At £76, the often-overlooked HALion Symphony Orchestra is a real steal at the moment: again, a simple interface and a full symphony orchestra at your disposal. It also contains a range of effects should you wish to add flanging and chorus to your symphony orchestra – useful, but not essential. It, too, contains a full symphony orchestra including solo strings, and has a straightforward user interface. The settings page handles the more advanced technical details such as performance monitoring, rendering settings, tuning and so on.Īlternatives Miroslav Philharmonik 2 from IK Multimedia is a good alternative to GPO5. Each instrument appears with its own particular set of relevant controls, has a dedicated channel strip in the mixer and can be treated with either convolution or algorithmic reverb in the effects page. There are four main pages – controls, mixer, effects and settings. It’s amazingly efficient and loading sounds is fast and easy using a simple drop-down menu system. No extra sample player is needed and it functions either standalone, or as a plug-in for your DAW. You simply drag a registration card onto the player. 16 new impulse presets have also been added to the convolution reverb.Ĭentral to GPO5 is the ARIA Player and after installing the software, unlocking it couldn’t be easier. The long wait is now over, though, and GPO5’s instrument list has 70 per cent more patches overall the addition of Garritan Orchestral Strings updated ProjectSAM brass patches an expanded choir new Steinway pianos a new harp and a custom organ console. Since then, updates have been few and far between and as good as it is, it was beginning to look and sound a little long in the tooth compared to its competitors – the strings in particular needed updating.
It first appeared as a Kontakt Player instrument, but was updated in 2009 as GPO4, with its own built-in ARIA Player developed by Plogue Art Et Technologie. Garritan’s highly successful Personal Orchestra has been selling steadily since 2004.