Quantum Leap Colussus? Good Quality or Ripoff?

[Shadix]

$535 seems like a pretty hefty price for a samplekit, even if it not only contain 32gb of samples but pretty much that whole variety of sounds you can spend oodles of money just hunting for.

My question is, has anyone used this? I suppose you could say I'm afraid that what I am going to be getting is equivalent to a really good soundfont bank, where some instrument groups have good samples while others lack drastically. Then the question of industry viability comes in. Are the instrument sets good enough?

[Geoffrey Taucer]

Most of the instrument sets are good enough.

I use collosus when I don't have a specific library dedicated to the instruments I'm looking for, and it almost always has something that will suffice. Some of the patches are absolutely excellent, some are merely passable, but on the whole I'd say it's worth the investment.

[Hy Bound]

Colossus is great! Some of the samples in there are probably not exactly what you're looking for when you go to choose that instrument (Didgeridoo for example) but as far as quality-quantity goes, its quite high quality samples of any instrument you don't already have and then some. I very highly recommend it, but if you're looking for specifics, I would go with one of the specialized EWQL products. Seriously, its expensive stuff, but you won't find any higher quality kits unless you get into the 8 grand arena of spending. You might as well plunk down the bigger money for EWQL now then spend a medium amount of money on something you'll need to replace with more expensive stuff later.

Basically, I use Colossus extensively and its more than worth the money.

[big giant circles]

There's also Goliath, which is the same thing (except with a bosendorfer piano) and uses the PLAY engine instead of the kompakt sampler thing.

Also, remember. It's buy one get one free at GC. So now $535 will buy you two HQ plugins.

[OverCoat]

IIRC Colossus is an amalgamation of all of their sample libraries, made like a complete GM bank, so you can make teh good midi rips

[zircon]

Nope soc, it isn't. About half of it consists of PARTS of their other libraries, and definitely not ALL their libraries (nowhere even close.) The rest is recorded new for Colossus. Also, it's not arranged into GM format except for a single menu at the bottom, and imo that's one of the least useful features, since there are no articulation choices etc. You normally browse it by going to the instrument group and then a subcategory, if any. So for example, "Guitars, "Basses", "Drums"..

IMO, Colossus is nice, and a good starting-off point if you don't already have a lot of good samples. The ethnic stuff is the high point, and the drums and pianos are good as well, but a lot of the other stuff ranges in quality. Some of the patches just don't sound all that great. The guitars are not as good as dedicated guitar plugins, the synths are not as good as dedicated synth plugins, and so on and so forth. However, the level of quality is high overall so I think it's worth getting. I'd wait for a sale though. East West does them ALL the time and you should be able to get Colossus for several hundred off list.