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Spitfire Audio - Albion Colossus

Digivolt said:
How does everybody feel about it now since that massive update it had ? Wasn't 40% over BF but it's temporarily 40% off now and I'm considering it but unsure
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It's a great library for a very specific sound. I think it's a pretty cold, somewhat emotionless library that excels when processed with other plugins and effects, or when paired with synthesizers. It's the exact opposite of most Spitfire libraries that gravitate towards little details that make things feel alive. The sound design patches are some of the best of any Spitfire library -- props to Snakes of Russia there. I think it works great for processed, polished action sounds, but doesn't lend itself to anything "human" or "pretty" sounding.
 
Digivolt said:
How does everybody feel about it now since that massive update it had ? Wasn't 40% over BF but it's temporarily 40% off now and I'm considering it but unsure
Click to expand...
^
Hi @Digivolt ,if you haven't purchased the library yet, I'd say definitely go for it.
I'm using Colossus everyday since it was originally released & it has become my favorite Spitfire library.
It is for sure the most complete Albion and the most flexible,because of its vast content.
On a surface level you would think that this library is good only for epic/hybird cinematic & trailer music, but the more you will use it you will discover that you can also create more traditional orchestral/classical/chamber music with it.You can even create some good trip-hop/downtempo, if you think outside the box.
* here are some user demos by me, cheers ! :

Colossus / CDT projects,enjoy!

Hi everyone! these are some of my latest Albion Colossus projects,enjoy! : * featuring Originals Intimate Grand Piano :
vi-control.net vi-control.net

Some of my latest work,enjoy !

Hi everyone !,this is some of my latest work,enjoy ! :
vi-control.net vi-control.net
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@SpitfireSupport @Karma @Paul Thomson :
It would be great if you guys introduce in a future update,better loading times for Albion Colossus.
Even with eco load enabled,it still takes some time to load a complete project, yes I understand the nature of how Albion Colossus has to load both orchestras & all mics.
For example I own Abbey Road The Collection & everything loads super fast, low cpu & ram usage, low load times, if you can bring loading time of Albion Colossus down to lets say Abbey Road One Orchestral Foundations or Albion One(Kontakt),it would be so great ! cheers !
 
SpyFx ✪ said:
^
Hi @Digivolt ,if you haven't purchased the library yet, I'd say definitely go for it.
I'm using Colossus everyday since it was originally released & it has become my favorite Spitfire library.
It is for sure the most complete Albion and the most flexible,because of its vast content.
On a surface level you would think that this library is good only for epic/hybird cinematic & trailer music, but the more you will use it you will discover that you can also create more traditional orchestral/classical/chamber music with it.You can even create some good trip-hop/downtempo, if you think outside the box.
* here are some user demos by me, cheers ! :

Colossus / CDT projects,enjoy!

Hi everyone! these are some of my latest Albion Colossus projects,enjoy! : * featuring Originals Intimate Grand Piano :
vi-control.net vi-control.net

Some of my latest work,enjoy !

Hi everyone !,this is some of my latest work,enjoy ! :
vi-control.net vi-control.net
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@SpitfireSupport @Karma @Paul Thomson :
It would be great if you guys introduce in a future update,better loading times for Albion Colossus.
Even with eco load enabled,it still takes some time to load a complete project, yes I understand the nature of how Albion Colossus has to load both orchestras & all mics.
For example I own Abbey Road The Collection & everything loads super fast, low cpu & ram usage, low load times, if you can bring loading time of Albion Colossus down to lets say Abbey Road One Orchestral Foundations or Albion One(Kontakt),it would be so great ! cheers !
Click to expand...
I jumped in last night and bought Colossus based on reading this thread. Lots of good points in amongst the negatives too.
I feel there's a lot of content for the price in the sale. tbh I've probably built up quite a few products in a short space of time so have plenty to get going with now.
Thanks for everyone that's left good detailed thoughts in here. Can really help less experienced folks like myself.
 
After about 1 year of use, Colossus is in pretty much all my productions.

I'd say it is "epic" but not in the sense of LOTR epic... it's a dystopian, cold, distant type of epic. I'd pair it with a "Hunger Games" or "Terminator" sort of epic, or anything post-apocalyptic... it gives a feeling of lost hope, hopeless fight against fate, etc.

It layers beautifully with more traditional orchestral libraries and also synths/hybrid (e.g. Heavyocity).

I agree that is a very niche library and paints a type of soundscape that is different from any other epic libraries that I know of (MA1, Jaeger, Symphobia). So I'd put it in a "niche" category, pretty much like Solstice or Tundra are niche products.
 
Powerful Systm said:
After about 1 year of use, Colossus is in pretty much all my productions.

