Think twice before purchasing Eastwest PLAY

[Richard400]

Normally I lurk, but as a "working professional" I just couldn't let the earlier nonsense pass about pros just using Play and having no time to post.

I bought two Play products early this year. The sound is wonderful (when you can get it), but they are in real terms unusable due to an assortment of glitches. Because I can't reliably use these products in a project I now simply don't use them at all. I just don't have time to wrestle with recurring technical issues when I'm on deadline.

They are without doubt the worst VSTis I've had the misfortune of buying. The only thing worse than the instruments is the so-called "customer service". It's a sign to me that they are fully aware of the technical disaster because they simply won't help resolve or even investigate issues.

[peter269]

Normally I lurk, but as a "working professional" I just couldn't let the earlier nonsense pass about pros just using Play and having no time to post.

I bought two Play products early this year. The sound is wonderful (when you can get it), but they are in real terms unusable due to an assortment of glitches. Because I can't reliably use these products in a project I now simply don't use them at all. I just don't have time to wrestle with recurring technical issues when I'm on deadline.

They are without doubt the worst VSTis I've had the misfortune of buying. The only thing worse than the instruments is the so-called "customer service". It's a sign to me that they are fully aware of the technical disaster because they simply won't help resolve or even investigate issues.

My problems with your comments are that I don't know your system spec, how you're setup and what you're sequencing with. I can't agree with what you say about tech support. Whenever I or any client has had a problem, it gets resolved. They recently moved to a job ticket approach so that everything is logged. My experience here has been very good.

[peter269]

I was also told by GC that PLAY sales have been slow, supposedly due to bad customer reviews, hence the 2 for 1 special that has now been extended by 1 month.

How TYPICAL of the Guitar Center to say that. For the record, EVERYBODY'S sales have been slow with sample libraries right now. Today the Dow Jones Industrials dropped another 445 points. When people are fearful for rent, sales slow down for everyone.

Read this story from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/te...l?ref=business

And this one about Dell:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/te...l?ref=business

[peter269]

Peter, in the years that I have been actively following the world of VSTs and sample libraries, I have never seen so many complaints about a single VST. I simply cannot believe that they're unjustified. SO many people saying the performance is poor; that it's a resource/CPU hog, that it doesn't run on minimum or even recommend systems, that it runs poorly on even dual and quad core systems, that it causes errors with OTHER VSTs... the list doesn't end. It just astounds me.

I've actually come extremely close to purchasing a number of PLAY products on three or four occasions, and every time I'm ready to check out, I remember how many posts I've read from respectable composers who know their technology about how the software runs very poorly. Even the people that do get it to run properly admit how unoptimized it is. For something that has been out for over a year now, I think that's unacceptable.

Now, before I get attacked for any reason.. I'm a big fan of East West products in general. I've spent at least $3000 on them. I bought QLSO Gold and XP Pro for over $800, Stormdrum for $300, RA when it came out ($1000!) the Complete Composer's Bundle ($1,100) etc. I have talked to at least a hundred aspiring hobbyists who ask my advice on orchestral libraries.. I have always advised QLSO. But not anymore. Thanks to an overwhelming number of negative user reports, combined with a dongle system and less flexibility to edit patches (as opposed to Kontakt), EWQL has lost me as a customer of their new product line and I no longer recommend it. I still recommend their old releases if people can get them, though.

At the very beginning, I think that was true. But now, I'm not seeing those issues too much. I think many of the memory hog issues have to do with the fact that many of the sequencing programs are still 32bit and limited in the amount of RAM they can access. With Logic on a G5 that's a real problem so you have to do a work around at times with Soundflower.

The ability to edit patches will improve once they release PLAY as an independent sampler, which is what I've read on other forums, not from any private knowledge.

[germancomponist]

The ability to edit patches will improve once they release PLAY as an independent sampler, which is what I've read on other forums, not from any private knowledge.

Oh, that would be very nice. I love to have the opportunity to edit what I want, as I can do it in Kontakt.

[Marty Prod]

PLAY was designed for 64-bit systems with at least 8GB of RAM.

ON THE PC
Sonar - 64bit
Nuendo - 64bit
Cubase 4 BETA - 64bit

.

that is funny !! Tech suport told me to not use Cubase 4 Beta 64 bits, because they NEVER tested play with it, and they will NOT do it because it's still a Beta.

[scope4live]

Yes....Guitar Center, where the Pro's go that are on a deadline.

