# Looking for an opinion on Hollywood Orchestra vs Iconica



## Sycraft (Jul 8, 2022)

I'm not real satisfied with my current orchestral options and so I'm debating spending a bit to buy a new orchestral library. Both Steinberg Iconica and EW Hollywood Orchestra are on sale right now for $500 and $400 respectively. I own Halion and Steinberg offers a free trial, so I have tried Iconica and it is pretty good. I am not blown away, but so far the recording quality seems good, and I like the tonal choices. Halion is rock solid in my experience, so I like that too, and it doesn't seem to be too heavy on the system. Probably biggest complaint I have is a number of instruments don't have many dynamic layers. Also, some solo strings would be nice.

Well, that makes me interested in Hollywood Orchestra. It is $100 less, which is nice (I don't make any money on this, it is all for fun), contains more stuff and looks like it probably has a good deal more dynamic layers for things, plus more RR samples.

However, the thing that holds me back is I really don't like EastWest. I bought some of their libraries back when they transitioned from Kontakt to their own Play software and it was a disaster to put it mildly. Play had all sorts of issues, the biggest being that it didn't know how to fast bounce properly, it'd cut off tails, you had to do realtime bounces and they acted as though this was a completely unsolvable problem. So I'm worried, particularly in light of the fact that they are now dumping Play for some MORE new software.

So my ultimate question is: How is Hollywood Orchestra, and how is Opus? Should I take a leap and get it and give EastWest another chance, or should I get Iconica instead since I'm already satisfied that it works well?


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## glyster (Jul 8, 2022)

If you buy from jrrshop it's EWHO OPUS is about $330 after GROUP discount. There are already many other threads about it. At this price, it's a no brainer.


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## RogiervG (Jul 8, 2022)

glyster said:


> If you buy from jrrshop it's EWHO OPUS is about $330 after GROUP discount. There are already many other threads about it. At this price, it's a no brainer.


side note: price is not everything..


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## Jdiggity1 (Jul 9, 2022)

Sycraft said:


> I'm not real satisfied with my current orchestral options and so I'm debating spending a bit to buy a new orchestral library. Both Steinberg Iconica and EW Hollywood Orchestra are on sale right now for $500 and $400 respectively. I own Halion and Steinberg offers a free trial, so I have tried Iconica and it is pretty good. I am not blown away, but so far the recording quality seems good, and I like the tonal choices. Halion is rock solid in my experience, so I like that too, and it doesn't seem to be too heavy on the system. Probably biggest complaint I have is a number of instruments don't have many dynamic layers. Also, some solo strings would be nice.
> 
> Well, that makes me interested in Hollywood Orchestra. It is $100 less, which is nice (I don't make any money on this, it is all for fun), contains more stuff and looks like it probably has a good deal more dynamic layers for things, plus more RR samples.
> 
> ...


Don't let your experience with PLAY deter you from OPUS.
OPUS was developed by a completely different team, as I understand it, including some of the most experienced developers in the sampler realm, some who've worked on Kontakt and others from Sonuscore. I don't have sources for this on-hand... but those are points I seem to remember from when OPUS was being teased a few years ago.
As a plugin and host, I've found OPUS to be very stable, efficient, and feature-rich. An improvement from PLAY overall (though by version 5 of PLAY, i wasn't having issues with that either).

You're going to get a lot more opinions on Hollywood Orchestra than Iconica, simply due to market cap. Iconica rarely (if ever) gets brought up around here, whereas EWHO is always being talked about in some capacity.

I would also recommend getting a month of composer cloud (if they still offer a single month/trial?) so you can compare how it performs directly, since you've used Iconica in the past. While i often recommend composer cloud to pretty much everybody, the Hollywood Orchestra series is a mixture of "better than anything else" and "hmmm this aint so crash hot". I've got my gripes about how a lot of it "performs" and responds to MIDI, but I'm also confident that if it were the only library I had, I'd be able to do whatever I need to do.

I've only used EWHO out of the two, but they both look like good value comprehensive choices. 

I do wonder how you are seeing Iconica for $500. I'm getting a price of $1498 for Iconica Opus (the full version) but $448 for Iconica Ensembles, which does not include sections and soloists. I'm honestly not sure if I'm being shown USD or AUD, but just to clarify, $500 USD does not convert to $1498 AUD.


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## veranad (Jul 9, 2022)

3DC said:


> The reduced price is displayed during checkout.


Yes, it´s on sale righ now.

