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Is there a timeline of the history of the releases of significant orchestral libraries since the beginning?

I bet as a community we could come up with a fairly accurate timeline ourselves, if it's not already posted somewhere else. I'd be interested in this because my memory is terrible, I like to look at lists of stuff. Maybe people will post what they remember and then someone else can go through and compile it into a new chronological post.

From my super-fuzzy memory, there were others before these but "back in the day" (1998-2002-ish) I remember the big three as:

Miroslav
Garritan
Peter Siedleczek's Advanced Orchestra

Then came:

Sonic Implants, I want to say it was 2002, I remember paying some ungodly number like $1,800 for not even the complete version. I sure got a lot of use out of it though.

And the two biggest actual game-changers for me when they arrived:

EWQLSO, I think the full version was around $2,400? I got the version that was $1,200 and am still using it today, in Kontakt.
LASS, around $1,200.

I find the prices fascinating as well as the dates because of how much people complain about paying for stuff now, you have no idea!

EDIT: I just looked and I have VSL in giga too so that's been around for a bit. And the Dan Dean stuff... I don't remember if he ever did full orch, all I have are the solo brass, solo winds, and solo strings libraries in giga. And Kirk Hunter Emerald is from that same period as well.

The later/recent stuff, Symphobia, Albion, Metropolis Ark, etc, I'm sure is much easier to fill in the dates for.
 
d.healey said:
The good old days, where extra mic positions cost another $1000 and you had to install from a million DVDs or pay extra to have it delivered on a 7200RPM HDD :) I still have all my EW boxes with their wonderful artwork.
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I have a full wall full of boxes myself. If I ever needed the space I would toss them without hesitation but for now they are a nice decoration...
 
I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to track this stuff down, especially if the libraries are still being sold, likely because firms do not find it advantageous to advertise the age of a product. Googling for reviews can be helpful for pinning some of this down as can manuals when you can find them. These have been my main methods for establishing library release dates when I’ve needed them for articles I’m writing.
 
jbuhler said:
I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to track this stuff down, especially if the libraries are still being sold, likely because firms do not find it advantageous to advertise the age of a product. Googling for reviews can be helpful for pinning some of this down as can manuals when you can find them. These have been my main methods for establishing library release dates when I’ve needed them for articles I’m writing.
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Have you tried the internet archive?
 
Yes, I’ll often check internet archive as well, but reviews are generally more reliable, especially for the bigger libraries. Walkthrough videos on youtube are sometimes helpful too once they started becoming a thing, though they are better for confirming dates than finding them because the originals have often been taken down.
 
Chillbot hit most of the historic high points. A couple more mentions...

Dan Dean also had ensemble brass. The tone of the french horns was a favorite of mine. I always felt he should have reworked them for Kontakt and took advantage of scripting, especially SIPS. I eventually did assemble some Kontakt versions and they worked pretty well, but more modern additions to the toolbox superseded them.

Westgate Studios produced a very nice woodwind set in the Gigasampler days. It came on one CD, as opposed to the thick zipper-packed Dan Dean CDs, and the goofily luxurious hardcover album folio that Garritan Orchestral Strings avalanche of CDs was shipped in. I got a ton of use out of that old woodwind set. Later, Westgate released individual winds sampled in more depth (and French Horn and Timpani), which are still available now through Big Fish. I like the sound of them quite a bit.

Talking about the history and development of sampled instruments requires a mention of the Northern Sounds forum. It really was a hotbed of discussion among many who would later be luminaries in the field. A lot of them offered their early experiments up as freebies back then. Maarten from Project SAM had a great free trumpet, Thomas Bergersen made a pan flute, bamboo flute and some bongos, and there was a large library of percussion and ethnic winds called G-Town, sampled in a church. For a while, there was a very lively and robust discussion of how to build instruments and improve sampling techniques by the eventual biggest players in the industry.

The Northern Sounds forum is gone, so the records of that time are lost and the contributions of early innovators live on mostly in the memory of those who witnessed it all happen. Despite its many faults, that place was an incubator for the talent that produced so many of the defining advancements in virtual instruments.

In thinking about Northern Sounds and that time, I remembered the immense and constant contributions of Ashif Hakik, aka King Idiot, who was also a member here. I just googled him to see what there was to see, and learned to my great surprise and sadness that he passed away earlier this year in 2021. KI was a mad scientist and source of so many ideas in the early days of orchestral sampling and scripting.

Digital history is a fathomless panoptical collage with no solid substance. Pieces evaporate, fragment, and relocate constantly. It is worthwhile to remember the contributions of those who built the foundation and tools that made so much subsequent art possible.
 
jbuhler said:
Yes, I’ll often check internet archive as well, but reviews are generally more reliable, especially for the bigger libraries. Walkthrough videos on youtube are sometimes helpful too once they started becoming a thing, though they are better for confirming dates than finding them because the originals have often been taken down.
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Yeah, finding historical stuff on the internet is very patchy.

