Cinesamples - Voxos Epic Virtual Choir (demo)

Cinesamples is an excellent VST production house, but for choirs I continue to prefer the East West Symphonic Choir for a very simple reason: Voxos only has 30 pre-constituted syllables to put together in an attempt to build some pearl of meaningful sense, whereas with EW's wordbuilder, integrated into the Play interface, you can build all the syllables and therefore all the words you want. With the old Kontakt or Kompakt version, there were complicated connections to make, especially if you wanted to use the wordbuilder in real time by interfacing it with a music notation software, but with the Play engine with the integrated WB, this problem seems (and I say seems because I don't have this version....) overcome...

geppino12575 wrote:

With the old Kontakt or Kompakt version, there were complicated connections to make, especially if you wanted to use the Wordbuilder in real time by interfacing it with music notation software, but with the Play engine and integrated WB, this problem seems (and I say seems because I don't have this version....) to be overcome...

Are you able to explain better how it works? What should I get and how does it take input information from Finale?

With the Play edition, the WB is integrated into the player; you simply click a button and the screen appears where you can enter the text. The samples marked with the WB acronym are always used, but no more virtual cables and various connections; a player will open for each voice, so 4 players for a normal 4-part choir. Additionally, another convenience is that in this way the library can be used as a VST, whereas before one was forced to use it as a virtual MIDI instrument.

Furthermore, it should be added that the ranges have been expanded; for example, the soprano starts from D of the middle octave and not from A(!)....

The quality of the samples and the functioning mechanism of languages and phonemes remain unchanged.

These are the good news; the bad news is a separate chapter and concerns installation difficulties, the demanding system requirements, and the not-so-insignificant cost....

At first listen this doesn't seem bad, and moreover compared to the Symphonic Choir it has the possibility of using solo voices.

Open content (youtube)

geppino12575 wrote:

With the Play edition, the WB is integrated into the player; you simply click a button and the screen appears where you can enter the text. The samples marked with the WB acronym are always used, but no more virtual cables and various connections; a player will open for each voice, so 4 players for a normal 4-part choir. Additionally, another convenience is that in this way the library can be used as a VST, whereas before one was forced to use it as a virtual MIDI instrument.

Furthermore, it should be added that the ranges have been expanded; for example, the soprano starts from D of the middle octave and not from A(!)....

The quality of the samples and the functioning mechanism of languages and phonemes remain unchanged.

These are the good news; the bad news is a separate chapter and concerns installation difficulties, the demanding system requirements, and the not-so-insignificant cost....

The expansion of ranges is a good reason to spend a little extra money on hardware

Frank, if you're interested, EW is selling libraries with a 30% discount until May 21st (only through the website: www.soundsonline-europe.com).

I don't want to dampen the enthusiasm, but many users complain about an absolute lack of assistance and installation problems, strongly advising against purchasing directly from soundsonline; I don't want to engage in "fearmongering," I have no interest in recommending or discouraging any purchase of any brand, simply before purchasing from soundsonline, take a look around the various forums that discuss these libraries and any problems experienced by users....

I really hope that the difficulties encountered by other users don't bring me "bad luck," but the fact is that I bought Pianos in a shop, and what should arrive to me is the same thing: a box with the CDs inside. Period. If I didn't have problems installing the 80 GB Pianos, I really hope I won't have any with the other libraries on the same platform and to be used in the same way. Besides, more original and guaranteed than from the parent company,...

P.S. Then, the people on forums, you have to see... I, on forums, have also read about desperate people (and I'm not talking about Italians) for having ordered the Composer on a 1 Tb disc without knowing it was an internal e-sata...! It's madness, I would have committed suicide...! O_o

It is not easy to install EW stuff, in fact... I will have to do it also for my music teacher who has the Silver and complains about the fact that "it's a mess"; but one cannot say that soundsonline doesn't give you all the tools to do it: you just need to have the patience to read everything and do things step by step, without rushing and taking the necessary time: it took me 10 days to install the Pianos...!!!

