I recently bought the Garritan Personal Orchestra as part of a group buy. If you haven’t heard this program, listen to the demos. Good stuff.
Anyhow, I’ve played with it a while, and I feel I can write a review now of it.
First off, you need a LOT of processing power. The requirements in the manual list this:
- Mac OS 10.2.6 or higher G4 733Mhz
- Windows Pentium 4/Athlon 2.8 Ghz or better.
Ok, so, knowing this, my 933Mhz G4 was NOT going to run this program. I already knew this from the get go. I prepared my Athlon 2.5 Gigahertz PC to run it (though it is under specs). Defragged the drives, added more memory, and got a M-Audio card. So, the system has 1 gig of ram, a fast 80 Gig hard drive, and Windows XP service Pack 2.
I decided to try a couple of things with it. I loaded up Kontakt player, and loaded up some patches. I chose a string section consisting of the “wet” versions of Violin 1, Violas, and Cellos on channels 1, 2 and 3. I then loaded up a Trombone Section patch, a French Horn patch, and a Trumpet patch. Not a lot of stuff I thought. I played back an arrangement I was working on.
Sound wise, these patches sound great. The strings are awesome. When I layer them with the Strings on my Roland XV2020 and SC8820, it sounds great. The trumpets sound a LOT better than either module’s trumpet patch. The french horns, layered with the other two modules, sound great, as do the trombones. I was in midi-heaven.
Then, I hit a section where, by my counting, I asked the Garritan program to do something I did not have enough processing power for. 3 notes sounding in the Trombones, 3 in the French Horns, 1 in the Trumpet, and 6 notes total in the strings (2 for each, in octaves). It pretty much brought the processor load to 100%, and effective killed the sound generation until I did a ALL MIDI NOTES OFF command.
What does this mean? It means that I need a faster PC to use this program effective. Pentium 4, 3.6Gigahertz or faster. Dual maybe. Dedicated to JUST sound. No virus crap, nada. Just Windows, and a blank, defragmented drive.
My only gripe is that if you use the Kontakt player as a STAND-ALONE, you can’t save all the instruments you loaded. Hopefully an update will fix this.
This program is great, but you need the power to use it. Horsepower. Don’t try it with a G4. G5 might work great, I don’t have one (yet 😉 ). But if you are looking to augment your setup. To take it to another level, get this. Go to Fry’s or something, throw together a FAST PC, get an M-Audio 4096 or something, and enjoy!
9.5 out of 10. .5 deducted for the stupid stand-alone Kontakt player
Although I don’t work for the Garritan folks, I’ve been pretty active with them and thought I’d offer something else to your review that may not be apparent to those who are new to GPO.
My company (Show Programming) hosts an Internet radio station, The Composer Channel, that gives airplay to artists who include GPO in their compositions. Any style of music that uses GPO is welcome. We don’t sell advertising, so it’s all about helping artists (we’re musicians ourselves and know how tough the biz can be). We have shows with hosts and also unhosted shows, and the response from the GPO community and listeners has been great.
It’s probably not going to make you rich and famous overnight, but we hope to at least expand the audience for your music. The artistic community has been good to us, and it’s just a small way of giving something back. If you have GPO, or are planning on looking into it in the future, you can see more info on getting airplay at http://www.showprogramming.com/. Hope this helps some of you!
Chris