I just happened to stumble upon this thread and am baffled by some of the comments, especially from DG.

What the hell is everybody's gripe with the Garritan violin? To this date, the Garritan Stadivari is about the only violin I've heard that could pass off as real in a recording when playing expressive passages. If you want to hear a very lousy and sickly sounding violin, check out Gigaviolin, a lame attempt to do what Garritan did.

The VSL solo string demos weren't as convincing. Some of that had to do with the cellos, though some of the more recent tests Beat Kaufman do sound pretty good. Timbre-wise the Garritan sounds pretty damn good too. I'm not hearing the same sample recording playing back time and time again, as I have in the VSL demos. The sound is full-bodied, and even the high notes which I originally thought sounded a bit off seem like they may have been corrected.

Based on other things DG has said, I'm not sure I can take what he says very seriously. For instance his comment about Macs being too slow compared to PCs. Geez. My 2GHz WinXP PC can take 2 minutes to find a file, the Mac does the same thing in one second. My old Apple II can render about 10 frames of game graphics and sound, while the PC takes that long do draw a 6"x6" transparent blue square. PC takes several seconds just to display a list of the ~70 installed apps, takes 35 seconds to delete 3000 emails, takes a few seconds to update icons with their pictures, takes minutes to switch to using virtual memory, and the list of snail-like behavior goes on and on. The modern PowerPC CPU at the same clock rate averages twice the speed of that gawd awful archaic 1975 Intel architecture. Not to mention Windows has about 30 bugs to every 1 Apple has. So I don't know how much credibility I put in the words of DG.

These massive GB sample libraries are going to collapse under their own weight. I remember how long it took for VSL to get a short little solo string demo done (Schubert quartet). And I haven't seen any other VSL solo string piece that moved beyond that Schubert one in all this time. So much for productivety.

-Elhardt

@Another User said:

What the hell is everybody's gripe with the Garritan violin? To this date, the Garritan Stadivari is about the only violin I've heard that could pass off as real in a recording when playing expressive passages.

[8-)]

@elhardt said:

.......So I don't know how much credibility I put in the words of DG.

-Elhardt

However, judging by what you think an orchestra playing Beethoven sounds like, I could easily say "right back at ya". [:D]

DG

@elhardt said:

For instance his comment about Macs [... blabla ...] twice the speed of that gawd awful archaic 1975 Intel architecture

what you are doing here ist worst kind of tendentious commenting as it could be found during the nineties in the .mac-newsgroups ... probably all macs are moving to intel now because it is such an inferior processor-platform.
SCNR, christian

@elhardt said:

I just happened to stumble upon this thread and am baffled by some of the comments, especially from DG.

What the hell is everybody's gripe with the Garritan violin? To this date, the Garritan Stadivari is about the only violin I've heard that could pass off as real in a recording when playing expressive passages. If you want to hear a very lousy and sickly sounding violin, check out Gigaviolin, a lame attempt to do what Garritan did.

The VSL solo string demos weren't as convincing. Some of that had to do with the 'cellos, though some of the more recent tests Beat Kaufman do sound pretty good. Timbre-wise the Garritan sounds pretty damn good too. I'm not hearing the same sample recording playing back time and time again, as I have in the VSL demos. The sound is full-bodied, and even the high notes which I originally thought sounded a bit off seem like they may have been corrected.

Based on other things DG has said, I'm not sure I can take what he says very seriously. For instance his comment about Macs being too slow compared to PCs. Geez. My 2GHz WinXP PC can take 2 minutes to find a file, the Mac does the same thing in one second. My old Apple II can render about 10 frames of game graphics and sound, while the PC takes that long do draw a 6"x6" transparent blue square. PC takes several seconds just to display a list of the ~70 installed apps, takes 35 seconds to delete 3000 emails, takes a few seconds to update icons with their pictures, takes minutes to switch to using virtual memory, and the list of snail-like behavior goes on and on. The modern PowerPC CPU at the same clock rate averages twice the speed of that gawd awful archaic 1975 Intel architecture. Not to mention Windows has about 30 bugs to every 1 Apple has. So I don't know how much credibility I put in the words of DG.

