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I am feeling brave enough to tackle loading orchestral samples from the London Philhamonia sample libraries, which are free, if only for home use (you can't obviously make Kontakt or Reason libraries out of them, and sell them on!).
For a start, you have to batch convert from mp2 to wav 24 bit.
You are then presented with a pretty laborious task of loading them all in; I shall be loading them into Reason NN XTs to create patches, for example, of Pizzicato violin, etc.
My questions are: in the folder list for, say, the violin, you get Pizz piano and Pizz forte - does this mean you should zone the soft samples together from Velocity zero to 69 and then load the forte Pizz samples into another zone from velocity 70 upwards? Thus to create a multi-samle velocity sensitive patch?
Or: should these be considered separate samples for separate patches, in this case, soft Pizz and loud Pizz?
Has anyone who uses Reason in fact created any patches using the free samples from London Philharmonia - they are beautiful and noise free; much better than London Solo Strings Refill, which, frankly, are very noisy, and not at all worth the $99 asking price, IMO
Am I in fact wasting my life doing this?
thanks

I would say yes with regard to putting forte and piano together in one patch, although you could do either. This is the old ‘velocity layers’ paradigm.

I’m quite a fan of the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra patch set, which is ‘free as in freedom’ as well as free of charge. http://sso.mattiaswestlund.net/ What I actually use is a conversion of this library (in SFZ format by default) to soundfonts, although I can’t remember where I found that.

Is there something that can convert from soundfonts or SFZs to Reason patches? Or maybe someone has done that already? If the SSO set satisfies you that might be the answer.

I have loaded Soundfonts successfully into the NN XT, using Reason 7.1.

This means, for example, i can load the Proteus 2000 orchestral collection from Digital Sound Factory.

There are currently about 12 different orchestral or related Strings libraries for Reason, many for free or for very little money. But Orkestra is still surprisingly good for articulation sets, even though quality wise the samples are bit lacking IMO.

Thanks for the tip; I am always one the look out for orchestral samples for Reason, both free and commercial. I am writing a book about Reason called Refill Yourself, which covers Refills, WAV and Soundfont libraries, provided they are legitimate and legal of course.

There was this great commercial library from Artificial Ear, back in 2009;l sadly, the company has gone, but i would still like to find this library for the solo violin. I never use torrents, btw, so any one knows of any legitimate way of obtaining these samples …

I have discovered a couple of unauthorised libraries, which obviously i can't refer to in my book.

I think I have just about all the WAV sample libraries for Reason, consulting the every wonderful Reason Freaks site, the book is actually running to six volumes!!!

If anyone can think of any other free sample libraries, particularly for unusual percussion and drums loops (demanding a complete volume on its own!), I would be grateful for any heads up.

There is actually plenty on free sound to do with orchestral items, I am new here, so I must have a look.

Sounds interesting what you’re doing. I’m a Linux musician, but when I used to use Windows I always thought Reason looked a lot of fun.

There seem to be companies out there that buy the rights to sample libraries from folded companies (they come and go on a regular basis...). http://www.ilio.com was mentioned lately, and stocks copies of sample libraries that anyone and everyone used in the 90s.

As for percussion, Freesound has a lot in this area. If you limit yourself to CC0 and CC-BY licensed samples, maybe you could make your own sample library!