I'd say it is "epic" but not in the sense of LOTR epic... it's a dystopian, cold, distant type of epic. I'd pair it with a "Hunger Games" or "Terminator" sort of epic, or anything post-apocalyptic... it gives a feeling of lost hope, hopeless fight against fate, etc.

It layers beautifully with more traditional orchestral libraries and also synths/hybrid (e.g. Heavyocity).

I agree that is a very niche library and paints a type of soundscape that is different from any other epic libraries that I know of (MA1, Jaeger, Symphobia). So I'd put it in a "niche" category, pretty much like Solstice or Tundra are niche products.
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Yeah looking forward to using it in conjunction with the other stuff I have. I really just try to use all these as just individual libraries that I might like a few things from at a certain time.
Not really concerned what the manufacturers try to sell it as. I watch all the walkthroughs and demos and if I like it I am likely to go for it.
That way I know if I start searching for some decent sounds I am likely to have something to hand.
But then I am not sitting down trying to write film scores. So my needs are not the same as a lot of other folks on here. I am just trying to make what you might call more traditional tracks.
Tracks vocalists can sing a regular song over. Tracks I can put a beat on. Instrumental folky stuff. Whatever. But just using slightly different sounds as to the type you might hear.
So I am less concerned with the accuracy or playability of specific articulations and mic positions 'per se'. Not unconcerned, just less so.
Although I totally get why others would be. You might even argue it's then overkill for me to buy such detailed products but I can trust them and I know that the source quality is generally spot on. Just makes things easier down the line.
 
I just got Colossus and it seems like it takes a while for the sounds to load after clicking on a preset. Is this normal? Is there a way to fix it? No problems when loading the Synth presets, it only happens for the orchestral instruments. I already have Eco Mode switched on.
 
anp27 said:
Is this normal?
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Perfectly normal. It takes a while to load in multiple articulations. Depending on the speed of your SSD and the size of the samples that one preset entails, this may take more time, or less. Orchestral patches typically have more and larger samples than synth patches.
 
anp27 said:
I just got Colossus and it seems like it takes a while for the sounds to load after clicking on a preset. Is this normal? Is there a way to fix it? No problems when loading the Synth presets, it only happens for the orchestral instruments. I already have Eco Mode switched on.
Click to expand...
It takes a long time to load, more than ten minutes to load my whole Colossus template from a SSD in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure when I tested it on my i9 iMac in Logic. I haven’t tried it now that I have it on a NVMe and an enclosure that rates much faster. I imagine it will be quite a lot faster but still not fast. You can lower the preload buffer in the SF player and that should help so long as your system can handle it.
 
Yes - I find several Spitfire Player libraries to have long load times. Colossus loads slowly (although it's new to me so I haven't used it a lot yet) as does Hammers.

It would help if they would use some of that expansive real-estate in the plugin to tell you what's going on. The only indicators are a small flashing light and the fact that the (quite small) RAM counter goes up. It's a bad user experience, since the plugin looks like it's ready to go every single time I go to smash a handful of keys and nothing happens and I go "hmm, what's broken with Logic now?" instead of rightly placing the blame on Spitfire.

So - yes, expected behavior.
 
danstein said:
Yes - I find several Spitfire Player libraries to have long load times. Colossus loads slowly (although it's new to me so I haven't used it a lot yet) as does Hammers.

It would help if they would use some of that expansive real-estate in the plugin to tell you what's going on. The only indicators are a small flashing light and the fact that the (quite small) RAM counter goes up. It's a bad user experience, since the plugin looks like it's ready to go every single time I go to smash a handful of keys and nothing happens and I go "hmm, what's broken with Logic now?" instead of rightly placing the blame on Spitfire.

So - yes, expected behavior.
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Same for me with BBCSO Prof. and Appassionata.

Others never get long load times so I don’t know what causes it.
 
jbuhler said:
It takes a long time to load, more than ten minutes to load my whole Colossus template from a SSD in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure when I tested it on my i9 iMac in Logic. I haven’t tried it now that I have it on a NVMe and an enclosure that rates much faster. I imagine it will be quite a lot faster but still not fast. You can lower the preload buffer in the SF player and that should help so long as your system can handle it.
Click to expand...
This is surprising. I reran the test using the same template as before but now on my Studio with Colossus on an NVMe connected via TB3 enclosure that usually delivers around 1500 MB/s according to the Black Magic test, and it's clocking in even slower to load now than when running it off a SATA SSD that was in a Thunderbay. With the Studio, Colossus patches became somewhat playable after about 12 minutes of load time, and mostly playable including the legato around 20 minutes, but it didn't finish loading the full 31.9 GB of RAM (reported in SF Player) for 45 minutes; and the little load light never did stop flashing (it's still flashing several hours later). This is all the Colossus instruments in non-eco mode and without changing the default preload buffer.

