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Give Spitfire a chance? Or not?... Samplecast review now LIVE

Any review needs to correctly balance the outputs though with any issues. The issues on this are relatively few and fixable. The quality (and audacity) of the output is, however, something in its own league (as I still think HZ01/02/03 are too). I'm slowly weaving this note by working note (I'm in the Win10 camp unfortunately) into a current score and I'm having having trouble wondering how I'm going to settle using anything less going forwards. The sample quality far, far outweighs the few glitches for a 1.0 release. UIs can change easily over time, but the TBs of samples that I'm sure were recorded for this sure speak quite plainly about how good this is.

This is an incredible release from the Spitfire team one way or another.
 
"Mike from Cinesamples has logged off Twitter for a couple minutes to release a new piano library ..." LOL! :rofl:

Good stuff, I think it's cool that you cover @bigcat1969 instruments. Regarding HZS, why do you think it takes so much memory? It seems to me that it is the engine that needs so much memory because the actual "content" is sparse. Also, I think I heard something curious with the 'shorts' when you were playing through them. Are there actually 6x/8x round-robin samples? Or is it just scripted to pick up neighbouring samples and repitch them?

Another thing that I thought was very interesting: your proper review reveals that @Daniel James first impressions were mostly spot-on. So much pointless drama. :rolleyes:
 
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Paul Thomson said:
The above (from DJ) is total nonsense.

But I’m not engaging with it as it’s pointless getting drawn into an argument with someone who desperately wants to have a row.

Reuben please do your review the way *you* want to do it - safe in the knowledge - good or bad - you’ll continue to get our support and appreciation for your work. We love your reviews!!

All the best.

Paul
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I see that passive aggressive dichotomies runs in the Spitfire family.
 
reutunes said:
I'll just drop this here...

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Just watched the review, and thought it was really well done! Honestly though? I couldn't be happier about not purchasing HZ Strings. Though certain articulations sound quite good, the library as a whole seems somewhat messy, and definitely more like a beta version. For the life of me, and aside from HZ's name being on the box, I cannot figure out why this library costs as much as it does.
 
Jay Panikkar said:
"Regarding HZS, why do you think it takes so much memory? It seems to me that it is the engine that needs so much memory because the actual "content" is sparse. Also, I think I heard something curious with the 'shorts' when you were playing through them. Are there actually 6x/8x round-robin samples? Or is it just scripted to pick up neighbouring samples and repitch them?

Another thing that I thought was very interesting: your proper review reveals that @Daniel James first impressions were mostly spot-on. So much pointless drama. :rolleyes:
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I did have the buffer and preload settings quite high during the recording for the screen capture so I didn't get any dropouts. You could probably get away with lower numbers in real-world application. But nevertheless, it still seems to be higher than kontakt. There were occasions during my testing where even if every mic position was unloaded the engine was still showing a few gigs of memory being used - so something isn't right.

Round robins go up to eight in some articulations. There are options for layering round robins in the interface but I didn't have those switched on during the recording. Just the standard round robin behaviour.

I agree that the Samplecast review does cover many of the same points as Daniel. He had the library for a day and I've been playing with it for a week, so it looks like first impressions have held up in this case. I expanded on a few of the interface quirks in a little more detail and even checked with Spitfire yesterday to make sure they were aware of the problems. The presentation is just different I guess.
 
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My two pfennigs worth: great review. I really feel like this review was made for me. Lol. On of my favorite sample libraries is Logria and I was hoping HZS was going to best the flautandos from it but from I can hear they are nearly identical. I’ve really not heard anything beat those from Albion II yet.
 
reutunes said:
I'll just drop this here...

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Thank you for another honest review with both the pros and the cons on HZ Strings. Even with all the flaws though, I would still be tempted if it were not for the premium price that SF placed on this library. Does SF really need to charge that much money to make their investment back? I'm sure it cost a small fortune though to produce. I usually spend a couple thousand dollars per year on sample libraries (a few thousand over the years with Spitfire) but even the intro price is much too rich for my blood.....especially with the initial hiccups. Once it goes to $800 dollars though...wow! I really hope that they let us t least demo HZ Stings (even just 1 octave) in the future now that they have a better way to protect their libraries with the new engine. I guess in the meantime though, I'll just have to be content with my "budget-priced" Albion I, II, III, and V (my personal fav) for my Spitfire sampled string cravings. LOL
 
Hej Reuben, thank for the review and I appreciate that all honesty and I actually see that Daniel already pointed out a lot of similiar issues and things which just tells me that Daniel was very spot on with his own remarks about HZ Strings. The review is imo very fair as it has a balance between the positive and negative things. His final conclusions are that people who already have products like Albion or Tundra need not to get HZ Strings because a lot of the material is redundant and can be in one or another way with similiar results.
 
@reutunes, I enjoyed your review and certainly appreciated a concise summary of strengths and weaknesses. It was also great to have the bugs and other disadvantages itemized in the new player, as well as a list of its assets.

While I like that you told fans of Hans's bombastic sound not to expect that out of the box, I disagree with your choice to remove Hans completely from the equation, as decisions you applauded (the gallery strings) and criticized (the choice to record at unity gain) reportedly came from either him or his people.

I also believe it was Hans's decision to bypass the Studer and go straight to digital, which would be uncharacteristic of Spitfire, but should also lower the noise floor when cranking the quiet parts.

As both Spitfire and Hans independently record at Air Lyndhurst and often use the same players, there's bound to be an overlap between their sounds. This library may be similar in a number of respects to other Spitfire offerings, but it was clearly a collaboration between the two parties.

Best,

Geoff
 
Geoff Grace said:
While I like that you told fans of Hans's bombastic sound not to expect that out of the box, I disagree with your choice to remove Hans completely from the equation, as decisions you applauded (the gallery strings) and criticized (the choice to record at unity gain) reportedly came from either him or his people.

I also believe it was Hans's decision to bypass the Studer and go straight to digital, which would be uncharacteristic of Spitfire, but should also lower the noise floor when cranking the quiet parts.

As both Spitfire and Hans independently record at Air Lyndhurst and often use the same players, there's bound to be an overlap between their sounds. This library may be similar in a number of respects to other Spitfire offerings, but it was clearly a collaboration between the two parties.
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I hear what you're saying - perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough in the Samplecast review. When I said I was judging the library without Hans in the picture, I purely meant that I was assessing it on it's own merits rather than being swayed by the "name" behind it.

In the review I do delve into the concept of the library and one of my considerations in the conclusion is that an uninformed consumer may purchase this library because of a certain expectation of Hans' sound. But in the main I tried to be detached from that aspect of the marketing behind the library and just focus on the sound and functions.

I don't doubt that Hans had involvement with the production process which has resulted in some lovely articulations and mic positions. However, as a composer your clients aren't buying a production process, they're buying the finished sound and don't really care how it's achieved.
 
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