Team PlayĮastWest Studios set up for a session. The company have now upgraded the drive to a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM SATA model which they say is suitable for sample streaming, and they advise that this warning message is now out of date. At the time of writing, EastWest's web site states that the drive is supplied for installation purposes only and is 'not intended for daily use (such as for storing the samples for streaming)”, a caveat repeated on the product box. However, I was surprised to find that the drive in question is a bare internal type, which means that you either have to put it in a spare drive slot inside your computer or buy a suitable external case for it. (See below for EastWest's specifications.)Ĭontrary to rumour, installing gigantic orchestral libraries from 35 DVDs is not the thing I enjoy most in life, so it was a relief to discover that HS ships pre‑installed on a hard drive. Happily for those hit by the current economic doom‑fest, the library runs without problems on conventional fast drives, though some of its bigger patches do demand a pretty hefty system. While these devices have much faster access speeds than regular hard drives, they are considerably more expensive. For months on end, visitors to the company's web site were confronted with a set of red theatre drapes concealing the object of desire, so it was a dramatic moment when show time finally arrived and the curtains drew back to reveal the new star turn: Hollywood Strings, the world's largest self‑contained string library, 13 months in the making and boasting around 800,000 samples.Ī recurring question has been 'what kind of system do I need to run this library?” One strong recommendation from EastWest is that users seeking optimum performance should use Solid State Drives (SSDs) to house the samples. Their latest release was originally announced over a year ago, raising expectations sky high and setting Internet forums ablaze with gossip. When it comes to keeping an audience interested, Los Angeles‑based sound company EastWest have the instincts of a showman. Take your front‑row seat, sit back and enjoy the show - Hollywood Strings is here.

East west hollywood strings 2002