East West Hollywood Orchestra.

Steenamaroo

Steenamaroo

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Totally going to buy this tomorrow.
Thought I would post here first incase anyone has any info they can share.

It seems too good to be true. The current price for Diamond is 80% off and works out cheaper than gold...
I don't really understand why but I've searched and can't find the catch.

As I understand it, the diamond collection contains diamond strings, brass, woodwind and percussion.
5 mic positions, all articulations....The heap, right?
If that's the case, the strings section alone currently costs more than the full orchestra.

Can any one point out the glaringly obvious thing that I've missed?

Thanks. :)

Edit. I should have pointed out that my computer is pretty powerful so that's not a concern.
12 cores @ 2.66, 24gb ram (will go to 48 if needed) and the sample library will be shipped to me on a usb3 drive but I'll be fitting it internally.
 
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Well, I just got confirmation from East West that HO Diamond does, indeed, include the full versions of the four separate sets (strings, wind, brass, percs),
and it is cheaper than Gold because they're running a promotion on it right now.

Still seems a bit stupid but, apparently, there's no catch.

Going to buy this unless anyone has any info I should hear first.
Seems like a hell of a deal!
 
Well, doesn't look like anyone's following but I went ahead and bought that diamond bundle.
I use strings and brass a lot and am usually annoyed by the cheap sounds so I think it's a good investment for me.

Don't want to speak to soon but the library hard drive left LA yesterday and it just arrived at Stansted a few hours ago! :eek:
Lets hope it doesn't get wrapped up in customs.
 
Dude, didn't want to butt in on this because I don't use hollywood orchestra, but I can say that I really enjoy E/W Silk - the samples are awesome and the Play platform is really easy to get used to and use well. Glad you got a good deal on the bundle; hopefully it doesn't take as long as Stormdrum 3 has for me. Ordered it a month ago and still nada...
 
pikingrin said:
Dude, didn't want to butt in on this because I don't use hollywood orchestra, but I can say that I really enjoy E/W Silk - the samples are awesome and the Play platform is really easy to get used to and use well. Glad you got a good deal on the bundle; hopefully it doesn't take as long as Stormdrum 3 has for me. Ordered it a month ago and still nada...
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for chiming in.
Your post almost got lost here! :p

Nah, really that's good to hear. I've read mixed reviews about the play engine but after some research it seems that maybe older versions of the software gave it a bad rep.
The most recent reviews I can find suggest that they've got their act together and your confirmation of that is a relief.

I've also seen a few reviews where load times were pretty slow through play engine, but the reviewer always seems to be using an entry level i7 with 6gb ram or similar.
I don't know what they expect with a 700gb library!
I'm hopeful that my 12core system with 24gb will make a difference there but, if not, load times aren't that big a deal.

I'll post back and let you know how I get on with it.

Have you chased up your order? A month is a long time!
I got a tracking number with mine and they are updating it regularly.
 
I ordered mine through a 3rd party (Sweetwater) and they have been getting the runaround (no ETA updates, etc) from EastWest - or so I have heard as of today. I ended up canceling the stormdrum but got another product on order to satisfy the ethnic drum urge for now.
 
Ah man, that's a shame.

pikingrin said:
to satisfy the ethnic drum urge for now.
Click to expand...

I don't think I've ever heard those words in that order before. :)

I'm actually having issues already, I think. :facepalm:
Samples haven't arrived yet but you can authorise the product to get your ilok licenses.
I did that.....and no ilok licenses.

Sent an email to east/west to see what's up. They were pretty quick in replying last week.
 
Whoa, Scratch that.
They just contacted me to say they'd dumped the licenses straight into my ilok account.
Very swift people, so far. :)

Was yours a pre-order or something, or did you just get unlucky?
 
Steenamaroo said:
Whoa, Scratch that.
They just contacted me to say they'd dumped the licenses straight into my ilok account.
Very swift people, so far. :)

Was yours a pre-order or something, or did you just get unlucky?
Click to expand...
It wasn't a pre-order, I don't think. It was only a month ago that I ordered it and it seems to have been around for a bit longer than that. Glad to hear that your transaction is going smoothly, I was just trying to give a friend a boost in his commission by going 3rd party distribution; guess that'll teach me. Stormdrum is 80gb of library though (not sure how big your collection is) and I didn't want to try and download it because it would take hours at my net speed. Hindsight says hours is better than months though...:facepalm:

As far as the ethnic drum urge is concerned, maybe that's not the most coined phrase of the century but it is the most concise way that I could put it! :laughings: I've got a few ongoing projects that could use the flair of some Taiko drums (among other things), and the quality of Silk pushed me to more E/W software. Going with NI Komplete now, hopefully that fulfills the desire...if not, SD3 will when it comes back in stock and I'll have the NI to fall back on for anything else - that pack is loaded!
 
Heh. yeah. 80gb would take a while. I'm on fibre 80/20, but still..
The Orchestra Diamond is 680gb, if memory serves. They don't even offer a download. :(

I asked around a while back and NI Komplete was recommended to me.
EW price won me over though. Lets hope that wasn't a mistake.

To be fair, EW looks better suited to me.
Komplete has Massive and all that junk, right?

SUCH a cool tool, but not really much use to me.
 
