Synful Orchestra

[andreasvanharen]

Not sure where I read it inside this forum, but I read that the Synful Orchestra plug in would give a very realistic orchestra sound. I tried it on my symphony midi file, but the result if very poor. Sound not better then any onther orchestra vst I tried. It still needs lots of tweaking. Also, not all the instruments are included in Synful Orchestra, so I don't think I would buy it.

[MaestroX]

I'm in the same boat andreas, alot of people rave about synful orchestra but I've never been able to get a good sound out of it whereas other people have. If your happier with your other orchestra vst I would stick to it.

[andreasvanharen]

I have a 4 gb sound library on my hard drive on my mac, filled with the soundfonts I bought from all over the world, plus I have the Orchestral Jam pack installed.SO for Logic Express and Garage Band I have no problems to find nice sounds, but Sibelius 4.1 is very poor in that and I only have the silver player for it , meaning not enough banks for my orchestral scores.

Anyway, I keep looking!

André

[MaestroX]

Ahh yes the sibelius 4 library is pretty much awfull. Nothing useable at all and the engine was slow.

I think it would be best to sit back and wait for Sibelius 5 to become more stable or you can look at using VST's through sibelius using Midiyoke to route the channels.

[crimson]

There's a magic setting in Synful called "delay for expression". Have you tried it? At least on solo instruments it improves the playback considerably. I haven't tried Synful with larger scores yet, so I can't say how it'll sound on those.

An update with better sounds has been in the works for ages now, and they say it'll be free for registered users. You could try Synful with different reverb settings (impulse response reverbs are best) or maybe equalize it a bit.

[MaestroX]

Hi Crimson,

I'm going to have to take synful orchestra for a spin on Sibelius 5. It should be easy to implement it but I'm not sure if the articulations will play though.

[crimson]

Maestro,

I get Synful to play articulations automatically in Sib 5 by just loading the VSTi and having it use "General Midi" as its sound set, although it should work with manual sound sets too (which can a better option). It plays at least staccatos, accents, up bow/down bows, trills and glissandi. However, with delay for expression (DFE) on, the glissandi go funky; and Synful doesn't support pizzicatos yet, which is too bad.

Other problems with Synful include the fact that you must somehow set any other VST instruments to play back at 1.0 sec delay if you want to use them with Synful with DFE on (and I haven't been able to find a suitable free VST delay yet). One other solution would be to insert a 1 sec rest before any non-Synful instruments, but it can be tricky.

Also, Synful can sound a bit murky compared to sample libraries, but a suitable reverb and perhaps some EQ can fix that a bit.

I wonder when the devs are going to release that much-spoken-of update. It's been in development at least for a year now