"Fluid Woods marks the 3rd collaborative effort between Audio Imperia and Performance Samples, falling in lockstep with Fluid Brass’ goals: fast repetition-sourced shorts sampling in a decidedly easy-to-use interface.
The instrument configuration is traditional: solo flute, solo oboe, solo clarinet, solo bassoon, and solo piccolo - recorded in tutti in the same room as Fluid Brass. The library highlights up to 8 dynamics and 6 rep speeds, going above and beyond even Fluid Brass in terms of expression.
All samples within Fluid Woods are sourced from real repetition performances, for enhancing the cohesive energy of your lines. We’ve also recorded the samples at different speeds (six in total), with the faster speeds automatically triggered based on your playing speed, to accommodate faster phrases – leading to more fluent and realistic performances because you are triggering samples that are actually pulled from faster performances."
$79 INTRO PRICING ($99 regular)
The intro pricing offer goes through July 22nd.
- 1x Piccolo, 1x Flute, 1x Oboe, 1x Clarinet, 1x Bassoon.
- 5 mic positions: Close, Section, A/B, Wide, Ambient.
- Up to 8 dynamic layers and up to 10 round robins.
- Faster speeds automatically triggered based on your playing speed.
- Approximately 22 GB installed (NCW format).
- Made for the free Kontakt Player.
I have no idea what to make of this library. I know what it does in theory. But for me, with these demos, the actual difference seems so miniscule, that 22GB installed size is just to much. Pretty happy with CSW. Would be more usefull to have some basic longs to switch to with the modwheel.
True, but I’m interested anyhow. For the sole reason that these are very crisply articulated shorts. Which is a rarity in Sampled Woodwinds Land where nearly all of the woodwinds shorts (and lots of brass shorts as well) have a kind of blurred, woolly “fffwoah” attack which lacks all commitment and conviction. ( A 25-year old frustration if mine.) With these Fluid Winds, I have a feeling you can really ‘punctuate’ your phrases and tighten up the performance. Can’t immediately think of any other woodwinds library which is as good at that as these Fluids seem to be. (I also have no fear that the Fluid Woods will combine well with CSW or other winds libraries.)
Haven’t bought it yet, but I am thinking about it.
If you do end up getting them PIet, let us know how you get on. I'm eyeing these too but I am not entirely sure I could justify getting them because I already know I would be using these to layer with other libraries and probably would not feature them by their lonesome.
Mixed feelings. Make that: very mixed. Nothing much wrong with the sounds themselves — although the library sounds a little more washy and much wetter than I, personally, would have liked — but for reasons only known to themselves, Audio Imperia and Performance Samples have made this yet another of their very heavily scripted, ultra-complex affairs which taxes Kontakt (6.7.1), and by consequence the DAW, to the utmost.
A single, simple monophonic line with any of the instruments — and keep in mind you can only play short notes with these patches, nothing else — will often push the CPU (or, at least, one of the CPU’s) to the very limits of its capabilities. Working with these Fluid Woods is not even obvious on the new MacStudio Ultra, a computer fitted, in my case, with 128gig RAM and powerful enough to run a small country with: using the five included instruments simultaneously — not an outlandish ask, I would think — invariably produces crackles and stuttering audio. (And we're talking simple, monophonic lines for each of the five instruments here. I’m not sure what would happen, as I haven’t dared testing it yet, if some or all of them were playing more than one note at a time.) I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to do anything at all with this library on my old MacPro. So that’s definitely something worth keeping in mind if you consider getting this.
I really don’t understand why this should be so. The extremely poor perfomance, I mean. There’s no legato, no advanced filtering, no cunning sample manipulation that I know of (even if the shorts are pulled, in real-time, out of much longer samples containing lots of these shorts), there is, in a word, nothing that one would imagine requires unusually complex calculations — how difficult can it be, in the year 2022, to call up samples of short notes as and when needed? —, and yet this library keeps causing serious problems for Kontakt and, in my case, LogicPro even when asked to render the simplest of phrases.
And I don’t know if it’s related to the above, but the GUI is also not very responsive. Adjusting a parameter often takes several attempts before it’ll respond. A minor issue, but quite irritating nonetheless.
Talking about minor issues, here’s a very minor one. Not really worth mentioning, to be fair, but I’m going to do it anyway, because I keep noticing it everytime I open one of the patches: the volume level of the library is *very* low. If you use it in combination with just about any other orchestral library, you need to give the Fluid Woods a boost of at least 8 or 9 dB to make things somewhat compatible, level-wise.
As for the musical character/identity of the included material: these are clearly orchestral instruments — huge difference, as far as I’m concerned, between orchestral and non-orchestral woodwinds (this applies to all other acoustic instruments as well, of course) — and they’ll only work best when used as such. It would be unwise, I feel, and unavoidably frustrating, to reach for the Fluid Woods if you’re planning to do some intimate chamber-type music (even assuming you have the hardware that’s up to the task). I had hoped for a little bit more versality in this area, I must say — spatial versatility, that is — but there isn’t: even the close mics yield samples that were unmistakably recorded in a fairly large, reverberant space. And there being no way to adjust the releases (and the library being locked), that’s the space you have to accept when working with these samples.
That being said and ignoring the preposterous performance issues for a benign moment, when used in a fitting musical context — that would be your standard, conventional mock-orchestral idiom — these five instruments are really quite good and useful. Nice timbres (although I would have liked to hear a little more dynamic timbre change, especially in the clarinet) and spatially perfect for orchestral duties.
As I said at the start: mixed feelings. With a strong tilt towards the negative though.
