I spent a lot of time scouring the internet for good, free sounds. Part of that was because I didn't have the money to purchase a decent library, and another part was just the acquisition syndrome where you "gotta get them all." I finally decided to stop when I noticed that I was spending a huge chunk of time looking for the "perfect" sound, and never making any music with what I had.

Although I can't say that my sounds are professional, but I really like the sound of the Garritan Personal Orchestra - especially the woodwinds. I also like how lightweight the library is, compared to some other stuff.

The main source of disappointment is the solo string instruments. I've heard some people get great sounds out of it, but I've not been able to do that. In particular, I with the solo strings had a more expressive, wider vibrato. I'm hoping that Garritan puts out an inexpensive "Advanced Strings" library at some point.

As a sidebar, I see that the top items being voted on for Garritan's next library are "Advanced Strings" (28.5%) and "Choir" (28.3%). This pretty much matches what people have been asking for from RealTracks as well.

I've got Miroslav Philharmonik, which has some nice solo strings. It may just be my machine, but it seems to take forever to load up, so I usually just bail at that point and rework the orchestration for woodwinds.

Hrm... Looks like Quantum Leap has a fairly inexpensive solo violin. Too bad it uses iLok (and I don't have any money). I'd still prefer to get a Garritan library, partly because they don't have nasty authentication, and partly because I could get it through PG.

I just got JABB, so I haven't formed much opinion about that yet. My initial impression is that it's doesn't feel as playable as I was hoping - it feels more like a SoundFont filled with solid sounds, but not really the sort of expression that you expect sound library. I suspect that I really need to dig deeper into the library, but I'm working with other stuff right now.

JABB actually has a nice arco bass that I've been playing around with - something that's currently lacking in BiaB. Not wonderful, mind you - just nice. I haven't had time to compare it with the one in GPO, though.

For MIDI fingerpicked guitar, I've used the SoniVox Taylor Acoustic Guitar. It's also got sampled up/down/chuck strums, so that's nice, too. Putting in MIDI guitar parts is pretty tedious, because it's got to be done (or at least edited) in piano roll mode so that the strings sustain correctly. And the chords have to be voiced properly, or it sounds stupid. But with a bit of work, simple MIDI guitar parts really can be very good.

There are a lot of pretty good guitar SoundFonts out there.

Keep in mind that a lot of my selection is based on what's affordable, not what sounds best. There are some awesome sound libraries out there, but they're out of my price range.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?