@Sycraft , I would also consider as an important buying factor that, between Iconica and OPUS, only Steinberg allows license trasfers (free), should you decide to sell it later on.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Jul 9, 2022)

Don’t buy something just because it’s on sale


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## Markrs (Jul 9, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Don’t buy something just because it’s on sale


Very true, though of course you have the rule which is "don't buy something unless it is on sale" 😂


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Jul 9, 2022)

Markrs said:


> Very true, though of course you have the rule which is "don't buy something unless it is on sale" 😂


My big brother does! We were out shopping during sales where he found a nice jacket he liked. But when he saw it wasn’t part of the sale, he immediately put it back


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## wlinart (Jul 9, 2022)

I have hollywood orchestra (play version) and owned iconica, but sold it. Iconica is great, a nice starter package for sure. I'm on mac/logic. Halion and logic wasn't the best combination it seemed, hence why i sold it. The woodwinds and harp are really nice. The percussion is a basic orchestral package, also with a very nice sound. The strings are the weak point. The brass is good. 
With hollywood orchestra it was the other way around i felt, the strings and brass are amazing, the woodwinds less (although it should be better in the opus version). The harp and percussion is also good. 
Overall, both are nice, especially for the price. Personally i would recommend iconica sections and players more than opus. I never really used the ensembles. Between Hollywood orchestra for $330 (via JRR), and Iconica sections and players for $400, it would be a tough choice, but with a slight advantage for eastwest, because of the amazing strings and brass. Although if you're running a laptop iconica might be the better choice. I ran the full orchestra on my 8 year old macbook. It used only 5gb ram, and wasn't very CPU-intensive.


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## liquidlino (Jul 9, 2022)

One thing worth noting. you can resell Iconica. Can't resell EWHO. If that's a factor in your decision making.


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## rlundv (Jul 9, 2022)

Do you use Iconica with Cubase? I my case, Iconica directly in Cubase on a PC lead to rediculous saving times, so the only option for my was to use it in VEP.


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## Sycraft (Jul 9, 2022)

Jdiggity1 said:


> Don't let your experience with PLAY deter you from OPUS.
> OPUS was developed by a completely different team, as I understand it, including some of the most experienced developers in the sampler realm, some who've worked on Kontakt and others from Sonuscore. I don't have sources for this on-hand... but those are points I seem to remember from when OPUS was being teased a few years ago.


I did see that and that does help for sure. I worry a little about the management. Doug Rogers is pretty convinced that his people are always The Best(tm) and thus everything is being done right. That was my other huge issue during the Play problems wasn't just that it had issues, but that they were written off as unfixable.


Jdiggity1 said:


> As a plugin and host, I've found OPUS to be very stable, efficient, and feature-rich. An improvement from PLAY overall (though by version 5 of PLAY, i wasn't having issues with that either).


Maybe I should try Play 6 and break out the old EW libraries I have.


Jdiggity1 said:


> You're going to get a lot more opinions on Hollywood Orchestra than Iconica, simply due to market cap. Iconica rarely (if ever) gets brought up around here, whereas EWHO is always being talked about in some capacity.


It is interesting to me how Steinberg is basically "the Cubase company" and their other stuff doesn't get noticed much. Basically, everyone has heard of Cubase, a decent amount know about Wavelab, but things like Spectralayers, Halion, and their sample libraries seem to be "They do that?" kind of moments to many.



veranad said:


> @Sycraft , I would also consider as an important buying factor that, between Iconica and OPUS, only Steinberg allows license trasfers (free), should you decide to sell it later on.


I'll keep that in mind though I'm kinda a horader. To date I've never sold any software or library I've bought, even ones I don't use. I still have my old EW libraries, I just don't use them.



wlinart said:


> I have hollywood orchestra (play version) and owned iconica, but sold it. Iconica is great, a nice starter package for sure. I'm on mac/logic. Halion and logic wasn't the best combination it seemed, hence why i sold it.


Understandable. I use Nuendo (on Windows) and unsurprisingly Halion likes Nuendo. That is part of what got me to consider Iconica is that they are stable together, and things like VST Expresison maps work well with the two.



wlinart said:


> The woodwinds and harp are really nice. The percussion is a basic orchestral package, also with a very nice sound. The strings are the weak point. The brass is good.
> With hollywood orchestra it was the other way around i felt, the strings and brass are amazing, the woodwinds less (although it should be better in the opus version). The harp and percussion is also good.


I haven't played with the strings much, the staccatissimo flute is one that I really liked, the sustained flute not as much. The timpanis are great. I still need to play around more but so far I've been pleased with the sound in general.



wlinart said:


> Although if you're running a laptop iconica might be the better choice. I ran the full orchestra on my 8 year old macbook. It used only 5gb ram, and wasn't very CPU-intensive.