I like new developements and praise those developers for going it on their own, but when it comes to making money I stay with what is stable and works.
Thankfully these forums and Composer's chats reveal the nature of new developements, and it's pretty easy to draw a conclusion.
And don't you love censorship.
If someone is obviously dissing the product and has no information to offer other than some negative rant, I understand that, but if one is registered w/ the product and is signed in to the support forum there, I find that unnacceptable, and just tells me to steer clear until they are out of BETA.
Paid BETA that is.

Giga/K2/PC, and EXS/Mac..........There's plenty of quality developements there already, and I use many that are considered old.
When it comes to a paycheck.....

I Fear Change.............Garth, Waynes's World 1993.

[Marty Prod]

Hello,

my name is Didier, and i'm a french piano player.
this year, i bought worth of 2000$ of East West product, including QL Gold bundle, Symphonic Choirs, the Play upgrade for Gold, QL SD2, and QL Ministry of Rock...

so Far ministry of Rock never worked very good. sometimes, when playing too fast with the guitar, the cubase project was Crashing.

i ordered the play upgrade for Gold in june, got it in august. as soon as i tried it, i reported to tech support that my project was taking 4 minutes to Save, who is completly unacceptable.
after 4 months , we are in november, this bug has not been fixed yet !!!! there is a 5 pages of complaining about this on the EW forum.

sunday, i updated Play with their new update. that's when all things went wrong.multiple crash, Cpu Spikes, crash of cubase during the VST scan at startup, previous project was not working anymore, etc etc ...and saving time of QLSO SO still very long (3 minutes).

i started to complain about this on the forum.
after two posts, my post have been deleted !!!
it's simply NOT acceptable.i was so upset by this, and that the update ruined my recording session of my first album (i'm actually working with Gregg Bissonette and Michael Landau) that i asked because of the censorship of the Admin and the numerous bugs, to have a complete refund of all my libraries.

as soon as i wrote this to the tech support, i received a message from the administrator of the forum asking me to "shut up" in a polite way.
i was so upset that i started to have some rude words with him.
after some messages, tech support contacted me again by providing a private update who has not solved my problem, but created a new bug !! now, my project crash only by using QL pianos in an Empty project, with a So big noise that almost killed my speakers and my hearing.(i'm suffering from tinnitus and hyperacusis since 13 years, so Thank you EAST WEST !!).

after complaining about this with the tech support, i wrote to Doug Rogers asking him to help here, and to provide me a full refund.
of course, he refused,and started to say some weird things about his Play software.

he told to me that it was my fault, that my computer has no enough power (i have a Quad Core 6700 Intel with 8 Gb of Ram), and he suggested me to buy a computer at VisionDaw because these computers are done to work with Play. i asked him "so your software is not compatible with other computers who are not from that company ?" ..
he didn't replied to this quote.

about the long save time bug i'm having , me and other users on the forum, he told me that it wasn't the Play fault, but a Cubase problem.
yeahhhh, sure ... that's funny, because this bug is also happening for some users in stand alone mode as well, and on other sequencers too (Sonar, etc ...).
i sent him the link to the topic of his OWN forum... got no reply yet...

he asked me several times to be polite with his Team ... well, when you lost 1600$ in two days during recording session, and that you spent 2000$ on product who are not working properly, i can tell you that i can be pretty upset and rude !

he told as well, that they already sold 100,000 Play products !!

today, i talked during ONE hour on an online chat with their tech support, and they were unable to find a solution to any of my problem ..
like .
" what ? bluescreen of death during a vst scan ? never heard of this ..."
" understand, that you have long time saving, because you load a lot of samples" ..

yeah sure, and what about kontakt who save in 10 secondes the same project with the same sample with QLSO Gold ?

......

ok, i'm stopping here. so , one suggestion : buy Play products are your OWN RISK.


Didier.

[germancomponist]

..."(i'm actually working with Gregg Bissonette and Michael Landau)"...

Didier.

Marty,

what a sadly story!

But, I read that you are working with Gregg Bissonette and Michael Landau, how great!

Please let me know (pm me) when the album is finished!

Good luck!

Gunther

[jazzman]

I own Gypsy and Ministry of Rock and have found both products to sound great and run smoothly. When I first bought them I did have a few issues with crashes and the occasional noise spike but after the second update I haven't experienced any further problems. Load times for me are just as good as Kontakt. I am running an Intel Core2Duo 6400 @ 2.13GHz with 3.00 GB of RAM and use Play both as standalone and VST in Cubase SX 3.1.1.944. Now if Omnisphere (which sounds amazing) would run as smoothly as Play I would be happy.