East West Symphonic Orchestra Gold Edition

So, I bought this because I'm a sucker for those 2-for-1 Play engine deals from Digital Village. Ok, you can get them elsewhere, but I am a massive Digital Village fan and all music tech should be purchased from them.

Getting Voices of Passion in the mail from Germany sometime soon, hopefully. What a sentence.

Anyway, let me tell you about this software. It arrived in a GIGANTIC box, big enough to fit an American Football helmet and around twelve novels. This was nothing compared to the copy protection...

To register this software, you have to get an iLok key (not included - £30) and stick it in your computer. Except, you've already messed up, because you should install the drivers before you do this - there's a tiny warning somewhere in a readme about that, but that's it.

The drivers on the DVD didn't work, so I had to download some drivers. They worked. Then I installed the software which took around two hours - seriously. THEN I had to authorise the software. Except I couldn't, because there's no way to set up the auth program with a proxy server. I asked support about this - no answer.

I took my iLok key to work, registered for an iLok.com account, installed the auth program, got the licenses. Then I came home with the iLok and it authorised the software successfully.

Then I couldn't find the DLL for the VST plugin, as it had been installed into Program Files / Common Files (OF COURSE! WHAT BETTER DEFAULT DIRECTORY COULD WE COME UP WITH). After getting it to work in Live, I loaded up a big patch and it crashed.

Next time, I tried to use it, everything worked fine except there was a load of note-stealing happening in streaming-from-disc mode. Dumping samples into RAM fixed it - therefore, buffer problem.

I set the buffer to the maximum size. Now everything works cleanly and properly.

The sounds it makes are gorgeous - you should buy it.

I am so close to never buying another Play engine product because the installation and copy protection are so utterly utterly terrible. East West, what is your problem? Anyone with an internet connection can still get a pirated version of this - just stop being so stupid.

Oh, and I can't update the software because of my proxy. Good one.