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Most Disappointing Library Purchase?

EWQL Pianos. Sounds dead as a plastic fish. Also a huge amount of useless data.

Actually, I was just thinking about this recently while trying to find a new piano patch. I downloaded them all as part of my cloud subscription, but honestly I'm not a fan (yet, anyways). I still prefer the old Steinway B in Goliath/SO.
 
Actually, I was just thinking about this recently while trying to find a new piano patch. I downloaded them all as part of my cloud subscription, but honestly I'm not a fan (yet, anyways). I still prefer the old Steinway B in Goliath/SO.
It was an audacious collection at the time. Great detail, lots of microphones, lots of Gigabytes... At best I can play it for 10 minutes, before I feel miserable. It sounds to me like a dissected frog. Even though they were at some time very nice looking frogs, especially the Bösendorfer.
 
I'd have thought Wagner would prefer the instant "Wheee!" though.

Believe me, if Ark 1 had been my first ensemble library I would have wrote even more overblown junk than I do now!!!

I get super epic with the libraries I mentioned...in some ways better than Ark. But that's just me, as I said Met Ark 1 is still a pretty darn badass library imo.

I started out with rock and heavy metal music as a kid (mostly the latter), so Wagner (and Met Ark 1 for that matter) were pretty obviously going to be in my future lol! I just get sounds that make me happier with Iceni, Hollywood, etc. Keep in mind, I must always tag at the end "engineering ability", without that MA1 would have been a constant staple for my epics.
 
From today's standard, QL Pianos has a lot of quirks and problems that haven't fixed and probably never will (there are a few dynamic layers that are louder/softer than higher/lower velocity, release noise stacking up, high notes are not dampered, pop/click at the end of sample etc). Can be worked around if you are just looking for a scoring piano, but the playability is kind of limited and the behavior is somewhat unrealistic at times.

I personally love its colorful roomy sound and wide dynamic range though, especially the Bosendorfer. Nick P did a fantastic job designing the sound of the library.

At the current price the spec is probably good enough for a character scoring piano. I wish I were able to tinker with the patches like Kontakt (Play Pro will come out in 2100).
 
One recent disappointing purchase have been Synchron Strings for me. I own quite a few VSL libraries and like them a lot. Not so with Synchron Strings unfortunately. I didn't fancy the sound, I wasn't happy with the legato, I didn't connect with how it reacts to cc changes. I missed many articulations, which is a first for VSL libraries.
 
What a shite response.

That reminds me of Cinesamples who did respond to my mail adressing heavy noise baked into the round robins of their Cinesymphony Lite library, that it's just considered to be a "sketching library", not for final productions. And that therefore I should have a look at their full orchestra libraries.

Unfortunately they forgot that the samples in Cinesymphony Lite are actually taken from their full libraries. Last purchase I made from them, that's fore sure.
 
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One recent disappointing purchase have been Synchron Strings for me. I own quite a few VSL libraries and like them a lot. Not so with Synchron Strings unfortunately. I didn't fancy the sound, I wasn't happy with the legato, I didn't connect with how it reacts to cc changes. I missed many articulations, which is a first for VSL libraries.

Yea, I want to like VSL but for the top dollar you pay for things like Synchron and their elaborate and costly upgrade paths, I just haven't found the quality to be worth it compared to other more recent libs. They sure have figured out an elaborate complicated way to monetize their products though (SE, Vol 1, Vol 1 plus, Vol 2 plus blah blah) Drives me nuts. Good news though is if you don't like their budget offferings, you can just stop there.
 
My biggest regret was buying 8Dio's Songwriting Guitar, a phrase based lib. For $98 I would have thought it be on par with Strummed Acoustic but was not even close. If it were say $50 then maybe not so bad but even then it was waaaay too limited for what it was. The good news is I wrote 8Dio about my disappointment after trying it out for a week and they worked out a good deal with me. I ended up getting an Agitato library and it was great. I recently finished the collection with their 40% sale. I feel like their support was top notch to work with.
I was also originally disappointed in Albion and then again in Albion One (blaspheme, I know) but the good news is the more I delve into it and force myself to work with it, since I paid so much for it, I actually like it a lot now. Some libraries just take time to warm up to.
 
- Light and sound concert Grand

- Chocolate audio Model 7

Advice to kontakt piano libraries developers: Make demo versions of your products because piano libraries need to be experienced and played before commitment or at least offer money back within a week. Not asking for 30 days.

Advice to myself: Never blind buy a piano library ever again.
 
My biggest regret was buying 8Dio's Songwriting Guitar, a phrase based lib. For $98 I would have thought it be on par with Strummed Acoustic but was not even close. If it were say $50 then maybe not so bad but even then it was waaaay too limited for what it was. The good news is I wrote 8Dio about my disappointment after trying it out for a week and they worked out a good deal with me. I ended up getting an Agitato library and it was great. I recently finished the collection with their 40% sale. I feel like their support was top notch to work with.
I was also originally disappointed in Albion and then again in Albion One (blaspheme, I know) but the good news is the more I delve into it and force myself to work with it, since I paid so much for it, I actually like it a lot now. Some libraries just take time to warm up to.
I totally agree with you, some libraries grows while you work with them.
 
