Virtual Instruments To Check Out – Accessible Alternatives To Komplete Kontrol And Kontakt

This blog post was born out of a discussion on the LogicBand discord server about virtual instruments. I have seen this come up enough that I decided it was worth preserving here as a blog post as well.
The question was asked regarding recommendations for accessible Virtual Instruments as it relates to strings And Horns.
Keep in mind I have no personal experience with the myself, and everything as I can verify it is true as of this writing. As Accessibility is a moving target let’s hope some of the issues are resolved in the future and not worsened.
Check out musio. It’s made by cinesamples. You have 30 days trial with them and access to all of their instruments. They were the Hollywood standard for the last 10 years or so. After the trial is done, you can pay for a subscription, $10 monthly, or $100/year or buy a perpetual license for $400 ($200 on sale), and get all of their libraries. Plug-in is accessible. You can’t choose instruments from the catalogue, but there’s a search option which you are able to use. The only inaccessible part is scrolling through all patches. It may not be so problematic because the first 10 or so patches for each library are with key switches so you can access things that way.
They are aware of current accessibility issues as they were reported and should be Working on accessibility sometime in the next month or so. Hopefully it will be available soon after that. Musio uses very little ram which means that you can have lots and lots of instrments active at the same time.
Spitfire audio and orchestral tools make non kontakt instruments. Orchestral tools plug-in is accessible, but keep in mind that their instruments are heavy on ram. It is also worth noting that without Komplete Kontrol, you’ll have problems using the Spitfire native plug-in. Controls are available in control view, but no way to switch instruments, articulations etc.
Those were all related to symphonies or chamber orchestras. If you need strings, winds and brass as solo instruments, swam instruments is a good option, these are modeled instrument not sampled, made by audio modeling company, and all are accessible. Other options include bohemian violin, cello, and viola from virharmonics. Not sure on accessibility. I believe they have free versions so try those. One more, acoustic samples makes what the question answerer believes to be the absolutely best brass and wind solo instruments, trumpets, horns, tubas, saxophones, clarinets, oboes and bassoons are available at the moment. Flutes should be released soon.