Desktop, but at the moment not a very powerful one. Core i7-8700K (6 core 4.6Ghz), 32GB of RAM. I am plotting an upgrade to 12th generation hardware but haven't done anything towards that yet and probably won't for awhile. That said I don't do particularly big setups.



rlundv said:


> Do you use Iconica with Cubase? I my case, Iconica directly in Cubase on a PC lead to rediculous saving times, so the only option for my was to use it in VEP.


I do, well with Nuendo but same thing. I haven't tried loading/saving at this point it has just been tests and such, noodling around, importing existing MIDI to try. I haven't made a project, just sampled the sounds. I do not own VEP so I'll have to test/think about that.


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## synergy543 (Jul 9, 2022)

To further complicate your decision-making process, I highly recommend you watch Sascha Knorr's breakdown of his Iconica demo. 


This is really a masterclass in itself.


Some are calling Iconica a "starter library", yet, clearly you can accomplish a great deal with it if you know how to orchestrate as Sascha demonstrates. Likewise, there are many good videos on EW Opus you should watch too. Both "Opuses" are good libraries so you can make a bad choice. Both have their strengths and weaknesses as well. EW may be more complete, but I do like the overall cohesive sound and depth of Iconica. Though mixing and matching the best sounds from various libraries I think is the holy grail.


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## Sycraft (Jul 9, 2022)

synergy543 said:


> Though mixing and matching the best sounds from various libraries I think is the holy grail.


I'll check out the video you recommended. And for sure I'd love to get both. And to get VSL. :D. However, there is only so much I want to spend, at least for now. So, I'm going to try and choose one. I will say that I do like the space the Iconica was recorded in. The surround mics add some great ambiance. On the other hand, I have reverbs I really like ambiance of so those will realistically get used instead.


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## ssnowe (Jul 9, 2022)

My understanding is that Sonuscore was a big contributor to the development of EastWest Hollywood Orchestra Opus (saw your concern regarding the Play engine).


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## Sycraft (Jul 9, 2022)

ssnowe said:


> My understanding is that Sonuscore was a big contributor to the development of EastWest Hollywood Orchestra Opus (saw your concern regarding the Play engine).


They also supposedly hired some people with experience, including one of the guys who worked on Cubase. I just worry based on past experience both with how Play operated, and how Doug Rogers responded to criticism of it. Also there was a big thread on this site of people chatting about it, many with issues. I didn't read the whole thing since it was like 400 pages long but it gives me some pause.

I'm going to have to do more testing, and probably get a new SSD for more space. It is a tough choice. I prefer the interface overall in Iconica, and the ambiance is nice. However I think I like the sound in Hollywood Orchestra overall more when I take both of them and feed them to a reverb I like. There's something to be said for the pretty dry space they recorded it in where you can change mics to change the character, but not really add much in the way of space so you can put it in the space of your choosing.

I do hate how they name instruments though. Always have :D.

One other issue I notice is that it looks like EastWest still doesn't compress their samples, so it takes up even more disk space. Not the biggest deal but it is kinda annoying. Overall it is heavier than Iconica to be sure but it doesn't seem to be problematicly so.


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## glyster (Jul 9, 2022)

One cool feature in the latest version (1.2 I think) of EWHO OPUS is that import key switch into expression maps work now in Cubase. It use to be broken, but seems fixed now.


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## Sycraft (Jul 9, 2022)

glyster said:


> One cool feature in the latest version (1.2 I think) of EWHO OPUS is that import key switch into expression maps work now in Cubase. It use to be broken, but seems fixed now.


Well that would be cool, how do you have it do that?


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## glyster (Jul 9, 2022)

Sycraft said:


> Well that would be cool, how do you have it do that?


You load the OPUS vst instrument, pick one of the patch/preset i.e. 18 str ks. Then create a midi track that outputs to that instrument track. Select the midi track, you should see the expression map section on the left side of the cubase window. If you click on the drop down menu, you should see an item says “import key switch to expression map.”


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## Sycraft (Jul 9, 2022)

glyster said:


> You load the OPUS vst instrument, pick one of the patch/preset i.e. 18 str ks. Then create a midi track that outputs to that instrument track. Select the midi track, you should see the expression map section on the left side of the cubase window. If you click on the drop down menu, you should see an item says “import key switch to expression map.”