These massive GB sample libraries are going to collapse under their own weight. I remember how long it took for VSL to get a short little solo string demo done (Schubert quartet). And I haven't seen any other VSL solo string piece that moved beyond that Schubert one in all this time. So much for productivety.

-Elhardt

Hmm.... I was going to get the sharp quill out, but i see Herb, Daryl and CM got in first.

Elhart, it's obvious by now you've never played in an orchestra. If by some erroneous assumption on my part you actually HAVE played, then i can only suggest you get the ears waxed with a fire hose or something. The technology of this effort looks interesting, but then so does a lot of technology these days, including the work and 'RESULTS' coming from the VSL VI. From an ex orchestral player's perspective, the strad doesn't sound like a violin. That doesn't mean i hate GG, or wish him ill, simply that it doesn't do it for me. There will be plenty who do want this type of product. But for you to suggest that more than one of these fine fellows has little or no idea of what a violin sounds like, is to suggest that the majority of astronauts would rather pass wind in a spacesuit than not. And i can ssure you, that the gentlemen in question have a shedload of experience between them that gives them more than enough authority to question the 'playability' or 'tone' of any instrument thrust in front of them.

And then you gleefully jumped in on the perennial Mac versus Pc debate. How boring are you. We were having a quiet laugh and a joke, full of IRONY, when you suddenly strap on your gladiator tribute convention codpiece, and start weilding the plastic axe, roaring like a kitten stuck in a public toilet. The debate continues to be nonsensical. Like an ocean wave, one surges forward, then the other. Perhaps you're still on the first wave, and have just fallen off your surfboard, but sone of us have paddled back out to catch the next curler, more than once. Why, us chaps are well past puberty. How about you?

'Massive GB sample libraries are going to collapse under their own weight.'

What a lot of manure. The sheer volume of options and articulations available, enable us to fine tune, to a much greater level, a sense of realism in our work. You might be content with a synthy string section, and that's your choice, but at the moment, you're performing the equivalent of standing in the showroom of a Rolls Royce collection waving a ford flag. And different structures of libraries will serve different purposes, although i will suggest that once the hardware and OS software catches up, and that's not far off now, then a Terabyte of samples will seem............modest.

For what it's worth, GG is a decent chap who has contributed much to the development of samples, as have Herb, Dietz, and the team here at 'Rolls Royce central'. I know for a fact he's made a very worthy contribution to a project in Edinburgh for people who aren't as fortunate as us.
But, we have our opinion on what is the sound we hear, and how an instrument is played, and some have the experience to know the difference.

I hope you think about what you wrote in more depth, and realise some of us chaps disagree with you completely . You like the Strad, go get it, and if it suits YOUR needs and you think it's ok, then you're in front. But it's YOUR opinion the Strad is ok for you, and OUR opinion it's not for us.

As for your attrocious maths when it came to counting the number of demos (29, and that's official), you're either prone to exaggeration, have an intent to downplay the VSl's major profile in the sample performance community including the playability and enormous potential of the solo instruments, limited only by the USERS's skills, or your maths teacher is going to be very dissapointed at the end of your semester.

@herb said:

Before you do propaganda for other developers here, please do a little more research. There are 29 dedicated solostring demos on the Vienna Instruments Solostrings demo page.

I'm not doing propaganda for other developers. I have no interest in seeing the Garritan succeed. Quite the opposite acutally. However, my statement about not seeing anything in the solo strings that has gone much beyond the Schubert demo has now been twisted. Throwing a solo violin in with orchestra or doing a trill demo is hardly what I was talking about. I did however find a Ravel quartet demo which does sound pretty good. That's about the only other major solo strings demo I've come across since the Schubert one came out. Thus my point stands.

@DG said:

However, judging by what you think an orchestra playing Beethoven sounds like, I could easily say "right back at ya". [:D]
DG

I know very well what an orch playing Beethoven sounds like and how mine differs. What I did was very difficult to do because they're all my sounds synthesized from scratch. That's quite a different area than using canned instrument recordings which anybody can do. That was my point of that post.

