Here’s another cool and great sounding library by Audio Imperia: SOLO.
It’s a collection of solo instruments for wood, brass and strings. All new recordings by actual soloists, so not taken from their other libraries: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, violin, viola, cello. Audio Imperia keeps impressing me with each new library. They mix really well from my experience and are really easy to use. Very tempted to pick this up while it’s on sale. $199 intro offer. Your thoughts?
WOW! This is the best sounding solo collection I heard so far to be honest! 
Very clean and emotive with the distinct vibratos. That trumpet was beautiful IMO.
Very tempting indeed, especially with all those different instruments in one consistent, well made library. (I’ve been really rather impressed with the other Audio Imperia libraries, and with the Modern mix and timing controls, they’re particularly easy to use in more “aggressive” hybrid contexts, where more classical oriented libraries can be problematic.)
I really like the mellow, meditative flavor of this library, actually… I think it might be absolutely perfect for some things I want to explore.
Oh, and those pads sound amazing! The sound design bits in the Audio Imperia libraries are solid quality, and easy to use.
Agreed. I constantly find myself going to Nucleus or Areia for strings and percussion. The woods in Nucleus are great to. Not so much a fan of their brass—they’re great too but just a bit too punchy for me. These solo strings might be pretty good for some classical chamber music though.
He did mention briefly one small drawback in this video regarding this collection though, which is that it is not really good for faster legato passages. I wonder where the “breaking point” is though… I mean can it handle 8th note legato phrases at least?
Also, checking the specs now, only one dynamic layer in legato articulations!?
Yeah. They kept it at one dynamic layer to reduce the number of cross fades which can make it sound unrealistic, but he mentioned that if you set the note offset or whatever they call it, to around 60ms you can achieve a legato for faster runs. There’s a big knob for it on the “advanced” page. Whenever I use Nucleus or Areia, I always set it to around 20ms or less to get rid of any timing issues/note lag with other libraries I’m using.
Though, the main point for this library is slower, more expressive playing.
Watching the demo again, you can hear how the sample trails off and naturally lowers in dynamic at the end of the phrase without him touching the mod wheel, which is how Areia works as well if I remember; when you sustain a note, there is a slight natural decay baked into the sample.
I think it was explained somewhere as well, that it’s all deliberately recorded with expression. Same approach as Tina Guo cello, which makes it sound amazing where it fits, but narrows the use cases down quite significantly. 8Dio also tend to have a lot of actual recorded arcs and the like in their libraries, for the same reason; it just sounds better than crossfaded dynamics layers ever will.
Nice! I was looking for solo instruments for my next purchase. I was thinking about the Joshua Bell Violin. But this is the same price, has a bunch of solo instruments, and sounds really nice. Maybe I’ll have to budget for both.
I do already have some real high quality solos with Cinematic Studio Brass and Woodwinds, but no real good solo strings other than Spitfires’s solo violin/cello–those are real good to, but I don’t have the full quartet. I think i’ll pick this up and see how it goes (Yay stimulus check! 
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I am a professional composer and composing for live instruments. Based on the reviews i read I purchased the Audio Imperia Solo sound library. This is mainly to playback new compositions to help performers (mainly singers) to learn their parts. The sounds sounded good on the surface. However when we started using them, half of the pieces sounded out of tune. The voices were sounding out of tune in specific notes (E & F) in the lower register when playing quavers. The violin would sound out of tune on F, E, A in the middle upper register. The worst experience of all was Audio Imperia customer services. They are experts in denying that there is anything wrong with their sounds and putting the blame on all sort of reasons. We provided out of tune sounding samples, and each time they would find a different excuse (i.e. these were not played on a DAW, or were not played in the ‘good register’ or not used in an idiomatic way). Each time we will provide new samples that were produced in the ‘recommended way’ (i.e. on a DAW, played legato, not fast, etc). During the last communication we sent violin samples playing in octaves and demonstrated how out of tune they sound in specific notes. Their reply was totally irrelevant talking about vocal sounds. Reading this we felt as if they were mocking us. At the end we gave up trying to reason with Audio Imperia. We ended up buying different sounds from another company that play great out of the box without the million restrictions that we were presented by Audio Imperia. My impression is that is somebody tries to compose around these sounds of course is possible (yet limited, very soon all pieces would sound the same due to the build in crescendo and decrescendo loops, incontrollable vibratos and portamentos). However if you need sounds that provide accuracy, faithfulness and respond to your ideas (and not the other way around) these are totally inappropriate. Most importantly, the overall experience communicating with Audio Imperia was extremely negative, unpleasant and this in itself is a reason for us not to purchase anything else from them as they show zero respect to their customers.