Review on EW Composer Cloud 1

Review on east west / sounds online composers cloud subscription

Sounds online composers cloud is a subscription based platform the first of its kind and the only one in existence that I know for music samples libraries.

If you are familiar with EW/QL products I don't have to tell you that the sounds are excellent and if this is your first time at it well... You're in for a good experience but outside of the sound quality of the libraries what they have done is a subscription model so that you have access to ALL the libraries or 7 libraries if you are a student, (they also have student pricing). If you already a client of EW if you are an owner of one of the libraries you can have the first year subscription for 30 dollars for the first year then it bumps up to 50 dollars that gives you access to ALL Libraries if you are a student you get the Student Pricing and for 15 per month you get access to your choice of 7 libraries that's 7 libraries for $180 that is awesome!!! Considering that I bought one library for $400

This review is not on the sounds which are the best in the market, nor the sample player called " the play engine" this review is about my experience as I joined the service.

First of all all the bad or should I say the stuff I wish was different

1. When you read the fine print on the contract the subscription is for a year and there is a penalty if you cancel which is 50% of the remainder of your contract sorta like a phone company contract. They do have monthly plans but, they're more expensive.

2. Again, in the not so fine print they say "Access to ALL libraries" that is not entirely true you have access to the "Gold libraries" that are awesome but they also have Diamond Libraries" which we don't have access to so in my book that is not ALL Libraries

3. This libraries need to be downloaded and we're talking about these Libraries are huge anywhere from 12 to 80 Gigs per library!!! So be prepered to be downloading for 3 or 4 days

They do have a a 1 TB HD available for 99 with all the Gold libraries installed but again for 99 plus shipping that for me it came out to $115 or 131 over night. I think that it should be free since what your paying for is the licenses to use their libraries. If their contract model is like a phone company they should at least give you the phone!!!

4. And last but not least it only works with an iLock you have a choice to license you're computer or license an iLock , which if you want to work in more then one system of course you want the licenses on the iLock, I already had an iLock but the subscription say it requires the iLock 2 so there goes another 50 dollars and I'm having a bit of an issue between ilocks now cause the licenses for my other plugins UVI EWQL and digidesign are installed on my iLock 1

On my iLock account but for some reason the licenses of the subscription were deposited on a different iLock account and I had no way of choosing accounts so at the time of this writing I had email iLock to see if they can merge the accounts so I can have all my licenses on one iLock since well... a MacBook Pro only has 2 USB ports this glitch might not happen to you and it may be an iLock issue cause it happen to me with UVI also a while back so just a bit of a hassle in my experience.

At the time of this writing I'm still downloading the libraries being a student and to test the waters I subscribe to the 15 dollar yearly plan for seven libraries I paid my $14.99 and I got a confirmation in my inbox right of way and I downloaded the play engine and their program "called installation center" it asks you to verify your iLock accounts password and a list of libraries comes up with all the goodies and download buttons for the libraries you have access to.

We'll be prepared to wait and have patience cause I subscribed on the 25th of July and its the 27th and I'm still downloading I've downloaded 5 so far I have two left but one of the libraries left is 60 gigs and the other 84 gigs!!! so it'll probably be 2 more days hahaha. The sounds are worth the wait I should say that I am in the mountains probably in a DSL connection and my download speed is 1 meg per second if I was at home my download. Speed would be 10 Meg's per second at least, EW does say that to download a library in any connection you should do it at night and go to bed. Also I'm downloading to an external usb HD because I want the libraries to be portable, I don't know if that makes a difference on download speed if it does it might be not significant, the good side of this is that I'm still waiting for my ILock 2 so I couldn't run the libraries without it.

At the bottom it says time left for download and speed

It seems like I said a lot of negative things about it but I cannot stress enough how good these libraries are, and to have access to 7 or All libraries for a monthly fee is amazing!!! Buying the libraries out right would be around 12 thousand dollars when all is said and done and no keyboard in the market Yamaha, Korg or Roland can sound like these samples do. At least not the factory sounds. Will I take my laptop to use live? maybe not cause I don't like the hustle I rather use my trusty Motif and Kronos but to record in my studio and for other studio work EWQL, UVI and Spectrasonics is the way to go.

So far I'm super exited to play Hollywood Strings and Gypsy I would let you know how it goes.

Happy producing!