Yeah, NI Komplete has a ton of stuff - not 680gb but it comes on its own HDD so I'm not worried about it. It's got Massive, and at least 70 other "tools" along with it from synths to libraries to plugins (from what I know) - most likely more than I will ever use. I definitely agree with your stance on the price; SD3 was only $270 and I spent another $700 to get Komplete on top of that; should have saved the coin and did the download...maybe.

I dunno, I have a few months off between semesters so hopefully Komplete will help keep me busy.
 
I'm only listening on crappy headphones but it sounds good; really subtle but you can tell that they're there. Almost sounds like strings in the background, too - might be my crappy backpack dwelling senns though.

I know you just got it but, overall, what do you think about the platform? Looks like you have enough in your bundle to keep you finding new sounds for a while, too! My HDD showed up today (beauty of a retailer 2 hours away) but I'm bogged down with final exams so I won't even have a chance to plug it in until either late tonight or at some point tomorrow.
 
There's a bit of something from each section in there, although I just updated so I don't know which version you listened to.
There's low brass, high strings, a flute, clarinet and timps. Gotta have timps! lol.

First impressions are mixed. It sounds great but a few things have pissed me off already.
I speculated that the slow load times in some of the tutorials I watched were down to those guys have 4-8gb ram.
Turns out that had nothing to do with it. Load times are just painfully slow.

Play engine seems to take a 10 second time out every few minutes. Your computer will do nothing during this time out.
It also does that if you save your session which is a massive pain in the hole because apple-S is, as I found out today, a subconscious habit of mine.
I probably save my session about 10 times per minute. lol.

That said, if these are the only problems I find I'm still pretty happy.
If I was going to be using it every day for intense scoring the load times would make it very frustrating, but I won't be.
 
That load time, and the comp timeout, is a little strange... I'm wondering what version of the Play engine your bundle came with; Silk has been flawless even on my little crappy system - maybe it could be something with the HDD that the bundle came onto? I was told, at least with Komplete, to be sure and move it onto a different drive and just save the drive that it came on basically as a backup. Not too sure that either one of them (E/W or NI) use the highest quality drives...
 
nice clip thanks for that,good to hear it in someones hands :)

was just gonna suggest cloning that drive but ^pikingrin`s got the solution there
 
Hey, thanks for the suggestions guys.
I did initially try their drive over usb 2, against their advice, just out of eagerness to test the new package and curiosity to see how it would perform.
When performance wasn't great I removed their drive from the enclosure and fitted it internally.
I'm sure it's not a high performance drive but it's 7200 speed so it can't be that bad, right?

I was doing some reading last night and a bunch of lads were saying moving to SSD didn't help.
I had a suspicion that would be the case as the play engine has a 'stream from hard drive' option that you can uncheck.
If you uncheck it it loads the currently used samples into memory, but there was no noticeable performance increase.

Since the library is the guts of 700gb, an SSD would be at least a few hundred quid and I'm not really fussed on spending that to find out those guys were right.

I might copy a few of the patches to one of my smaller SSDs and load them up from that out of interest. Might be worth a try.
 
Steenamaroo said:
When performance wasn't great I removed their drive from the enclosure and fitted it internally.
I'm sure it's not a high performance drive but it's 7200 speed so it can't be that bad, right?
Click to expand...

I have a 7200 drive I think is a turd. Toshiba, I really didn't look at the full specs, but there is much delay. With that said, your drive has to be better over a direct connection (SATA I assume) verses USB.
 
Steen, your issue has me a little baffled... You've got a library that dwarfs the one I got with Silk but the Play engine is the same thing and I'm not having any of those issues; seems like it shouldn't matter what the size of the library is. I've got my Silk library on a 1 TB 7200rpm glyph drive over USB2.0 and it works flawlessly. Hopefully the steps you're taking clear that up.

I'm in the process of installing Komplete Ultimate at the moment and I realize now why I was told to move it to another HDD. The drive that the bundle came on is just for installation, probably the same thing that E/W said, and from what NI says in the install guide it won't function as a playback drive for streaming samples. I've got the sample libraries (the bulk of the bundle) going on the glyph drive with Silk, BFD and a few other smaller libraries and the actual plugs/virtual instruments going where they need to on my main drive so Cubase can find them. Got some errands to run and hoping that it's done by the time I get back, getting excited now!
 
Steenamaroo said:
Hey, thanks for the suggestions guys.
I did initially try their drive over usb 2, against their advice, just out of eagerness to test the new package and curiosity to see how it would perform.
When performance wasn't great I removed their drive from the enclosure and fitted it internally.
I'm sure it's not a high performance drive but it's 7200 speed so it can't be that bad, right?

I was doing some reading last night and a bunch of lads were saying moving to SSD didn't help.
I had a suspicion that would be the case as the play engine has a 'stream from hard drive' option that you can uncheck.
If you uncheck it it loads the currently used samples into memory, but there was no noticeable performance increase.

Since the library is the guts of 700gb, an SSD would be at least a few hundred quid and I'm not really fussed on spending that to find out those guys were right.

I might copy a few of the patches to one of my smaller SSDs and load them up from that out of interest. Might be worth a try.
Click to expand...

Are you supposed to use the drive directly? For NI Komplete, the drive provided is only for installation and isn't very durable, not enough for frequent use.
 
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