Personal Orchestra (GPO)

Edited review. The first couple of versions of this product got a thumbs down from me. My complaints mostly related to problems on the Mac, with Logic, and due to the Kontakt player.

Now (December 2004), after 3 updates and a year, the software is actually getting good enough, although it still didn't take me a day to find a major bug. (Report to Garritan/NI with a request to let me know if they can reproduce it, or if it might be a problem with my installation. No reply.)

Pro: even with my limited skills this thing sounds good. And I don't even try hard. The demos that I've heard from people that do try hard are pretty unbelievable.

Cons: I used to list a number of bugs here. After several GPO and Logic updates (don't know who to blame) they mostly (but not totally) seem to have gone away.

What remains is mostly interface complaints about the NI player. Mediocre design, and clumsy in several places. Mostly unnecessary annoyances. Example: I moved the GPO sound files to a new drive. There doesn't seem to be a way to tell GPO where the new samples are. I had to reconstruct the instrument settings in the tracks that I had been working on.

Documentation: there is a little booklet, but it talks more about orchestras than about software. Quite insufficient.

Support: there are forums that are helpful, in fact more so than the email support.Read Review