Demystifying the various EastWest player engines.
Currently, there are several products available that use the PLAY interface. The PLAY interface/engine can also load samples from other PLAY-based products. For example, the Gypsy player can also load Fab Four instruments and samples. However, the PLAY engine cannot load instruments or samples from Kontakt or Kompakt players. PLAY is fully supported in all current versions of Windows (XP and Vista, 32-bit and 64-bit) and Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5).
The other products by EastWest include the Kompakt player. These players are library-specific. For example, you cannot load a horn from the EWQLSO Silver library into the Symphonic Choirs Kompkat player. These are all single-library, stand-alone players. Please note that Kompakt does not run on any Intel-based Mac computer, or on 64-bit versions of Windows.
The full version of Kontakt, however, is able to load any of the instruments and samples included with any of the Kompakt-based EastWest libraries. So, you can load a Boys choir (from Symphonic Choirs), a basson (from the Silver edition), bagpipes (from Goliath), and…well, you get the idea. Kontakt CANNOT, however, load any instruments from the PLAY libraries. Kontakt is supported in all current versions of Windows (64-bit is under development at the time of this writing) and Mac OS X.
This information is current as of June 4th, 2008. Future updates and additional information will be available on EastWest’s FAQ page: http://support.soundsonline.com/faq/index.php?
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