Are software synths the answer?

[KenW]

Can someone offer quick guidance? I've no experience with recording kit but use notation software - Sibelius on a Mac with OSX. My interest is in getting the sheet music out but seriously want to hear 'true' sounds of the intruments I'm writing for! I would like to achieve this without extra hardware as I use a laptop. Do software synths achieve what I want? Do they work well? Which ones? - I want orchestral and vocal sounds.
Can someone give me the background to start me off please?

[samplemaniac]

yes they are reply for list

[Chavez]

Running good sounds for sequencing on your laptop by softsynths? Good sounds (heavlily depending on what u call good sounds) from a computer comes - for me - from samples/soft samplers. You can surely get a lot of vocals, strings and pianos (and thousands of more sounds) from a softsynth, but the quality aint that good I think. But then again - it all depends on your criterias an in what kind of music u wanna use them. Currently Im using my Korg Trinity as a sound module when Im trying to make "Aqoustic" pieces like piano, guitar and so on. The choirsounds is good, but they can never come close to sampled choir or real choir. And since u have a laptop I guess u dont have the proper soundcard to take full advantage of sampled choirs and other "Aqoustic" samples fully. Running a sequencer-based recording from a laptop only is in my mind not concidered good enough. At least not on my Lap (a pentium III, 1200 mhz with a 64 mb GFX card).
Im running into to much sync problems and **** when trying that. It ruins the pure flow of sequencing.
But if u just gonna use it for pre-hearing stuff that u make for reallife artist? Sure. Give it a try.
Which ones?
Reason 2.0 from propellerheads is purely a good softsynth/softstudio but I don't know if it has the instruments/sounds u need.
There is a bunch of addonCDs for Reason2.0
Im really not to updated on this field, so maybe someone else can help u some more here?

[Chavez]

Hmm seems like i have been away from the scene for 2 long. Just found this. Amazing. Take a test ride and be amazed.

Native instruments "Kontakt" (http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?kontakt_us)