By Tiffany Brooks

I recently purchased the Miroslav Philharmonik plugin from IK Multimedia. As a plugin, it came in DX and VST versions so it integrated well into my Cakewalk Sonar 5 software. I can’t describe how wonderful these samples sounds. My classical pieces actually sound like music for once!

But this is where my glowing review takes a dark turn. I was dissapointed to find out that the plugin does not have keyswitches and does not respond to program changes from midi. This means that if you have a part that switches between different articulations (i.e. from legato to pizzicato and back), you will have a difficult time making this work. I had to create a separate track for each articulation. So far I’ve only used this for a string quartet. Just imagine if I had to do this for an orchestral piece!

I am hoping that IK Multimedia will come up with a better solution for this plugin in future releases. Miroslav samples have been around for a long time, and they are known to be some of the best sounding orchestral samples that you can buy. Since IK Multimedia owns the rights to the samples, I hope they will also take responsibility to make sure that they indeed put “musicians first” as their taglines says and make it easier to use.