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They do, both yearly and month to month.

Also, it's $29.99 a month for 7 collections of your choice, and you get a new one every three months.

$49.99 for everything (Gold versions).

And the introductory deal: right now, it's $29.99 for the "everything" package, and that price is good for the first year.

You can pay yearly, or month-to-month, but on month-to-month, if you cancel before your contract is up, you owe 50% of the cost of however many months you have left.

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Using this as a trial to see what I like, then cancelling later on and buying full price (to save money).

So far I'm absolutely in love with Solo Violin. Different legato types, easily accessible on the mod wheel, very easy to get some really melodic slurred leaps.

QL Ra is the only other download that finished. It seems pretty solid, but I'm really looking forward to QL Silk, which adds the much needed true legato. Gypsy I also want to check out, but from what I've seen, the instruments are a bit lackluster.

Also gonna grab Hollywood Brass, Strings, and Woodwinds. Not sure about if I'll end up buying Woodwinds, since I already have CineWinds CORE which may be hard to beat. No reason not to try it out though; it doesn't cost any extra! :tomatoface: The Strings are really what I'm excited for, since the available articulations are much more diverse than CS2. Brass is always nice, and EastWest is really good at their staccatos.

I really like the idea of using this subscription to cheaply try out these libraries and explore their potential before shelling out for Complete Composer's Collection (and because I'm trying them all, I get to pick exactly what I want/need in CCC). I don't think there's anything sadder than a composer buying a library he ends up displeased with. :lmassoff:

Good move, EW.

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Nah, nothing freezes. I started with Gypsy. I downloaded it, authorized it to the iLok. I tried to load an instrument and it said it couldn't verify the license. I deactivated the license, reactivated it, and then tried again. Same result. I tried doing it both directly on the computer and on the iLok, same result. Right now I'm trying a reinstall to see if that changes things.

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Finally got everything working.

On the Soundsonline support forums, there were people having issues, some having the same as me, so I'll share one hopefully helpful tip. Make sure you upgrade to the latest version of PLAY and install support files for everything that you're going to use, even if you haven't downloaded it yet. This will save you major headaches later.

I've downloaded Gypsy and it works just fine now.

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This looks reaaaaaaaaalllllllyy awesome! I'm tempted to just buy a month or two just to finish up a few projects with the samples i want.

Looking into this now but:

Are there any ensemble string/brass samples that are close mic'ed available in this package?

Does this work with offline studio pc's?

First: you can cancel whenever you want, but when you sign up you essentially sign up for a year, even though you only actually pay month to month.

First month is an additional one time setup fee of 29.99, so you pay $60 that first month.

If you cancel before the year is up after that, you pay 50% of what was remaining on your "contract". Just some stuff to keep in mind.

Ok, as for what's included, there was a list posted on the support forums:

The Dark Side

Fab Four

Ghostwriter

Goliath

Gypsy

Hollywood Strings Gold

Hollywood Brass Gold

Hollywood Orchestral Woodwinds Gold

Hollywood Orchestral Percussion Gold

Ministry Of Rock 1

Ministry Of Rock 2

Silk

Symphonic Choirs Gold

Symphonic Orchestra Gold Strings

Symphonic Orchestra Gold Brass

Symphonic Orchestra Gold Woodwinds

Symphonic Orchestra Gold Percussion

Pianos Gold Bechstein D-280

Pianos Gold Bosendorfer 290

Pianos Gold Steinway D

Pianos Gold Yamaha C7

ProDrummer Spike Stent (April 23)

ProDrummer Joe Chiccarelli (April 23)

Ra

Solo Violin

Spaces (coming in May)

Stormdrum 2 Pro

Stormdrum 3

Voices of Passion

56’ Stratocaster

Adrenaline

BT Breakz

BT Twisted Textures

Drum n Bass

Electronica

Funky Ass Loops

Guitar & Bass

Hypnotica

Ill Jointz

Joey Kramer Drums

Percussion adventures 1

Percussion adventures 2

Phat & Phunky

Public Enemy

Scoring Tools

Smoov Grooves

Steve Stevens Guitar

Stormdrum 1 Loops

Stormdrum 1 MuItiSamples

Symphonic Adventures

I'm liking it so far, but it obviously takes forever to download these libraries, at least some of them. I imagine you can run it in an offline PC, but you'd have to have license installed on that PC and then it expires once a month - so it would have to be able to check to make sure you made your payment and your license was renewed. Hope that helps.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Update!

 

I've been using these libraries for a little while now. 

 

Hollywood Strings: Decent sound, patch format is horrendous. There are many specialty articulation patches (many) which is wonderful, but the master patches (which I opt for in libraries) are terrible. The keyswitches will change articulations, but don't have independent behavior like legato selection and CC response. Basically, the keyswitch patches have gimped functionality, and if you want it to feel better, you have to use the multi-patch workflow. I don't care for said workflow, so I will sadly not be downloading the rest of Hollywood Orchestra (especially because I already have much more functional Kontakt orchestral libraries, even if the features are not as expansive). I even find the old EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Gold more intuitively usable than Hollywood. C+ recommendation on sound alone.

 

Quantum Leap Silk: Beautiful. Love every bit of it. Has some great plucks, winds, and bows. The articulation switching is nice and convenient, and the legato scripting is pretty great. They took many instruments from Ra and added legato, which is great too. I can see myself using Silk a lot in the future. A+ recommendation.