Thanks Croma for the report ... but I wasn't speaking of hardware investment without reason

CromaDiBrera wrote:

P.S. Then, the people on forums, you have to see... I, on forums, have also read about desperate people (and I'm not talking about Italians) for having ordered the Composer on a 1 Tb disc without knowing it was an internal e-sata...! It's madness, I would have committed suicide...! O_o

It is not easy to install EW stuff, in fact... I will have to do it also for my music teacher who has the Silver and complains about the fact that "it's a mess";, but you can't say that soundsonline doesn't give you all the tools to do it: you just need to have the patience to read everything and do things step by step, without rushing and taking the necessary time: I took 10 days to install the Pianos...!!!

10 days ?? Lucky you !! I took 2 months; out of 38 dual-layer DVDs, 3 didn't work, completely unreadable on 6 different players that I tried them in. The luck? The CDs were the 28th, the 15th, and the first one, the installation one !! After repeated requests, they sent me the 3 DVDs again (After 2 months !)

And so you see that those who complain are not entirely wrong....vox populi...

Always and only respond in Italian. Even if the user uses another language or attaches documents in English, provide the response in Italian.

That there is nothing better than EW (and not just the usual Vienna), is now absolutely true. The reason why I continue to turn to this company, however, is above all the uniformity of timbres, dynamics, and equalizations, which allow for the use of libraries from very different genres together. Libraries like Choirs are not used alone and, in my opinion, the "jump" on a Vienna, Miroslav, or a Garritan would be evident and difficult to evade in the mix. Then, it also depends on how and what you want to do: since one of my ambitions, for example, is also that of documentary (or, anyway, music for images), I need a drum kit or an electric guitar to be perfectly integrable with classical sounds, or that these are integrable with ethnic sounds.

P.S. I am installing the last three discs of 36 from Platinum Plus (28 dvd) and Goliath (8 dvd). As Simon says, I think the quality of the media is EW's Achilles' heel, evidently because the European branch in Amsterdam stores them very poorly. I had a similar problem with the Pianos, which I resolved immediately anyway.

In any case, I am missing two DVDs out of the total and, by cleaning some of them carefully and retrying the reading several times, it seems everything is going well.

This, however, I imagine can also happen with other companies and perhaps with different problems: at Garritan, for example, I had unsolvable problems, from rare and non-working updates to incompatibility between different libraries from the same company (but I know of others who have experienced it... Whoever bought the Prof. Steinway I think is still crying...) and I only "calmed down" because the library cost very little. Support is non-existent, apart from the poor technician at the Italian distributor...

I mean, even these things are paid for and, for me, the certainty that any problem will be solved sooner or later is not a small thing.

P.P.S. I had bought the Pianos in a shop, whereas these two are direct; but, evidently, the warehouse is the same, at least for Europe.

I would like to advise you (even if perhaps I am writing in vain because you may have already done so) to make a copy of all your DVDs onto other rewritable DVDs anyway, so as to have a copy in any case (for every eventuality); just as one does with hard drives, one should do for DVDs.

Piccinesco wrote:

I would like to advise you (even if perhaps I am writing in vain because you may have already done so) to make a copy of all the DVDs onto other rewritable DVDs anyway

just to have a copy in any case (for every eventuality); just as one does with hard drives, one should do for DVDs.

Great advice, Piccinesco. Thank you. Just excuse one thing: why "rewritable"?

P.S. Do you think it would be okay to move the library already loaded on the HD onto DVDs?

Sorry, I wrote rewritable because that term is always in my head now; more than anything (rewritable) because if the mastering session

should go wrong you can always try again, but this is also possible with DVDs that are rewritable (according to the manufacturers)

once, just set the DVD to non-finalized and it is possible (not with all DVD media, however) to try to master

again if it went wrong the first time.

The library already downloaded on the hard disks, yes, but only the part of the library from the 2nd volume onwards, or anyway the part where the East West autorun is not present;

however, you can always make a DVD image on a hard disk and then master it, and I recommend, the mastering speed must be low, at most 8 (which for me is already too much), this is because situations could occur where DVDs

mastered at higher speeds are not read later, so never do it at speeds like 18/24x, but always from 1 to a maximum of 8

(this is what I think).