For those of you who write orchestral music using a mac, can you please tell me what you use. Gigastudio is a standard but to the best of my knowledge does not run on a mac. Please advise.
Thanks

I use garritan personal orchestra for most stuff. Its awesome: Notation package, great samples, cross platform sequencer, good (freeware) reverb, all for $250. It is based on Kontakt player. I actually use the full version of kontakt for large ensembles because you can get more voices per instance which is more CPU and RAM efficient, as well as Direct from Disk rather than ram based sampling. Kontakt is definately the most powerful sampler as far as tweaking and modulating stuff. I use it for all softs of composition. Its a powerful sound shaping tool. Beware,however, it is NOT the most stable program. I have had more than one headache with it crashing, but that is all.

Other mac options:
Mach5 is really good. It will read any sample format and is very straighforward to learn and use. It can do a lot too but not as much as kontakt. Also more stable.

Digidesign has SoftSampleCell. I think its pretty weakass, but works great with protools.

ES24mkII is another really sweet sampler, especially if you use logic. I am jsut switching to it soon so I can let you know if I dig it. Logic is a really strong sequencer for orchestral music btw.

Never used Halion, another option from Stienberg.

Also unity session?

blah... thats what I know. A good forum for this stuff is

http://www.northernsounds.com/ubbthreads/u...ds.php?Cat=&C=1
Northern Sound Source: Viewing list of forums

Good luck

Chris

Mmm, I'd second Garritan Personal Orchestra - very nice sounds for the money. It does operate in standalone mode, but it should also work as a plug-in with Logic.

Otherwise, yes, any soft-sampler and a decent sound library will do the job (some of which can cost more than your entire Mac!). There's also Reason 2.5, of course, which has the Orkestra sample collection. Not bad, could be used ReWired to a sequencer like Logic.

If you bought Logic Pro, you'd get the EXS24 anyway, then you could experiment and choose the right solution for you.

There are some brilliant demos of the Garritan personal orchestra on their site www.garritan.com check out the woodwind in the 'rite of spring' excerpt, or the huge sounding saen sans (if thats the correct spelling?) organ concerto. At £170 odd quid its worth buying for the organ and piano alone, never mind the complete symphony orchestra!!
You may think I'm slightly mad but I was so impressed that I've bought it in advance of a computer fast enough to run it, my G3 imac is fairly elderly so I'm buying a G5 soon with heaps of RAM. One minor gripe is that the cubasis in the Garritan advertisements turns out to be only OS9 (Or maybe I'm missing something in the manual?) I'm looking forward to playing with it though and unless I win the lottery and buy the Vienna set (unlikely!), I'm sure it will be more than enough to keep me happy.