Awesome, I'll give that I try when I download bigger instruments. At the moment I've been downloading just specific articulations as I'm low on space on my samples SSD (I have a bigger one on the way), particularly since Iconica is on there as well.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Jul 9, 2022)

If you’re after a dry sound, I’d go with the Cinematic Studio Series.

I only have the strings but it’s one of the best purchases I‘ve ever made, and from what I hear on this forum, the brass and wind libraries are also superb.

Sure, you may have to save longer, but in the end you’ll IMO get some libraries that are much easier to work with (provided you can deal with the varying delay offset for legato)


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## wlinart (Jul 9, 2022)

glyster said:


> One cool feature in the latest version (1.2 I think) of EWHO OPUS is that import key switch into expression maps work now in Cubase. It use to be broken, but seems fixed now.


Iconica has the same function for cubase built into halion. https://vi-control.net/community/th...nic-instruments-that-have-key-switches.85228/


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## Sycraft (Jul 10, 2022)

Playing with them more, I'm leaning towards Hollywood Orchestra. Opus *seems* to not be a problem and it is just a more complete set. Also while it is more complicated, it seems to be easier to play with the sound to get what I'd like. Some of that probably has to do with the scoring stage they recorded it on.

I will say that Opus is an interesting mix of good tech and bad tech. The on-demand instrument download is great. It is nice to not have to download a whole library if you don't need it. However the EW Installation Center sucks. You need a ton of free disk space because it downloads everything and then extracts it, even though it doesn't compress (because it is encrypted) so you need more space than you should. Also it comes in a ton of zip files and will just fail randomly. The strings just failed to install so I'm now manually unzipping 109 zip files rather than try and redownload the whole thing again, it doesn't seem to have a "resume where you left off" or "install from zip" function. It also still stores each sample in its own file which is silly from an access time standpoint (there's a reason why all games and things like that use monolithic data files) and makes copies drive to drive slower.

And of course the samples aren't compressed, so they are like double the size they need to be.

All that said, it's probably the way I'll go. It is just interesting the technology that other samplers have that they still haven't gotten. Compressed samples and monolithic files are something that Kontakt and Halion got like a decade ago.


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## RogiervG (Jul 10, 2022)

Sycraft said:


> Playing with them more, I'm leaning towards Hollywood Orchestra. Opus *seems* to not be a problem and it is just a more complete set. Also while it is more complicated, it seems to be easier to play with the sound to get what I'd like. Some of that probably has to do with the scoring stage they recorded it on.
> 
> I will say that Opus is an interesting mix of good tech and bad tech. The on-demand instrument download is great. It is nice to not have to download a whole library if you don't need it. However the EW Installation Center sucks. You need a ton of free disk space because it downloads everything and then extracts it, even though it doesn't compress (because it is encrypted) so you need more space than you should. Also it comes in a ton of zip files and will just fail randomly. The strings just failed to install so I'm now manually unzipping 109 zip files rather than try and redownload the whole thing again, it doesn't seem to have a "resume where you left off" or "install from zip" function. It also still stores each sample in its own file which is silly from an access time standpoint (there's a reason why all games and things like that use monolithic data files) and makes copies drive to drive slower.
> 
> ...


enjoy


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## jesussaddle (Jul 31, 2022)

glyster said:


> If you buy from jrrshop it's EWHO OPUS is about $330 after GROUP discount. There are already many other threads about it. At this price, it's a no brainer.


I don't see a group buy thing at the moment (its 2 weeks late?) but Thomann has currently it for $339 without any discounts.


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## jesussaddle (Jul 31, 2022)

Jdiggity1 said:


> Don't let your experience with PLAY deter you from OPUS.
> OPUS was developed by a completely different team, as I understand it, including some of the most experienced developers in the sampler realm, some who've worked on Kontakt and others from Sonuscore. I don't have sources for this on-hand... but those are points I seem to remember from when OPUS was being teased a few years ago.
> As a plugin and host, I've found OPUS to be very stable, efficient, and feature-rich. An improvement from PLAY overall (though by version 5 of PLAY, i wasn't having issues with that either).
> 
> ...


You mention getting a month of Composer Cloud ($29). It wasn't available as an option to me, despite there being a page essentially (not literally) saying, "if you don't want the year's worth of charges applied to your account, choose a different option". I looked and looked, and finally logged out, and created a different account. Then the option for the month showed up. https://soundsonline.com/composercloud (now scroll down to SEE OTHER PLANS and click and it will say Monthly right there. Phew. Ah well, I bought the whole thing at Thomann for $339 because I hate spending $29 when I'm probably buying the library anyway. Good way to pis_ away a sales discount :D


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