Vienna Symphonic Library has released Vienna Instruments PRO, a sample player for Windows and Mac. Vienna Instruments PRO is the most powerful sample player on the market, will improve your work-flow dramatically.

Read the exclusive online supplement to this article: At the 2002 AES Convention, a new company called Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) announced that it would soon release the largest, most versatile, and most realistic orchestral sample library ever attempted. With private funding and a seemingly unlimited budget, VSL had custom-built a state-of-the-art studio and recorded thousands of hours of samples played by world-class musicians from ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestras. Led by visionary Herb Tucmandl, VSL had begun editing, processing, programming, and assembling those samples into a massive collection of unprecedented proportions. 1: Vienna Instruments' sample player runs standalone or as a plug-in. Its well-designed interface offers plenty of real-time control over the library's 24-bit, 44.1 kHz sample content.

Setting the Stage The ten boxed collections, which you may purchase separately, are Solo Strings, Chamber Strings, Orchestral Strings I and II, Harps, Woodwinds I and II, Brass I and II, and Percussion. They vary in size, price, and number of installation DVDs. Each includes a CD-ROM for installing the Vienna Instruments software instrument, which runs standalone and as a plug-in for AU and VST hosts. To accommodate so much content, I bought a 500 GB Seagate hard drive and installed it in an external USB 2.0 enclosure. My computer was a dual-processor 2.3 GHz Apple Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.4.8, 4 GB of RAM, and a 16x DVD drive. Although I ran Vienna Instruments standalone and as a VST plug-in in Steinberg Cubase SX3 and as an AU plug-in in Apple Logic Pro 7.1, I spent most of my time working in MOTU Digital Performer 4.61.

2: Vienna Instruments' browser lets you select from an extensive list of Patches. Each instrument-specific Patch offers a single multisampled articulation or some other kind of variation. You begin installing each volume by running the Vienna Instruments Library Installer, inserting the first DVD, and waiting while the files are copied and decompressed; on my computer, it took about 50 minutes per disc. The installer will visually prompt you to insert the next DVD. In all, the 10 volumes furnish 29 installation DVDs, most of them double density.

You cannot install only certain instruments; you must install the entire volume containing the instrument you need. Nor can you delete from disk any instruments or articulations you don't plan to use.

After installation, the total content added up to about 375 GB — much less than the 550 GB I had expected from VSL's specifications. According to the company, Vienna Instruments decompresses its 24-bit data every time you load an instrument into memory. It uses a proprietary technique with a 3:2 compression ratio, making 24-bit samples on disk the size of 16-bit samples. Because most users don't have a single hard drive large enough to hold the entire collection, you can distribute the sample libraries on several drives. Avid pro tools hd.

In any case, you must initially run the included Directory Manager application to tell Vienna Instruments where to find its content. To authorize Vienna Instruments, you must register each volume on VSL's Web site and then paste the activation code you receive into Syncrosoft's LCC application before you can download a license to your ViennaKey. Installing and authorizing the entire Symphonic Cube took more than two days for me to complete. Big, Bigger, Biggest Vienna Instruments is available in three editions: Standard, Extended, and Full. The Standard Library provides the articulations that are most useful for every instrument. The Extended Library, an add-on to the Standard Library, gives you articulations that are more detailed and of greater variety, but few additional instruments. Together, those two editions make up the Full Library, the version that VSL authorized for my review.

When you install any volume, you install its entire content, Standard and Extended. After authorizing the Standard Library, you can use any volume's Extended Library for 30 days from the first time you open its Extended content. If you don't spring for the Extended Library at the end of 30 days, you can't delete the unusable data from your hard drive. I suspect that given the choice, most users would rather reinstall the entire Standard Library than keep hundreds of gigabytes of unusable data on their hard drives. Virtual Vienna In the center of Vienna Instruments' GUI is the Selector Ring; clicking on one of five buttons on its perimeter activates a function page (see Fig.