MOTU Symphonic Instrument. Good or a waste?

[Maud]

I am in a big need for some high quality strings sounds. I am not looking for huge ensemble pre-sets that sound like they were recorded in Air Studio with the London Symphony. I am more looking for a solo viola to accompany "sad bastard" singer/songwriter acoustic pieces. Think Eliot Smith and Wilco, or the viola/violin part on Dylan's "Hurricaine". I am mostly concerned with the quality of the sounds #1. But I am also very concerned with ease of use. I am not a violin player, but I need to act like one. I want to be able to control the vibrato rate and intensity and have it sound real.

Also, I need a really nice piano sound. Now, by "really nice" I do not mean that I want it to sound like a Tori Amos Bösendorfer recorded in a church in Transilvania. The online Steinway MP3's sound great to me. But I wanted to ask if any of your guys that have this V.I. can tell me if it is worth the $300 that it costs? I certainly can't afford the Vienna Symphony Library. And to be honest, with my modest needs, I wouldn't even want to. Too many options; too much to think about.

I would be using ProTools LE with an Mbox 2 on Windows XP.

Thanks guys,
Michael

[bradch00]

I too wasn't looking for the BIG string sound, there's so much of that available without getting into a fit for purpose VI. As well I wasn't looking to spend 1K+ on it, therefore MSI is where I ended up and all in all, I'm pretty happy with it. The samples are good and very useable, I like the solo instruments (brass, woodwinds, bowed/stringed instruments). A good representation of trills, slides, marc and pizzicato for all the strings in both solo and ensemble. I did find myself reaching for the EQ once in a while to tame some of the samples, (roll off the bottom etc). There's a two band EQ for each "part" as well.

What I am impressed with is the implementation. With one instance running you can have up to 64 different "parts" (4 banks of 16) all controlled by different tracks. For example if you have MSI plugged into track 1, you can address it in tracks 2,3,4... etc, without having to plug an instance into each track, thus lowering the overhead to operate several instruments. The outputs from each part can be routed indepentantly of the output of the track that MSI is actually plugged into, creating sub-mixes for each "type" of part or instrument. (This may be a common attribute of some VI's, but it's something I found quite elegant).

Most the modulation sliders and knobs have a "learn" mode where you can associate it with a slider or knob on your midi controller by <ctrl/clicking> over it and moving the desired modulation control to calliberate. Overall I found the implementation to be quite intuitive, although I didn't like the way vibrato and tremolo were done. I found that there was a noticeable amount of overhead (CPU power) required to run this VI with the built-in reverb therefore I usually use a send to something else.

It came with a seperate I-Lok.

That's about all I can say.... Oh I'm running it under PT M-Powered on a G5 PPC iMac.