Free Audio Plugin Of The Week
Good orchestra sound sets are very hard to find, especially non-expensive or free collections. This week’s free plugin is an orchestra sound library created by Mattias Westlund, and is comparable in quality to good commercial libraries. It really is a one in a million find!
If you want orchestral sound sets to use in your music, don’t waste your cash on expensive sound libraries – check out this great free alternative.
Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra features the full range of orchestral instruments – wind, brass, string and percussion sections. It really does sound good too, if you’re not convinced then check out a demo: Orchestra Demo
Download and info page: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra
Alternate download: Orchestra Download (.rar)
How To Install Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra
The sample library comes in the format .sfz – what’s that? It’s a type of sample known as a soundfont, and luckily it all works pretty swell with Ableton Live. You may need to download a VST plugin to play it through though, for the full rundown of how to get it working then read here: how to set up soundfonts in Ableton Live.
does this work for mac?
Sure does – if you don’t have the sampler device though you’ll need to install a VST or audio unit that supports loading soundfont samples. See the link at the bottom of the post for more info :)
I downloaded the SoundFonts for the SSO, but I can’t manage to install them in Live Suite 8. It seems that it does not recognize the .sfz files (I tested with a small .sf2 file and it worked perfectly)… do you know how to proceed?
You could always load them in a VST that supports soundfont files instead. There’s a free plugin called SFZ player that should do the trick – read the link at the bottom of the post for some more info :)
not for mac. SFZ player only works for windows as far as I know…
My mistake. There is a soundfont player for Mac called bs-0, but it doesn’t seem to load sfz files either.
I only ever loaded sfz files on my Windows PC, and didn’t realize that sf2 players aren’t backwards compatible with older sfz files. So currently this plugin will only work on Windows.
I’ll have a look in the next few days to see if there’s some other workaround like converting sfz to sf2 :)
Anyone find a solution to using this on a Mac?
Alchemy Player by Camel Audio will load SFZ files on a Mac.
The only solution I found is the Aria Player from Ploque / Garritan. >this is the only nearly perfect player for orchestral SFz on Mac.
Other Players, like Dimension, Rapture or Camel Player didn’t work properly with big layered samples.
But the Aria Player isn’t free :(
I believe Dimension Pro loads sfz’s. Doesn’t it?
Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanx
It’s AWESSSSSOME
U R THE BEST (Publisher)
I wish I had read all the comments before downloading the whole thing to my Mac. You should make it more clear to mac users that the only way to use these ‘free’ is to lay them out yourself in Sampler or similar.