 

Quantum Leap Ra: Ra would be just every bit as perfect as Silk (with a different range of instrumentation) if it had legato scripting in its winds. That Shakuhachi has a nice timbre, but it just can not connect notes (though, it is great for "accents" if you're just doing a couple shaku notes for flair). Still, the lack of legato scripting is outweighed by the fact that all the percussion and plucked instruments are really solid, with lots of articulations. B+ recommendation.

 

Quantum Leap Solo Violin: This is a mixed bag, kind of like Hollywood Orchestra. If you like multi-patch workflow, it's great. If not, skip it. However, I do find the legato mod switch patch to be very useful; it'll switch legato types using mod as a selector. This is great for keyboarding nice violin parts, but it only has legato, and the rest of the articulations like sforzando will not be offered in the same place. Basically, the great sound and few useful patches make up for its lack of good keyswitching. B recommendation.

 

Quantum Leap Gypsy: Amazing. Guitars have a nice timbre, though I can't shake the feeling there's some slight portamento in there. The accordions are well-sampled, and the violin is amazing, I'd say much better as an all-in-one instrument than the Solo Violin. It has glissandi, fast legato, bow change, etc. but with the addition of all the other necessary articulations such as pizzicato, staccato, sforzando, etc. The sound is not as "concert hall solo violin", but to me it's more useful, and more evenly humanizable as a result. A+ recommendation.

 

Quantum Leap Symphonic Choirs: This is actually a lot better than I expected it to be. Different ensemble types like adults and boys choirs, different syllables, all keyswitchable, really great sounding dynamic crossfade on the mod wheel. It's really easy to get nice choir backdrops for chorale or just block harmony. There's no legato, but it doesn't really matter. I find sample choir legato to be too exaggerated in most cases. As long as the notes bleed a little, it sounds great.  A recommendation.

 

Next on the list is to try Stormdrum 2 PRO, Voices of Passion, and Stormdrum 3!

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Neblix, I completely agree about the Hollywood series. EWQLSO is so much simpler to use, and I have had almost no luck with the Hollywood stuff. The master keyswitch stuff in EWQLSO makes things very easy to work with.

 

To add to your list, Ghostwriter, The Dark Side, and Stormdrum 3 all have a lot of very interesting sounds. Stormdrum 3 has some great stuff in it - try out the Dragon Ensemble.

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I've never really understood why EastWest bothered with keyswitch patches at all in the Hollywood series. The libraries are clearly designed to be used in a multi-patch configuration, and the keyswitch patches are inflexible/incomplete and seem like an afterthought.

 

Contrast with VSL, which is set up so that it's extremely impractical to do anything besides keyswitching, which is an annoyance for me now that I prefer multi-patches and have set my workflow up to make the Hollywood series easy to use.

 

You just can't win.  :<

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I've never really understood why EastWest bothered with keyswitch patches at all in the Hollywood series. The libraries are clearly designed to be used in a multi-patch configuration, and the keyswitch patches are inflexible/incomplete and seem like an afterthought.

 

Contrast with VSL, which is set up so that it's extremely impractical to do anything besides keyswitching, which is an annoyance for me now that I prefer multi-patches and have set my workflow up to make the Hollywood series easy to use.

 

You just can't win.  :<

 

Different strokes for different folks, but honestly, I would've loved to use the Hollywood Orchestra if it had good master patches. I'm all about software responsiveness instead of I/O systems, and VSL gets that really well. It also would have made my subscription even more worth it. It's also not a huge development sink to do some better scripting unless it's the case where PLAY is so bad that they can't even do good master patch behavior without redesigning it.

 

Makes you wonder how far EastWest's instruments would be if they stuck with Kontakt's platform from the beginning. But that's not really important anymore; they're not gonna budge off of PLAY (but they seemed to have eased up on the iLok bullshit with the cloud). I can at least appreciate how good libraries like Silk and Gypsy are, even if Hollywood is kinda eh.

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  • 9 months later...

Getting a new audio pc within the next couple of weeks and I currently budgeted an upgrade for my EWQLSO Gold to Platinum.  However, for a little more I could subscribe to the CC for a full year which is appealing (i've been dying to get my hands on Gypsy, Silk, Symphonic Choirs and Goliath for years). I really just want to upgrade EWQLSO in order to get the close mic samples and I am aware that Platinum EWQLSO is not included in the base subscription plan but would anyone be able to tell me if the Hollywood Gold libraries include close mic configurations?  I'm only finding the differences in included articulations between the different versions and the few people that i'm finding talking about close mic's seem to have bought platinum as far as i can tell.  

Edit: Finally found it.  If the information isn't too dated it looks like close mics are Diamond only for Hollywood.  

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7 hours ago, Garpocalypse said:

Edit: Finally found it.  If the information isn't too dated it looks like close mics are Diamond only for Hollywood.  

Yes, this is correct. Gold has only one mic position. I believe it's the main mics for strings and brass and the mid mics for woodwinds. Not sure about percussion.

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Man this would seem like really cool addition to sound libraries for compositions. Too expensive though as it is kind of an "rent" for those libraries. But then again about paying rent.. living on an apartment (in which i am currently living) costs 400€ a month for rent and i will never get those back. But i could keep the audio compositions safe that i had composed from renting that for merely 25€ a month, compared to the fact that i will never "obtain" this apartment even though if i had payed forever this rent month by month. And i couldn't compose with an computer if i didn't even have a bloody place to use this computer and a source of electricity would i now? Ugh.. I should at least try out the 10-day free limited trial with 3 of the products of my choosing. I would go with some sort of Brass ensemble library and if there were any good vocal choirs (with working wordbuilder stuff that would give opportunity to build words sang by choirs virtually) i definitely would choose that

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