But it's not a show-stopper: anyone hankering after the old programs can still use the old Kompakt Player to load them, and Native Instruments' Kontakt sampler will happily load both new and old programs.Īnother contentious revision sees the original keyswitch programs replaced by a new set which (at the time of writing) do not allow keyswitching between long and short notes.
That's a good thing, but using old names for new programs is confusing - it would have been better if East West had renamed the new programs and included the originals in a separate folder as a courtesy to existing Symphonic Orchestra users. According to East West, the idea is to 'augment the original samples and provide more velocity layers and realism'.
D'oh! The Pro XP editions supposedly incorporate the old programs as well as providing new ones, but it turns out that although the old program names are retained, many of them have been reprogrammed to take advantage of the new samples. SO Pro XP running under the bundled Native Instruments Kompakt Player.Unfortunately, that's not the end of it: the updated Kompakt player which ships with the library won't load the old programs, and the old player won't load the new programs either. If you want to use the new Pro XP samples on projects you started with the original library, you may end up having to duplicate the original samples on two hard drives (to check how much disk space the Pro XP libraries take up, see the 'Drive Planner' box over the page). However, if you do that, projects which use the old samples won't be able to locate them! A workaround is explained in the manual, but it's tedious.
There are other restrictions: the old and new samples must both be installed in the same folder on the same hard drive, so if the drive you use for the original library doesn't have sufficient space to install the new samples, you'll have to move the old samples to a drive big enough to hold both sets. This is because many of the programs in Pro XP use a mixture of original and new samples.
Potential buyers should be aware that whatever edition they buy, they must own the equivalent original edition of the Symphonic Orchestra library in order to be able to use the Professional Expansion ( Pro XP) set. Once trimmed down to size, the samples weighed in at 71GB, more than doubling the size of the original library. Editing and programming the new recordings took a year. By the time Professor Johnson and the 100-strong tribe of musicians and technicians emerged bleary-eyed from the concert hall one month later, the SO project had expanded considerably. The new sessions addressed all that, and more. At that time the library lacked marimba, celeste, piccolo trumpet, solo viola and solo double bass, and the implementation of performance styles was somewhat patchy. Two years after the sessions for the original library, the Symphonic Orchestra production team (headed as before by the Grammy-winning recording engineer Professor Keith O Johnson) returned to the original orchestral hall with the same pool of players to record a new set of samples.
That's a great achievement in anyone's book.
One oft-cited reason for its popularity is its big, built-in concert hall sound the instruments were recorded simultaneously from three microphone positions in a 2500-seater orchestral venue, making EWQLSO the only full orchestral library on the market with six-channel surround sound capability. The result of a meeting of minds between sampling supremos Doug Rogers (East West) and Nick Phoenix of Quantum Leap, the original 67GB four-volume set (reviewed in SOS in June 2004) gained widespread praise and is now the library of choice for many US composers and music directors. However, it still wasn't enough for some people - so East West have released this 18-disc expander set.Īlthough impossible to pronounce and liable to antagonise your spellchecker, EWQLSO (East West/Quantum Leap's Symphonic Orchestra) has become a byword in the orchestral sampling world since its release in 2003. East West and Quantum Leap's Symphonic Orchestra was one of the largest orchestral libraries ever released, at 19 DVDs for the full edition.