ETA: by contrast the AR1 violins loaded their 3.04 GB, with a green light in about 90 seconds, and it was playable almost immediately.
 
You can try VSL, it is fast and efficient and does not take up much memory. Spitfire's products do load slowly and require huge amounts of memory. Although I have BBCSO PRO, and Albion Colossus, and many other products, after I tried VSL's products, I used VSL's products most of the time.
 
jbuhler said:
This is surprising. I reran the test using the same template as before but now on my Studio with Colossus on an NVMe connected via TB3 enclosure that usually delivers around 1500 MB/s according to the Black Magic test, and it's clocking in even slower to load now than when running it off a SATA SSD that was in a Thunderbay. With the Studio, Colossus patches became somewhat playable after about 12 minutes of load time, and mostly playable including the legato around 20 minutes, but it didn't finish loading the full 31.9 GB of RAM (reported in SF Player) for 45 minutes; and the little load light never did stop flashing (it's still flashing several hours later). This is all the Colossus instruments in non-eco mode and without changing the default preload buffer.

ETA: by contrast the AR1 violins loaded their 3.04 GB, with a green light in about 90 seconds, and it was playable almost immediately.
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This is strange. I always assumed that the Spitfire player is at least optimized for MAC users. I am on WIN and my experiences so far are mixed: BBCSO Pro loads quite slowly and I have avoided using it because of that (in particular once you start loading/unloading mics to find the right sound it gets frustrating). On the other hand, the AR selections I have seem to be quite efficient.
 
mussnig said:
This is strange. I always assumed that the Spitfire player is at least optimized for MAC users. I am on WIN and my experiences so far are mixed: BBCSO Pro loads quite slowly and I have avoided using it because of that (in particular once you start loading/unloading mics to find the right sound it gets frustrating). On the other hand, the AR selections I have seem to be quite efficient.
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I don't have BBCSO, which would probably be the best alternate test, since it is also very large, but I do have many other SF player libraries, and none of them have anything like this issue.
 
jbuhler said:
ETA: by contrast the AR1 violins loaded their 3.04 GB, with a green light in about 90 seconds, and it was playable almost immediately.
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Even that seems really slow.

I don't have any of the AR1 libraries so I can't test them, but I did with several Spitfire player libraries. On my 2019 iMac, Loading the HZS 60 Cellos "all-in-one" patch with all 26 mics (4.09 GB) took 35 seconds. From a Samsung T7 connected via USB3 (so just 5 Gbps).

BBCSO and EWC have similar load times per GB, whether from USB3 / 5 Gbps, USB connected to a TB3 port / 10 Gbps, or an NVMe drive in a 20 Gbps TB3 enclosure. A mix of Samsung drives (the aforementioned T7, and a 970 Evo Plus in the TB3 enclosure) and Crucial X9 Pros.
 
Justin L. Franks said:
Even that seems really slow.
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Not really because it’s fully playable immediately and it’s still a big load—by itself AR1 violin 1 is nearly as big as all of Abbey Road One Foundations—since I haven’t yet optimized the preload buffer for the NVMe.

I ran it again and it was actually closer to 20 seconds this time before the flashing stopped, but it was fully playable including legato almost immediately. Loading the cello after violin 1 was loaded took under 15 seconds. Again it was playable immediately.

Compare that to Colossus, which the SF player reports as 10 times bigger than the AR1 violin 1 but is basically unplayable for more than 10 minutes and isn’t fully playable for 20. The flashing light never goes off for it. In any case I left it for hours and it was still flashing even though it was no longer adding samples to memory as far as I could tell. So it appears there is something deeply wrong with Colossus, at least if you are going to load a large number of its instruments all in one go. Just loading the default combination patch from Colossus, a bit smaller than AR1V1, but it takes nearly two minutes to load (it is playable immediately though). It does manage to get to green. Loading the high strings, which is somehow bigger than AR1V1, and that took a similar amount of time as the combination patch but it was not immediately playable. It did get to green.
 
jbuhler said:
I ran it again and it was actually closer to 20 seconds this time before the flashing stopped, but it was fully playable including legato almost immediately. Loading the cello after violin 1 was loaded took under 15 seconds. Again it was playable immediately.
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Yeah that's more like it. In your earlier post, you said it took 90 seconds to fully load the 3 GB, which is more than 3x longer than loading a similar size patch in every large SF player library I have. And that's even with SSDs which are slower than yours.
 
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