I got EWQLSO Silver. It's the cheapest symphonic library East West has, and it is fucking excellent. The sound is great, and the realism is pretty crazy.

For a comparison to EWQLSO and Garritan Personal Orchestra, listen to "String Quartet 2" on my myspace: http://www.myspace.com/parsonsmatt First is East West, second is Garritan.

Wow that is a huge leap in quality compared to GPO. Some of the higher string sounds are a bit grating though, but again, compared to the GPO sound library I'm impressed.

EWQL is decent. Silver is all 16 bit and has very minimal articulations though. I recommend platinum xp pro (what I use).

$200 vs $1000...

If I had the money I'd get the Vienna symphonic library though.

I'm probably going to get the VSL Complete Library sometime, for sure.

But anyway you have to think of it as an investment. The extra 800 is most definitely worth the much better samples and instruments and incomparably larger variety of articulations. Saving up $1,000 isn't so hard.

I completely agree, but EWQL is just a stepping stone for me. I needed something better than GPO, and I definitely can't afford Vienna yet. For the money, Silver is by far the best buy. Once I get some more cash, I'll start buying Vienna libraries.

I don't think Silver is the best buy for the money, it'd have to be Gold. There's a huge improvement in quality and it's not that much more.

I absolutely adore East West. I use it for virtually everything I do. Here's a couple of orchestra introduction pieces I've done for bands just using it; this one is for the band Archaea http://www.splen.co.uk/files/music/rand ... estral.mp3 and this one is for my band http://www.splen.co.uk/files/music/ales ... ecurse.mp3

The only problem is that I wouldn't rely on them for solo instruments. They don't use round robin triggering either so it can sound rather lifeless if you're not very careful, especially when rapidly hitting the same velocities.

Hey rexxz, are you using the PLAY engine or the Kontakt engine? I am having horrible issues with the PLAY engine.

What sort of problems are you having? I have Gold (standard, not pro or xp) with the Kontakt engine, and Platinum Pro XP with the PLAY engine.

Crashing, freezing, mainly. It works fine with two or three instruments/instances, but any more than that and the whole thing starts freaking out, and then takes the entire DAW down with it.

Sounds like memory issues to me.

i've yet to upgrade to the PLAY engine because i've heard so many similar stories, matt.

Now that I'm digging around, I too am finding stories like these... Glad to know its not just me, or my PC.

The computer I'm running on is a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 OCed to 2.7GHz, 4GB of RAM, and TinyXP. Nothing else exhibits these problems, and the system is more than adequate for EW Silver.

Yes, I know that it should be adequate, however what you're describing is symptomatic of a memory failure. You could have a RAM leak somewhere. Check your processes.

What should I be looking for? The problems occur even on a fresh boot.

See how much your DAW is using. When you run it + all your plugins that you normally use.