Great acoustics and a cinematic sound. A bit basic.

One of my the first Kontakt libraries. I still use it to this day. Good purchase.

It's recorded in the Sony MGM studios. That's an orchestra that was used in big Hollywood productions, so you get that cinematic sound. Very bombastic and great acoustics.

The old version of Cinestrings was quite noisy, but they cleaned up te samples and improved the interface. It's very usable now.

It's a bit basic with only a few articulations, but they often sell this with a discount or as part of a bundle, so it's not expensive. A solid backbone to my orchestral sample libraries. Especially since I own every other library by Cinesamples recorded at Sony MGM. It's nice to have a complete orchestra with a great and coherent sound. This way you can hear that it's all in the same space and belongs to the same orchestra. You can always add some more advanced libraries by different brands to expand the sonic capabilities.

I combine it with Cinematic Studio Strings that's more expressive, but has less good acoustics and is less suited for action driven music. I also use the E-Instruments cremona quartet (from the Native Instruments bundles) for solo strings. Those are much more detailed and can be good to layer on top of this library to give it more depth.

As for the other libraries from Cinesamples, some are better than others. The percussion library is great and very extensive. The harp is good. Brass is really good, but they have a newer one that's better but recorded in a different studio so with different acoustics. The woodwinds are not so good, so I replace them with Orchestral Tools Berlin Woodwinds. CinePiano has a good sound, but the samples are too noisy. There are a lot of great piano libraries out there that you can get instead. Cinesamples VOXOS is a choir library that sounds good, but it's recorded in a different studio. Samples are quite noisy but I still use them because I don't have a better alternative.

I wanted to give it only 4 out of 5 stars, since it's not perfect, but not a single sample library is. I really like the sound. The fact that I still use it when I have so many alternatives shows how well it still holds up.

Preferred Settings + Usage: