East West introduced Colossus, a high-end GM-compatible sound library, at the 2005 Winter NAMM show.
Colossus is a massive 32-gigabyte virtual instrument that includes all of the instruments and SFX in the GM specification, and more. Recorded by Quantum Leap producer Nick Phoenix and multiple Prof. Keith O. Johnson, Colossus includes 15 gigabytes of new sounds, a new 2 gig piano, and 15 gigs of sounds from the range of Quantum Leap and EastWest titles.
A hardware rack-mount version of Colossus called Colossus Live will follow the software release.
MSRP $995.00. Slated for release on February 28
For more information, visit the East West site.
Surreal live sounds in Celeron!
Being owner of EWQL Colossus for some years from now I might say it’s a worthwhile investment in software, regard high price – almost U.S.$ 1,000 – and extensive exaggerated memory requirements – up to 32 GB!!
Thus having spelled this initial opinion, I must say it is rival of lushier – and pricier – Motifs, Tritons, etc. Sounds unparalleled in many aspects of its sounds, in reality really extremely good. Despite my antique Acer Laptop 1.4 Ghz Celeron with 2 GB – together to an ASIO Edirol UA-4FX -, in general tweaking with MIDI parameters permitted me to use it well, at least in home purposes. Unfortunately, decided to take it at a professional wedding as main sounds Midied to my TX5 Tokai organ; then, my Laptop crashed and nothing sounded in Colossus, leaving me with my organ, while my boss desired just piano plus strings stylish-sounds. Oh, this was terrible, lost a series of work with this particular employer!
Anyway, balanced electric and acoustic pianos with one good string and many hard difficult to describe orchestra, choir and ethereal sounds plus guitars, basses and drums reveal the full potential of this software.
Perhaps the problem is to load the eight multis – it does take reasonable time (15 seconds more or less) and in the middle of a performance could be embarassing or lead to a disaster. Just these eight slots is somewhat tiny for an instrument of this category! Yes, there are in fact infinite multis to load, however!
It’s so light in processing requirements that my netbook Atom could handle it – marvelous thing! Again, indeed, a supertool not to be underestimated at all.