I just bought Gigastudio Orchestra and installed it. So far I am quite
disappointed. I compose 18th century style music, and want to hear
it on well-sampled instruments. Even this $500 (street price) package
fails to have any decent solo string voices I can find.
Not only that, but human playback and GS don't seem to get along at
all, and playing with no human playback through GS yields quite inferior
results. The voices themselves are undeniably better than Finale's, but
the phrasing and effects are lacking, as are all the subtleties of attack
and sustain that Human Playback deals with quite well really.
From what I can tell so far, Finale's human playback feature seems to
interact with the SmartFont software in ways that it is unable to with GS.
If anyone knows how to plug these things together to get decent orchestral
sounds without a lot of MIDI and audio massaging and manipulation, I would
surely appreciate hearing about it. I don't expect San Francisco Orchestra
performance quality, just something that's not offensive. I'm currently running
GS 3.0 Orchestra, Finale 2004 and Live 4.0.
Another library of interest, btw, is EW/QL. If anyone has experience getting this
library to work with Finale Human Playback I'd be very interested. I contacted
their sales department, but the gentleman who wrote back didn't seem very
interested in taking my money--he didn't seem to care whether he answered
my questions or not.
Thanks,
Alan
MSEE, PhD CS. Composer 18th century orchestral and chamber works. |