I don't recall the exact words, but I said something along the lines of "well it does sound good - but not $650 good!" - which was roughly the retail price of Miro 2 at that time. I'd heard a few demos of IK's new flagship orchestral offering when it was released, and I remember discussing it with Otto a couple of years ago. When I got it, I wasn't sure what to expect. Last year I was kindly gifted Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE along with some other IK stuff.
I feel truly sorry for people who paid full price for it back in the day! And there began, I think, my distaste for IK Multimedia in general and the Miroslav library in particular.Īnyway, with that bit of background out of the way, let us move on. I paid like 1/6th or less of the original cost of the library and still felt ripped off. But overall it was all the same out of tune, lo-fi-sounding mess. Sure, there was a lot more to choose from which made cherry picking useable things easier. after having paid for, downloaded and installed the whole thing I quickly realized that the bits missing from the CE version were not significantly better than the stuff that I was already familiar with. So while I knew the samples were old, there was a ton of stuff in there and my hopes were high. It weighed in at 7GB of samples as opposed to CE's paltry 2GB. I sprung for it immediately, expecting it to have everything that the CE version lacked and much, much more. You get what you pay for, right? So I always assumed CE was more of a paid demo version of the full library, and it made sense that IK wasn't going to give away all the goodies in the budget version.Ībout a year later, the full Miroslav Philharmonik went on sale for, I think, $50. Besides, the CE version was a cut-down, feature-limited budget variant of the full Miroslav Philharmonik which, at the time, still retailed for around $300 or more.
I wasn't too keen on it - in fact I thought it sounded terrible - but it had a handful of things that were useable and for that amount of money one can't expect too much. I'm guessing 2011 or so? I don't remember how much I paid for it, but it was on sale for something like $10 or $12. That's why it has irked me to no end seeing IK Multimedia passing the library off as some kind of magical, natural-sounding wonder of technology after they aquired the rights to it (some decade after the samples actually were cutting edge!).Īs for my personal experience with these samples, I got Miroslav Philharmonik CE in.
I just happen to think that the samples have become very dated-sounding and their usefulness limited.
Now don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for Miroslav Vitous and all the work that went into creating the original samples - especially considering it was all done in the early nineties. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I have no great love for the Miroslav Philharmonik library, as I have done a lot of complaining about it over the years.