I have thought Spitfire overrated up until now, but I think the BBC stuff sounds beautiful. Seems to have great playability too.
Wish they’d give the V1 a little more range—Eastwest goes a full major 3rd higher!—but I think BBC will becomes my “anchor” orchestra.
Interesting, as you have spoken very highly about EW for so long. This is only on observation btw. I also love the sound of EW, but I could not agree with their player. How is the BBCSO player work in practice, resources etc?
Yes, I still love EW. I’m sure that for some situations, I’ll choose EW over BBC. Indeed, they sound, and pan, similarly so I think they’d probably play well together in the same piece. The EW is brighter and more aggressive, but that’s just an eq issue. And obviously, when I need that extra range at the top, I’ll rely on EW–and that does happen frequently. I really don’t know why Spitfire limits the ranges of some of their instruments as they do. I haven’t created actual music with BBC yet, but I’ll let you know how that goes. I have a Star Wars fan fiction project coming up where I’m going to have to do my best John Williams imitation, and that’ll put BBC through its paces for sure.
Yes the library has a great sound, using it for a project atm.
However for me there are some drawbacks as well. The horn is terribly sampled, the Hollywood Brass horns or the Cinematic Studio Brass one is far better. The overall transition between the dynamics (only 2) is quite harsh sometimes. Also quite some tuning issues and due to the player you can’t go in the back side of things like Kontakt to tweak or fix things.
I personally have some memory issues that it keeps loading memory. The difference in what the task manager is saying in amount of RAM used and what shows that Cubase is using is sometimes a 35 GB gap…
Otherwise the player does it job, but lot of things could be added or adjusted for the worklow (load single patches for example instead of disabling them).
But the overal tone is beautiful and I am very fond of the sound!
I started yesterday with orchestrating a music theatre piece that I wrote in 2017 for storyteller, piano and alto flute and using BBC SO for this. I orchestrated yesterday a small interlude
Wow, amazing composition Jaap, love the “Magical” sound. 
Thanks Mike! And allthough there are enough annoying quirks in this library, it can produce an awesome and nicely coherent sound which I really love.
The string runs sound nice, and sound like what I found, right out of the box: you can PLAY THEM, and they sound like that. Correct?
Interesting view. I know according to Christian Henderson they keep the ranges just inside the plability ranges so that you can “hack” extra nots inside the players. Which I guess just means you can tune them up to a 4th higher before the sound starts to morph.
Personally I think that only works with bass frequencies bug the results are quite pleasing tbh. I just don’t do it. It’s an option though 