The Orchestra Essentials

One of the best "starter pack" orchestras for composers on a budget. Works with Kontakt Player, too! The Orchestrator (similar to the one in EastWest Opus, which was also co-developed by SonuScore) is the icing on the cake and gives you a nice starting point for sketching ideas. Clean and intuitive interface, interesting presets, and the sounds themselves are pretty good and "rawer" than your standard Hollywood-like libraries, giving you more space for experimentation.

Sonuscore did a fine job of sampling the orchestral sounds for this VI. The Kontakt interface is interesting and fairly basic. I was able to set up some sketch-style ensembles for composition. They might even be passable for certain kinds of background recordings.

Unfortunately, the arpeggiator has not impressed me so far. It seems to have very limited features and almost no randomization options -- not as mature as several other orchestral hybrid VIs among my sound libraries.