Just occurred to me to wonder if there will ever be a time when people think “ooh, a vintage library”.
 
d.healey said:
The good old days, where extra mic positions cost another $1000 and you had to install from a million DVDs or pay extra to have it delivered on a 7200RPM HDD :) I still have all my EW boxes with their wonderful artwork.
Click to expand...
I actually miss the DVDs in the sense I got a physical product in my hand which was pretty cool at the time. ah, the good ‘ol days :)
 
chillbot said:
EWQLSO, I think the full version was around $2,400? I got the version that was $1,200 and am still using it today, in Kontakt.
LASS, around $1,200.

I find the prices fascinating as well as the dates because of how much people complain about paying for stuff now, you have no idea!

EDIT: I just looked and I have VSL in giga too so that's been around for a bit. And the Dan Dean stuff... I don't remember if he ever did full orch, all I have are the solo brass, solo winds, and solo strings libraries in giga. And Kirk Hunter Emerald is from that same period as well.

The later/recent stuff, Symphobia, Albion, Metropolis Ark, etc, I'm sure is much easier to fill in the dates for.
Click to expand...
EWQLSO still rocks. I almost bought Spitfire Core today, but playing through EWQLSO again, I didn't see the need.
 
Another great orchestral library from the early days, more than deserving a mention in any historical overview, is the Denny Jaeger Violins set. I’m fairly sure that if someone were to take the time to reprogram these samples in a format that makes use of more recent sample playback innovations, you’d have a violins library several patches of which could still impress many of today’s orchestral library users.

Also worth some attention: the EMU Proteus 2 and the orchestral library for the Kurzweil K2000(R) (which came on I-can’t-recall-how-many floppy disks). And whenever the words ‘floppy disks’ are mentioned, I’m always instantly reminded of two things: (1) CorelDRAW 3 which shipped on 36 floppies, the 35th often being a faulty one, but this has nothing to do with this thread of course, and (2) the Roland S-50 that also had an orchestral library on an endless set of floppies.

Other hardware that had, for that time, very decent orchestral samples were the SRX expansion cards compatible with various Roland modules. One of those cards, the SRX-04, offered orchestral strings. Quite lovely things, as I remember. (I still must have a Roland XV-5080 somewhere, in some box or other, with that card in it.)

Pretty exciting modeled brass (and loads of other instruments) was delivered by the Yamaha VL-1(m). Did the best guitar emulations of everything that was available at the time as well.

_
 
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re-peat said:
Another great orchestral library from the early days, more than deserving a mention in any historical overview, is the Denny Jaeger Violins set. I’m fairly sure that if someone were to take the time to reprogram these samples in a format that makes use of more recent sample playback innovations, you’d have a violins library several patches of which could still impress many of today’s orchestral library users.
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I have a library in giga just called "Denny Jaegar" though it has no violins and I have no recollection of ever using it. I wonder what it is but maybe I'll go back and see if much is useable.

dj.png

re-peat said:
Other hardware that had, for that time, very decent orchestral samples were the SRX expansion cards compatible with various Roland modules. One of those cards, the SRX-04, offered orchestral strings. Quite lovely things, as I remember. (I still must have a Roland XV-5080 somewhere, in some box or other, with that card in it.)
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I also have a 5080 with a bunch of cards, which I still use quite often. Just FYI the Roland Integra-7.... if you're ever looking for a new hardware synth... contains every SRX board they made, though you can only choose four of them to load at once.
 
Threads that mention E-mu samplers, Proteus and the best physical modelling (hardware and otherwise) synth that was ever made… Lovely memories. I have such clear memories of loading CD upon CD of Hans Zimmer Guitars (Spectrasonics) into my 5000 Ultra and playing those first notes… Incredible realism that I had never before experienced “under the fingers”. A while later I got the Miroslav Vitous orchestral samples and was even more blown away…
 
Sitting here looking at Peter Siedlaczek's Advanced Orchestra CD-ROM set for Akai released by Best Service, but alas no where on it is a release date of any sort. I'm sure this info is on the internet somewhere, haven't looked.

Meanwhile a quick browsing using the search function of this forum can provide a lot of dates quickly. This is in 5 minutes or so, maybe I'll dig up more when I have more time:

2008 Symphobia
2009 LASS
2011 Albion 1
2012 Albion 2 Loegria
2012 Albion 3 Iceni
2014 Albion 4 Uist
2014 Mural
2015 Albion ONE
2016 Albion 5 Tundra
 
chillbot said:
alas no where on it is a release date of any sort
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I have a cd-rom called Advanced Orchestra Upgrade '97, so I guess the original was probably released somewhere around the mid nineties.

2000-01-peterupgrade_orch-1-W9kfaxY661pa.UnAvX3LieRLDuzq639N.jpg



And maybe also worth mentioning: Wizoo, the company that sampled the first Halion Strings for Steinberg somewhere around the early 2000's. They also released a few percussion and drum libraries after that, if I remember correctly.

_
 
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Let’s not forget that Hans was basically the first person to ever do it, although we STILL don’t have access to those samples lol
 
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