The most significant new arrivals occur in the woodwinds, but seven new brass instruments also make their debut, along with essential tuned percussion instruments, masses of brand new unpitched percussion, and for the first time, solo strings. The Pro Edition (henceforth known as PE) of this already enormous library adds important instruments which were missing from the First Edition (FE). If you thought the VSL First Edition's 92GB was overdoing it a bit, you'd better sit down and take a deep breath before reading the next statistic: the VSL Pro Edition upgrade is 235GB in size. Undeterred, the Vienna team continued with their mission to record practically every sonic nuance of the symphony orchestra, and have now faithfully delivered the second phase of their project. The scope and sheer size of the library was unprecedented, causing some critics to doubt whether users could ever fully understand its complexities. Clearly, this was not an organisation to do things by halves! Finally, the company turned the hype into reality when they delivered the first edition of this grand opus on a series of 14 DVD's, reviewed in SOS May 2003. Word also leaked out that the company had constructed a custom-built acoustically treated orchestral recording facility, the Silent Stage, to record the library. Despite widespread scepticism, VSL began to deliver on the hype when they turned up at trade shows with their own acoustically isolated chamber, the so-called Symphonic Booth (see next page), so that people could hear the quality of their work-in-progress library themselves. In Spring 2002, the Vienna Symphonic Library team announced one of the wildest dreams yet, a massive orchestral library whose sample count would eventually run into millions. With the old RAM size restrictions swept away, sound companies were free to think in Gigabytes rather than Megabytes, and to contemplate the creation of sound libraries which would indulge their users' wildest dreams.
Even if anyone had been mad enough to record that much data, presenting it in the limited Akai ROM format would have required 176 disks - more CDs than most people have in their music collections! But the advent of hard-disk streaming samplers brought a dramatic change. Is it the be-all and end-all of orchestral sound libraries?īack in the not-so-far-distant past, when orchestral sample supremos Miroslav Vitous and Peter Siedlaczek ruled the roost, the idea of a 90GB sound library would have seemed laughable. The eagerly awaited upgrade from the VSL team breaks all records for size, depth and scope.
As with the First Edition, the constituent volumes of the Orchestral Cube Pro Edition (the Strings, Brass & Woodwinds and Percussion Pro Editions) can also be purchased separately (right). The VSL's Performance Set Pro Edition (far left) and Orchestral Cube Pro Edition (centre).
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