Dimension LE & Garritan Pocket Orchestra

[West]

Cakewalk has bundled its Dimension LE sampler with Garritan Pocket Orchestra and dropped the price from $99 to $19.99. Pocket Orchestra is a light version of Garritan Personal Orchestra.

So is this a great orchestral library? Not really. Worth twenty bucks? Definitely. I bought it earlier today and I haven't had time for more than a cursory examination, but there seems to be some useable stuff in there. The section strings are decent, though some samples have an annoyingly slow attack. The woodwinds are passable. The brass is, frankly, a joke. I've heard 32MB GM soundfonts with better brass. Some solo strings are really nice, like the violin, others are unusable. It's a mixed bag but considering the price, it's a good deal.

Of course you also get a whole bunch of synth patches, which wasn't of any big interest to me (though some of the layered sounds are quite cool). The neatest thing about Dimension LE though is that it uses the sfz format, which is a very powerful and completely open sample format. You can't access a lot of paramters from the interface -- for that you need its big brother Dimension Pro -- but sfz files are plain text so you can use your text editor of choice to edit them, and the samples are stored as wav's so if you want you can open them in an audio editor and mangle them to your heart's content. Plus, it will happily load any other sfz files you might have.

So if you're looking for some extra samples to add to your collection, do check this deal out. I'm going to try and compose something with it, I'll post a clip here later on.


And FTR, I'm not affiliated with Cakewalk or Garritan or any other music software company. Just wanted to give you a heads up as I know there are people here looking for orchestral samples on the cheap.


Edit: uh, and now it looks like the offer is over, it's back to $99 again. :/

[PPH]

I like the sfz format. I have used it. There's an editor called SFZEd which is very useful for making sfz files. SFZ+ doesn't seem to support it, though.

[West]

I like the sfz format. I have used it. There's an editor called SFZEd which is very useful for making sfz files. SFZ+ doesn't seem to support it, though.

Yeah, sfZed is an excellent little util. The way it will automatically map samples according to file name/key is a lifesaver for me, doing stuff like that manually is incredibly tedious, especially for chromatically sampled multi-velocity instruments. In fact I always use sfZed, even when the final format is not going to be an sfz file. I just do the grunt work in sfZed and then convert the sfz file to the target format (sf2, most often).

And no, sfz+ does not support sfz files which is kind of confusing. But I think the story goes something like this: sfz support *was* planned for sfz+ -- maybe the free sfz Player was even something of a testbench for this feature -- but then rgc:audio was bought up by Cakewalk. And apparently Cakewalk had no interest in further development of these two plugs (the soundfont format being sort of a dinosaur, after all), and instead instructed the rgc guys to create a new sfz-based sampler -- that's right, Dimension Pro. So AFAIK Dimension LE and Dimension Pro are sort of the successors of the sfz plugins, I actually think they use the same sampling engine (though probably more advanced). And now that I have Dimension LE I don't see myself using sfz Player anymore.

Now let me just mention that if you missed the $20 deal described above, don't even consider paying $99 for it. It's not worth it. If you're after a basic set of orchestral samples and a VSTi that will load sfz files, GPO4 is probably a wiser choice.

[PPH]

I like the sfz format. I have used it. There's an editor called SFZEd which is very useful for making sfz files. SFZ+ doesn't seem to support it, though.

Yeah, sfZed is an excellent little util. The way it will automatically map samples according to file name/key is a lifesaver for me, doing stuff like that manually is incredibly tedious, especially for chromatically sampled multi-velocity instruments. In fact I always use sfZed, even when the final format is not going to be an sfz file. I just do the grunt work in sfZed and then convert the sfz file to the target format (sf2, most often).

And no, sfz+ does not support sfz files which is kind of confusing. But I think the story goes something like this: sfz support *was* planned for sfz+ -- maybe the free sfz Player was even something of a testbench for this feature -- but then rgc:audio was bought up by Cakewalk. And apparently Cakewalk had no interest in further development of these two plugs (the soundfont format being sort of a dinosaur, after all), and instead instructed the rgc guys to create a new sfz-based sampler -- that's right, Dimension Pro. So AFAIK Dimension LE and Dimension Pro are sort of the successors of the sfz plugins, I actually think they use the same sampling engine (though probably more advanced). And now that I have Dimension LE I don't see myself using sfz Player anymore.

Now let me just mention that if you missed the $20 deal described above, don't even consider paying $99 for it. It's not worth it. If you're after a basic set of orchestral samples and a VSTi that will load sfz files, GPO4 is probably a wiser choice.

Thanks for the advice, although I wasn't even dreaming of spending that king of money in this thing. The general opinion on GPO is not very good; something which is confirmed by your comments. For $20, it might have been a good deal, though. Still, I don't regret letting this pass.

[marcusvinicius]

They have this site with some examples:
http://www.cakewalk.com/products/dimensionle/sounds.asp