PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Seeking guidance with orchestral sample software

I've been looking to purchase a low cost, good quality orchestral sampler. The two I've been considering is Garritan Personal Orchestra and IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philarmonik. Ik Multimedia is actually having a sale for the Total Workstation XL Bundle, which includes the Miroslav Philarmonik, for $199. Anybody familiar with both the Garritan PO and IK's Philarmonik?
Which has better sound?
Which is easier to use?
Do both makers offer tech support?

Thank you

Tho I rarely use orchestral sample's, and thu can not help you with your question, I would just like to point out the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra a free .sfz format library that sounds fine to me. You can also grab a .sf2 version from HERE.

I hope this helps some.....

I've got them both, and prefer GPO 4. The main reason isn't sound, but convenience. Miroslav loads a lot slower on my machine. I also really like the sound of the woodwinds in GPO - in particular the flute and oboe.

GPO also uses keyswitches to toggle articulations, so you can load an instrument on a single MIDI channel, and get different articulations by pressing MIDI keys. Miroslav requires loading the different articulations onto different MIDI channels, which is much less convenient.

I also found the GPO sounds more "playable" from the keyboard.

As a result, I really haven't spent a lot of time going through Miroslav. But every time I do, it seems I end up coming back to GPO instead.

I don't want to give the impression that Miroslav doesn't have some great sounds in it. Here's something I put together using the Miroslav solo violin: Miroslav Solo Violin Test

It took a lot of work to get it to that point, but I think it's a nice example of what Miroslav is capable of. But it's also tailored to show off particular sounds of that instrument.

Looking through the Miroslav library, I can find a lot of sounds that are particularly good. The solo bassoon/short is expressive with a pleasant woody sound. The solo english horn is pleasant, but the vibrato trails off sooner than I'd like. The solo oboe expr 1 has an emotional sound. The cello section is lush lush, and the second viola section has a marvelous vibrato. The solo flugelhorn has some iffy notes, but it's really nice. And the list goes on.

I'm also m not entirely thrilled by all the sounds in GPO, either. In particular, the brass seems weak to me.

But if I had to pick a single library, I'd go with GPO. It's got some very nice sounds, and I think it's got the most bang for the buck.

Thank you very much. I will look into it.

What is the difference between .sfz and .sf2 files? Also, can you use these in RealBand and/or ProTools? Does it come with its own player or can you import these into PT's Xpand, or other player?

First, thank you for your reply and sorry it took me a bit to write back. I listened to the Miroslav violin solo that you produced and the sound is very nice. Not being very good on the keyboard, I am somewhat limited as far as playing a piece. However, I am a composer, have a very creative mind, and want to go beyond my current boundaries. In addition to sound quality, which, from your writing, it seems that Miroslav could be quite as good as GPO, I am looking for ease of use, and if needed, being able to speak to someone from tech support who are as readily available to answer questions as BIAB people.
Also, I'd be using this in RealBand and/or Pro Tools, which I forgot to mention on my first note, and as such, are both GPO and Miroslav compatible with both DAWs?

To summarize:
Looking into GPO vs IK Miroslav, which:
1 - is more 'user friendly' (putting aside speed and convenience)
2 - offers good tech support
3 - is compatible with both RealBand and PT?

On the side, I know that Groove 3 has tutorial videos on SampleTank, which would be the player through which you load Miroslav's sounds. Are there tutorial videos on GPO?

The .sf and .sf2 refer to SoundFont files, developed by Creative Labs. .sf2 is the second version of the format. They're basically a format for holding sampled instruments. They contain sampled sounds, and instruments composed of those samples. The instruments can specifies how samples are mapped to keys - samples can be assigned to ranges of keys, and also be triggered by velocity. There is additional information for the instrument as well - panning, low frequency oscillators, and so on.

One SoundFont file can contain one or more instruments, which can be made up of one or more samples.

An .sfz is similar in function, but consists of a set of files. The instrument file is a plain text file consisting of a description of what samples are mapped to the instrument's keyboard.

Where .sfz primarily differs from .sf is that the samples are not embedded in the instrument's description, stand-alone files. So if an .sfz instrument has 12 samples associated with it, you'll also have 12 separate .wav or .ogg file as well.

The SoundFont file format was pretty popular for a while, since Creative Labs used it to as the primary format for their SoundBlaster cards.

There are a number of free players available for each format. How well they implement the formats. I use the free sfz player to play SoundFonts from my DAW (Reaper). I had trouble running it with multiple instances - it would start crackling and dropping voices. I'm now running the multi-core build version, which runs fine. By default, it runs in "low quality" mode, so be sure to set Quality setting higher.

The violin demo was put together by initially auto-generating the melody in BiaB, and then importing the MIDI track into my DAW. It's got a "piano roll" display, which is something that I initially abhorred, but for editing MIDI data turns out to be more convenient than standard notation. I added the all the runs, slides, and adjustments there. I had loaded a bunch of different articulations on different MIDI channels, and changed the articulations as I felt appropriate. For example, the short runs alternated between the legato patch on channel 1 and the staccato patch on channel 2. I'd put in a bunch of slides via the mod wheel, adding the curves in manually. I replaced a number of those when I found one of the violin samples had a nice slur.

In total, I probably futzed around with that part for over 12 hours. But it was all done via mouse - no MIDI keyboard was used at any point.

If I've got a single melody line to enter, I'll use BiaB. If I've got something more complicated, I'll use Noteflight. The "free" version of Noteflight only allows a limited number of scores, but it works fine for me. Once I've mocked it up in Noteflight, I'll export it and load it into my DAW.

If I'm particularly lazy, I'll export it as MusicXML and import it into Finale's free NotePad notation program, and export the results as a MIDI file with Enable Human Playback set. It does a nice job interpreting the dynamics - especially things like trills, which can be tedious to enter by hand.

Here's a quick video review of GPO4.

I'm not sure what you consider "user friendly", so I'm not sure how to answer that question.

I've had to deal with MakeMusic (which purchased Garritan) the other week. There was an updated, but when I logged on to the site, I couldn't find it under the "updates" list. When I tried to contact tech support, it required that I enter the product I had... but Garritan wasn't on the list. They got back to me within a day explaining where the file was (by then I'd found it) and promised to fix the issues with their site.

I've not dealt with IK for support.

The only issue with using GPO4 in RealBand is that GPO uses the mod wheel to control volume. RealBand and BiaB treat the mod wheel as a LFO modulator, and by default set the controller to 0, which silences the instrument. To get around it, you need to insert a mod wheel event at the start of the track to turn the mod wheel back up.

I just loaded a Philharmonik flute as a melody instrument, and it works just fine.

Did that answer your questions?

I have the free version of IK SampleTank, which allows you to import samples. I believe Sample Tank can convert some sample formats. If I download these sample files and try importing them into SampleTank, is it better to try the .sf2 files rather than the .sfz?
Anyway, I'm getting into a totally new area here. I've worked for the past few years only with BIAB, and with some limitations. I now have PT and love its editing capabilities. I'm slowly building my knowledge base in all areas of music production, and I appreciate very much the information you provided.
What I mean by these sound players being 'user friendly' is that some of these have words, or abbrev. that at present, I don't know what they mean (macros, envelopes,etc), and without a user manual, or video to teach you, I'm clueless as to what they are there for.
If the free samples don't work for me, I am considering looking into IK Philarmonic. It has twice as many samples, and there is a lot of learing material available.

Thank you again for the information. I'll try importing these free samples and take it from there.