Well, It is definitely my purchase of a choir library from 8Dio. Had massive expectations from demos of it and found flaws after 10 minutes playing it. That followed up by a zero refund/resale/storecredit/discount offer policy made me soo sad. A true feeling of beeing fooled.
 
My biggest regret was buying 8Dio's Songwriting Guitar, a phrase based lib. For $98 I would have thought it be on par with Strummed Acoustic but was not even close. If it were say $50 then maybe not so bad but even then it was waaaay too limited for what it was. The good news is I wrote 8Dio about my disappointment after trying it out for a week and they worked out a good deal with me. I ended up getting an Agitato library and it was great. I recently finished the collection with their 40% sale. I feel like their support was top notch to work with.
I was also originally disappointed in Albion and then again in Albion One (blaspheme, I know) but the good news is the more I delve into it and force myself to work with it, since I paid so much for it, I actually like it a lot now. Some libraries just take time to warm up to.

What? Seems like they have good and bad days. I had a horrible experience with them offering me nothing at all in the same situation on their top of the line choir library.
 
Most of 8DIO stuff...total disaster for me. Mucho bucks down the drain... Only company I ever asked for my money back but no way...they kept it. Their demos are always so good yet THE worst playability ever. I tried a few different times with their libraries , now no matter how impressive their sales pitch is...won't take the chance with them. Also a month ago sent a support request to them on how I could get the update for the 1920's something piano I had purchased and never heard back. I'm done.

Wish I had read this thread before I stepped in on 8Dios site. I share your feelings totally. :(
 
Anything that doesn't have Cine as the first four letters... and not so much disappointed in the product as in my in myself for impulse/corner cutting purchases... The good news i've managed to cherry pick my least used libraries for a patch or two that's useful...
 
Not a big spender here, but I'd say :

East West StormDrum (a while back, remember NI Intakt ? I never really used it)
8DiOboe (so far, never managed to make it sit in a mix, but I'll keep on trying)
EWQL Symphonic Choir (mostly WordBuilder though I had rolf moments try to make the choir curse in French).

I also have mixed feelings about EWQL Orchestra Gold : I like the sound & articulations, but it's not a instant-gratification library :D

Sobbing about all the ivory back scratchers I could have bought with that money.
 
Not a big spender here, but I'd say :

East West StormDrum (a while back, remember NI Intakt ? I never really used it)
8DiOboe (so far, never managed to make it sit in a mix, but I'll keep on trying)
EWQL Symphonic Choir (mostly WordBuilder though I had rolf moments try to make the choir curse in French).

I also have mixed feelings about EWQL Orchestra Gold : I like the sound & articulations, but it's not a instant-gratification library :D

Sobbing about all the ivory back scratchers I could have bought with that money.

And that just goes to show that everyone has different tastes. I always felt EWQL Orchestra Gold and Symphonic Choir were "instant gratification" libraries...right back to when I first bought them on the old NI Kompakt platform. And I still use Stormdrum 1 quite a bit, I just love those loops. :thumbsup:
 
Well, It is definitely my purchase of a choir library from 8Dio. Had massive expectations from demos of it and found flaws after 10 minutes playing it. That followed up by a zero refund/resale/storecredit/discount offer policy made me soo sad. A true feeling of beeing fooled.

The same thing happened when I bought the Adagio bundle on sale for $400, big waste of money. That is the only library that gave me buyers remorse. Fortunately, some of the Sordino patches in Adagietto are useable.
 
Of the libraries I've purchased, I'd say the one that really sits up there for me was Aria Sound's London Symphony Stings - 1st Violins (Not the solo strings). I honestly don't think they sell this library series anymore as I can't find it on their website. The production quality was not good as the orchestra sounded like it was recorded in a tin can. The programming was extremely shotty, with a horrible GUI design that also had very odd behavior. To adjust the mic levels, the sliders moved up and down but if you clicked on them, you needed to move your mouse side to side to adjust them. Just hilariously awful. The icing on the cake of how bad it was, was the "true glissandi" patch. They tried to program it like you would regular legato libraries but only captured one or two glissandi transitions through the range and the cross-fade in and out of it was just not good. Very clever idea and awesome concept but very lazily designed and implemented.

Now, I really tried to like it. They had, at the time, a lot of articulations not present on the market and I was in the need of filling out my string samples with as many different colors as possible. I remember sending an email to their support highlighting my frustration over the current state of that library in the first few days following it's release and they never responded. Due to that lack of any customer support, I've never purchased from them again. I've heard their newer libraries are better but that whole experience was enough to never want to buy from them again.

Cheers,

Chris
 
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