Are East West plugins good these days?

Plugins
1

Very many years ago, I purchased an East West lib using their Play engine, and the results were not good. I’m not sure if it was buggy, or if it was a performance or configuration issue, but that was well over a decade ago.

Last year there was this thread on Opus. There’s no indication of whether or not the problem has been solved, or if it affects additional EW libs: Beware EastWest OPUS - #16 by dhj

I’m considering buying RA. Do other have success with the Play engine and EW libs in Gig Performer? (I’m on an M1 Mac) Is their stuff efficient for CPU and RAM (loading just the selected instruments?)

2

I had an EW plugin years ago but I always had trouble with it (though I no longer remember what)

I switched to Spitfire Audio for orchestral stuff a few years ago for the cases where the libraries that come with Kontakt weren’t sufficient.

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3

I used EW Quantum Leap samples with excellent results in GigaStudio, back before Kontakt existed. That was for composing music to picture, rather than live. Nick and company developed Play, rather than license Kontakt, I couldn’t get it to work well, but those were early days. When Tascam stopped supporting GigaStudio, my sound library became obsolete. :weary_face:

4

Ahh, remember the old Chicken Systems Translator! Hah!

Yep, Gigastudio was the king of samplers/sample libraries, I think because it was a pioneer in streaming from disc.

Then Kontakt adopted that (it initially could support Gigastudio sample libraries) and soon overwhelmed Gigastudio. (That’s my short-hand understanding of this history, anyway. Could be a bit off).

Another thing to consider about East West Plugins is they tend to be very ram heavy. I don’t know whether the Play system has the same ram conservation tools (ram purging, etc.) that Kontakt has.

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5

I have recently stopped using them due to the excessive timeout used by the Opus Player. If you don’t have an internet connection at a gig, it can slow down .gig file loading considerably. It’s a shame as some of the brass stuff especially is really good.

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6

This is a concern with every library that sniffs for licenses over the internet. The day their server dies, do we lose our sounds?

My Spitfire libraries went nuts the other day for a bit. I had just purchased a couple of new ones, and then I discovered my live machine from the Internet. Hopefully, it was just a one time check on the new library, rather than an ongoing thing.

(FWIW, I got Spitfire’s Epic Chorus and Shakespeare Organ, which are both simple and lightweight, but they sound very good. I might want deeper libraries for film scoring or as a professional organist, but they are enough to tell a live audience that, “this is a pipe organ and chorus” with the flexibility that I need.)