String Section VSTs

$1000?! Ouch.

I'm glad you found something that works for you...Sorry about the expensive learning lesson. I personally have really enjoyed Cinematic Strings2 and could recommend them to anybody interested in some great sounding strings at a GREAT price... http://www.cinematicstrings.com/

You might want to check out:

Spitfire Albion: http://www.spitfireaudio.com/albion.html
LA Scoring Strings (LASS): http://audiobro.com/

Hey Konrad

What are your system specs? Can you explain a bit how you use Hollywood Strings... a typical scenario...?

I'm sure you checked your system specs before committing yourself to buying HS (and even then their claims for sys requirements are a bit overblown imo). So it seems a bit odd that you're having such problems using them...

+1 on 8DIO, haven't tried the strings/violins since I have EWQLSO but I have a lot of their stuff, the epic taiko and frame drums are fantastic, also the Bazantar and Legacy grand are just amazing when you need something moody and brooding.

Wish they'd do a Duduk next.

  EDIT: Also for those libraries that just takes up horsepower I use MIDI over LAN and have a closet with some older q6600 just running a vst host loaded with whatever I don't want on my main box, very little additional latency if you already have a network in place. I remote to them using TightVNC when I need to change something. It's great because you can useually snag up used Q6600s for peanuts now. 

I have a rack-mount Creation Station from Sweetwater Sound.  8-core processor, 12 GBs RAM, running Sonar X1 in 64-bit under Windows 7.  My system specs well exceed the EastWest requirements.  Problems:

1-There are too many samples with similar and cryptic names that are all controlled in different ways (e.g., use Mod Wheel for one, speed for another, velocity for another...).  Someones the Mod Wheel controls vibrato, sometimes it controls volume and vibrato, sometimes veoldicty controls volumes, sometimes it controls sustain.  Sometimes you use CC7, sometimes CC1, sometimes CC11, etc.  Add into this that portamento may be controlled by speed or by velocity, or by a combination, or may not exist at all.  It is all too confusing.
2-Samples take a ridiculously long time to load.  Then if you decide you need a different one, you start over.  Each articulation requires loading a different sample.
3-Notes drop out a lot—like a synth that is running out of voices.  When this happens, the CPU use is low (like 20% or less) and the memory use is less than 4 GBs out of the 12GBs available.   And note that I am NOT using the samples in the folder called POWERFUL SYSTEM samples.

I got on the EastWest forum, explained this, and just asked: which is the best sample for a legato sound with vibrato controlled by the mod wheel?  The thread is long and confused things more,
The keyswitch samples are easy to use and sound good but are not legato.
I am not bashing the product—it can sound great, but the performance is poor, and the manual and videos need to match what the user sees on the screen more closely.

VSL is way easier and more efficient, though admittedly without all the options of Hollywood.

Hey Konradh,

I don't have Hollywood Strings,  but I have had other libraries with similar issues.  I could not get Cinematic Strings 2.0 to stop dropping out until i raised the buffer inside Kontakt for individual patches.  It comes from the factory set at 60mb.  I more than doubled that and everything started working fine.

Also in Kontakt if you load a patch and resave it over itself it will load quicker.  I have taken to loading an instrument,  tweak it so it responds to midi data the way I'd like,  then save it with a revised name so i don't mess things up.  Your patches will then load quicker....(I Know...PITA!) 
 
So i don't know if you are using Kontakt or some other software to load into Sonar, but perhaps that is where your issues are.