EastWest Goliath

It's still me,the guy who wrote the review below. I totally forgot to mention that the PLAY software used with Goliath, is very unstable and does not at all work well. I cannot use the standalone version at all because it has some crazy problem with the ASIO drivers of my Edirol USB soundcard
Edirol soundcards are THE most stable and best soundcards I ever came across. My soundcard NEVER gave me a problem in YEARS,but,strangely,Goliath has serious problems with it! I wrote to support and they were not able to solve my problem,at one point the guy stopped to reply to me,probably because they don't know what else to tell me.

Also,worst of all,Goliath,even when used as VST,it causes Reaper to crash. All this is rather bad as I expected that the PLAY software would be as good as Kontakt,which is a really stable program. But this is not the case,and I am hugely disappointed!
Maybe I will get this stuff to work,but I am sure it's going to cost me a lot of time and energy.

All in all,I regret having bought the Eastwest Goliath library. Even if I got two products for the price of one , with 440 euros I could have bought Kontakt 3, which I have already used in a distant past and was / is, in my opinion,the best software sampler ever devised. Stable as a rock,never gave me a problem,just like my trusty soundcard. Goliath is overpriced,incomplete,and unstable. It has a minor amount of high quality sounds,but all in all,it has a long way to go. If I had bought it at full price,I would have bumped my head on the wall.

Rating for sounds : 7 our of ten. Only because of the violin,the sax,classical guitar,and some other instruments. The synths SUCK.

Rating for ease of installation : 3 out of ten,the program is just unnecessarily huge (only because it has only WAV files,which take lots of space) . The program requires an I-lok, a pain in the neck,you'll have to waste your time to update it's drivers and correcting errors.

Rating for stability: 2 out of ten. It's just that bad.

Rating for sales and support: zero. Support seems to have two 'main routes' beside the forums. I'll have a better look when I have some time. For now Goliath took even too much of it.

I would advise to either buy Kontakt 3 or maybe even an used hardware sampler. You won't get error messages and I am seriously considering that route

I have been making music for about 18 years; I am a rock guitarist and keyboardist but lately got into soundtracks and more classical oriented music.
I have now checked out Goliath long enough to write my impressions of it.

Price is rather high for this software,Goliath,if bought alone. But I took advantage of the '2 for 1' offer from Eastwest,so I've got the Symphony Orchestra Gold thrown in for nothing.
I bought it from Soundsonline,but to be fair,I regret it. I am on a tight budget and asked,before buying,at Soundsonline,as to whether,if I bought 2 products for one, i would be able to resell one of the products ,in order to recover some of the initial cost. The response ,from an incompetent person at Soundsonline was 'you can do what you want with the second product'. So I thought I could resell it. I bought it,and when I read Eastwest Terms and Condition, I soon found out that the product was neither resellable,nor transferable. I wrote back to that guy,no reply. What an incompetent person,I hope Soundsonline will get people who care about what they are doing,because that one didn't !!!!!
Anyways,I am basically stuck with two products,but I only needed Goliath for now.

Here's my impressions about Goliath:

It has some very high quality sounds,but that's the only good thing about this library. My favourite Goliath sounds are the tenor sax,violin,60's organ,some choirs. But not all sounds are usable. Some sounds,like Distorted Guitar, has a bent note at the start of the sample,which basically renders the entire sound unusable,since that bent note sounds in tune in a key,but out of tune in the same key. It would have been better to sample the darn thing without embellishments that render it useless,as the case here.

The synth sounds are ridicolous. There's only a very small bunch of them,like a dozen or so,and yet they come in a 9.4 gb DVD, which is a really huge and unnecessary amount of data for synth sounds. Why? Because huge sampling is the wrong technology for synth sounds. You can get killer synth sounds from a 10 mb program from Novation,for example.

Everybody raves about the Goliath piano sounds,but not me. I have an old version of Edirol's Super Quartet,which ,I feel,beats the Goliath pianos. The Edirol is also a very small program.

Also,the Goliath patches are not that many. It does not at all covers all genres. There's a lot of stuff missing,especially synth sounds.
The UI is very basic. You can only fiddle with a limited number of parameters. There's not even an EQ, which I think is necessary on some sounds. On one of the 1 or 2 GYGABITE pianos, the sound has too much mids and tends to cause distortion in my headphones.

Last cons: these huge libraries are sold in WAV format. That's why they are huge,not because there's really that hugge amount of samples or sounds. What's the point of selling a 40 gb sampling library (which is huge and will take you all day to install), when one could include TWICE as many samples (and thus more sounds and velocities),in the same 40 gb, by compressing the files a bit?
Even an MP3 at 256 kb, does it sound that much worse than a WAV file? Yet the MP3 compressed at 256 kb ,is about EIGHT times smaller than a WAV.

Soundfonts are MUCH smaller and they are still high quality.
So,all in all,yes the Goliath library is 'huge', but mainly because it's in WAV format.
In conclusion,Goliath is a great idea,but it's far from perfect,and considering the price tag,I would probably get Kontakt 3,because it too has a huge sound library (albeit a bit less at 33 gb) but can read future libraries from about ALL brands (which Goliath can't do,as it's a module,not a sampler).

Unless you get ,with Goliath, also Symphony Orchestra Gold (the latter really is beautiful! ) ,which I did,so I am not too displeased in the end,although my initial intention was not to fork out 440 euros at all. I bought it merely because of the ignorant reply from the guy at Soundsonline.
Well,that's the way it went,fortunately I've got the beautiful Orchestra Gold thrown in for nothing,so I am not too unhappy and I will really squeeze these two libraries for years to come ,as they costed me some good money