@cm said:

what you are doing here ist worst kind of tendentious commenting as it could be found during the nineties in the .mac-newsgroups ... probably all macs are moving to intel now because it is such an inferior processor-platform.
SCNR, christian

What I'm doing is pointing out is that DG is making erroneous comments. I'm an assembly language programmer and even designed and built my own processor out of descrete TTL. I've programmed professional apps in 68K, PowerPC, and Intel assembly. I know fully well what an archaic CPU the Intel is. I've since heard other developers complaining that their code ported from PowerPC to Intel is running sometimes more than two times slower even when the Intel is running a slightly faster clock rate. Apple may have moved to the Intel because Motorola is not able to keep up in clock rates or delivers, or Apple may want more PC apps ported to Mac or run under Windows on an Intel Mac. Much of this is about the computer illiterate public and their perceptions that CPU processing power is based only on clockrate. Fact is the PowerPC is a modern architecture, the Intel is not.

@hermitage59 said:

Elhart, it's obvious by now you've never played in an orchestra. If by some erroneous assumption on my part you actually HAVE played, then i can only suggest you get the ears waxed with a fire hose or something. The technology of this effort looks interesting, but then so does a lot of technology these days, including the work and 'RESULTS' coming from the VSL VI. From an ex orchestral player's perspective, the strad doesn't sound like a violin. That doesn't mean i hate GG, or wish him ill, simply that it doesn't do it for me. There will be plenty who do want this type of product. But for you to suggest that more than one of these fine fellows has little or no idea of what a violin sounds like, is to suggest that the majority of astronauts would rather pass wind in a spacesuit than not. And i can ssure you, that the gentlemen in question have a shedload of experience between them that gives them more than enough authority to question the 'playability' or 'tone' of any instrument thrust in front of them.

I questioned why the G Strad is being bashed here and I still haven't gotten an answer. You say it doesn't sound like a violin, DG says it sounds like a racket. Talk about over exaggeration. Nobody has given a reason why it doesn't sound like a violin or what the problem is with it? It of course sounds like a violin and I believe Garritan and many others in the industry also have some authority too. When somebody doesn't provide firm facts they often result to sarcastic and insulting comments, or go on about unrelated things, much like has been done here.

And my comment about the massive GB sample libraries collapsing under their own weight isn't necessarily a lot of manure. The more options and articulations the slower and less real-time the library becomes and the longer it takes to accomplish anything. I supported that claim by the amount of time it took for the Schubert quartet demo to be done, and the almost absence of any other solo string quartet demos. And it's a complaint I've heard others make.

>>YOUR opinion the Strad is ok for you, and OUR opinion it's not for us.<<

And when I asked why this is the case, I got nothing but insults and a lot of handwaving to try to distract me.

>>As for your attrocious maths when it came to counting the number of demos (29, and that's official)<<

As I've stated in another post and my original post, I was commenting on the lack of sophisticated solo string demos that moved beyond the Schubert quartet demo. I know there are simple little demos displaying different articulations and such. Those aren't complex string quartet demos. If only people could comprehend and read my original points, stop twisting what I say, and actually answer questions, then these threads wouldn't get so out of hand.

My math or math(s) skills are just fine. People's reading comprehension skills are the problem.

So for now I'm going away understanding that the G Strad is no good because people here with authority say so, and I need to clean the wax out of my ears, and things about Intel vs Mac, synthesized strings, my math skills, Ford vs Rolls, etc. Well that really cleared things up.

-Elhardt

BTW, when it comes to math skills, so far I've come across a total of 41 solo string demos. So for those who thought there were 29, you're MATH(s) teachers aren't going to be very proud. I should point out that 29 of them must be relatively new and don't show up in the links to solo string demos and I have never come across them before. The solo strings links on the VSL site take you either to a page with 11 demos, or another page with 12 demos (all the same as the first 11 plus one more). It's a rather confusing, redundant and illogical site. Too many overlapping products under different series of sample sets leading to customer confusion and more money to spend.

@esperlad said:

I would like to see an actual second violin.

Ditto. I am very happy with VI Solo Violin, but would love to have an alternative Violin, Viola and Cello, so that String Quintets and Sextets could be much more authentically filled out with tonal variety.

However, given the cost (which probably would be at least double the current Solo Strings collection, possibly more since it might sell less), I shan't hold my breath! I'll just use filters and other tricks.

elhardt, I'm almost tempted to answer your trolling, but as I'd be very surprised to learn that you own any VSL products (as you don't need no stinking samples), I can't be bothered.

Good luck with your synthesis

DG