East West Symphonic Choirs - PLAY Edition Reviews

4.0/5.0 based on 7 customer reviews

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Customer Reviews

Trevor
from Saginaw, MI
November 25, 2012Music Background:
Hobbyist

Wordbuilder is now fully integrated in the Player !!

I upgraded to Symphonic Choirsa couple years ago and I've seen EastWest continue to develop their product with one improvement after another. There's still not a product out there that can touch it.

The main complaint left here by other reviewers center around Wordbuilder, the program that forms the words. Potential customers should know that once, Wordbuilder was a seperate program that ran alongside Symponic Choir. EastWest has since then fully integrated Wordbuilder. !!! happy happy !!!

I was using Voice of The Apocrolypse (VOTA) way back in the dark ages of Gigastudio // flashback!! // and Symphonic Choirs is LIGHT YEARS ahead of that. It takes me minutes to program now what used to take me HOURS.

Moreover, I appreciate a company that continues to develop and improve a product after you buy it. that's refreshing!

Mattsynth
from Phila, PA
April 29, 2011Music Background:
Pro Musician

Top notched choir samples

This is one of East West's best package. Loaded with quality choir samples and even the solo samples are great. Wordbuilder is an added bonus and is so much fun to use. Lots of keyswitching to work with.

Casiquire
from United States
December 10, 2012

Still the only one!

Message to the readers: as of roughly 2010-2011 many of the other reviews are out of date. No other software is required to run this software as a plugin or in "standalone" on Windows or on Mac. It's all fully-functional, fully-integrated. On to the review! At the time of this review, years and years after the release of this product, Symphonic Choirs is still the only product that does what it does: it allows you to record a choir realistically singing your own lyrics and words. Of course getting very realistic results can be extremely time-consuming and require a keen sense of which phonemes build your words and how to manipulate the vowel and consonant sounds provided. I don't exactly see this as a flaw of the library though; human languages are all so varied and complex that perfect simulations of singing or speech without a bit of work are pretty much unimaginable. The only minor omissions I would also like to have in this library are divisi samples and sampled legato, so for the amount of work required and those omissions I have removed half a star. This choir sounds very powerful and detailed and comes with different microphone positions to hone in on the right sound or to let in more sounds of the hall. If you're writing music out of passion--not for money, and not under time constraints, but out of love--and see choirs and lyrics as vital to your music, this is the only option for you, and fortunately it's more than capable.

Todd
from Seattle, Wa
January 19, 2010Music Background:
Pro Musician/Student Recording Engineer

Beyond Brilliant

This synth/sample player represents the actual "next level" in the professional arena. Word builder doesn't work in stand alone mode, however you can still play the pitched samples. I run Windows 7 in the 64 bit mode, so finding a virtual midi driver (VMD)was a hassle. The online manual gives some names of compatable VMDs which can be googled but the freebies are 32 bit and the 64 bit units cost $20 on average...Forget it, I've got a killer system so the extra processing associated with running this in a DAW isn't an issue. Once your up and running though, functionality is a breeze with all of the available tutorials on EW web site. No vocal samples to date come close to sounding as human as these. A little tweaking in Word builder (shown in the tutorials) combine with the high quality and definition, anyone would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the real and the virtual. Aside from the stand alone midi problem, QLSC is better than perfect.

JF Levesque
from
January 25, 2012

EWQL CHoir

On-time delivery. Good sounds. credible choir. I would appreciate Wordbuilder plugins integrated with Apple Logic though

E J
from Granite Falls, WA
January 17, 2010Music Background:
Pro guitarist/midi/sound design.

Great Software, But...

If you're a PC user, once again, you'll have to take a second seat to the Mac user. There's no instant gratification here. By that I mean: This is actually two programs that run simultaneously. The Word Builder controls the Chiors with midi messages. So if you want to use this software in the stand alone mode (on a PC), you've gotta find yourself a loopback driver. This is a virtual midi output to input driver that is intrinsic to a Mac but not the PC (so this is partly microsoft's fault [Win 7]) but can be found on the internet after some searching...And you WILL have to SEARCH for it if you're running x64, keeping in mind that most of the freebies out there are quite cheesy or potentialy infected. Now if you have a decent DAW (such as Sonar 8.5), this may not be necessary as the advanced midi routing within the software is taken care of. However, after dropping more than four bills on a program that can't talk to itself in the PC stand alone realm because of a piece of freeware omitted by it's makers because they use Macs...Okay guys, really? Symphonic Choirs is innovative in so many ways, but they tripped at the finish line. Could've easily been five stars. Oh well, can we has an update?

Ben Balser
from Louisiana
May 16, 2013Music Background:
Professoinal Composer

Super Disappointed

No better than any of the other choir samples that came with Logic Pro, to be honest. Word Builder is so limited and overly convoluted it is useless. I'd advise others to not bother with this package. Not to mention how complex and messed up the installation process is. Really? All that for not much? I'm back to M-Tron, which works way better, and sounds way better.