I must admit that this is really tempting, and I’m probably just going to go for it. I’ve wanted some of these instruments for a long time but the cost was just absolutely prohibitive. I mean god damn even the lowest tier pricing of these products is $200+, and those are so low tier as to defeat the purpose of buying EW over some other random sample collection. I’ve wanted my hands on the choirs and hollywood strings for years, but at those prices they can fuck right off.
Basically the way this deal works is that first of all, it’s not a cloud product at all, it’s a subscription model. You download the product and store it locally just like before. As of yet I haven’t heard tell of any remotely cloud based features, and considering they’ll limit you to one computer I can’t see any cloud based features being remotely useful. I haven’t seen anything related to cloud storage of settings, project files, or anything at all. The only thing remotely cloud about this product appears to be the way the license checks in over the internet, replacing the need for a physical iLok, which is actually a big plus imo. I want my USB ports dammit, all of them.
So you can either pick 7 things and pay $30/month, or get all of the things for $50/month. The one downside here is that you’re limited to the gold tier of their product, which appears to give you all (or damn close to all) articulations but limits you on mic positions and 16-bit vs the 24-bit of the higher tiers. The bits don’t matter as much to me but the mic positions potentially could. On the other hand I would think it wouldn’t hold you back at all from making convincing compositions.
The pick 7 also lets you add one more thing ever 3 months. Pick 7 would give you enough to pick up the 4 Hollywoods (giving you a complete orchestra), the Choir, and then your pick of 2 other things (I’m eyeing one of the super pianos which are supposed to be super massive, even gold version is 50gb).
$50 seems a little steep, but that’s not to say I think it’s a bad deal, just that the $30 seems like more a sweet spot for me, considering I can’t possibly use that many different libraries in any reasonable time frame, and I can get the “core” that I want with the pick 7 deal.
Was wondering about your thoughts, and also, in less than 2 weeks I’ll be taking the plunge to try it out and will let you know how it goes.
edit: I put together the 7 I would want to pick, and totaled up how much the gold editions cost, and it came to $2350. That’s 6.5 years of subscription. During that time you would theoretically acquire 25 new libraries, and you’d get any updates to the 7 you picked. Any way I slice this, this looks like an incredibly good deal for something I’ve wanted for a long time.
