which is fine if that’s what you’re after.
I have LASS full and LASS Sordinos. To my ear that is what a room full of live string players sounds like. It doesn’t have a baked-in sound, which makes it very flexible. You can get a big “Hollywood / Epic ” sound, if necessary. But, you can also achieve a far wider range of styles, which makes LASS more useful from my perspective.
I think HS and HB sound amazing, but the Play engine just destroys my mac and I actually deleted the diamond bundle off my system. Before that, I even tried using 6Gb/s SSDs for each library and it didn’t help much – the main issue is the insane load on the CPU. They should bite the bullet and convert all Play instruments to Kontakt – I think they’d make a ton of money.
I just don’t understand what they’re doing over at EW! Even the drum libraries are CPU hogs. I love SD2 (haven’t even bothered to get SD3) and still use it a lot, but the hassles make it almost unusable… even for short percussive samples in a library that came out in 2007.
I agree with all the comments above. EastWest do some really nice sampling, but the PLAY engine has been buggy and unfixed for a decade, despite continual new versions being released. It’s a total, total hog, and there is no detailed editing available (despite EastWest promising PLAY PRO nearly a decade or so ago). And there *are* sample problems which you may sometimes need to work around (e.g. out of tune samples, occasional artifacts, etc.). If it was a Kontakt library, you could fix it yourself quickly and immediately. Not so in PLAY. Anytime you run into limits, EastWest will tell you your computer isn’t powerful enough. Apparently if you have less than sixteen computers running one instance of PLAY each, you’re not going to really get the best performance out of PLAY.
If they were the only game in town, this would merit further discussion. But they’re not. There are AMAZING orchestral libraries available from the likes of CineSamples, ProjectSAM, LASS, and several others. Many offer cheaper “LE” versions to get you started if you’re on a budget.
Even with an 80% discount (which trust me, will come around again — EastWest stuff goes on sale approximately every other week), I would not recommend it.
Agreed. Make sure you budget for Vienna Ensemble Pro as well to get these libraries to work at all adequately on one system. I’m on Logic and could barely get a handful of instruments playing simultaneously with Play instances loaded directly in Logic. Using VE Pro my system performance is WAY better, but load times are still pathetic compared to Kontakt. These are really slave system libraries.. Bringing up any of these concerns to anyone at EW is always met with straight denial and/or the classic ‘not running a powerful enough system’. On the other hand they sound great, so there’s that…
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