No more SONiVOX for me.

Too many hoops and limitations, with an impossible support maze.
 
 

The reason I have it because I bought Ensemble 88 on impulse for $17.  I didn't realize it was PACEd at the time or I would've passed.
 
I do like it quite a bit.  Hopefully I'll manage to get it going on the new machine.

I think that the inMusic purchase of SONiVOX and AIR may have disrupted the development and support for those products.  http://www.inmusicbrands.com/
 
If they work for you, and you got them at a good price, well great! I grabbed a bunch at killer prices!
 
But if you have run into any issues or bugs, then it seems that their support has no info regarding future updates or bug fixes.  I contacted SONiVOX tech support about a question for one of their products, and as soon as they saw that I was running Win 10, they closed the ticket and told me that their products do not support Win 10 yet.
 
So, YMMV ...

There is a workaround for the Big Bang crash that seems to work, but yes I agree.

Amicus717

abacab
There is a workaround for the Big Bang crash that seems to work, but yes I agree.

Yeah, I saw the workaround and tried it, but it doesn't work for me at all. BB still crashes Sonar and Reaper, like clockwork, every time I fire it up. The only DAW I own that BB doesn't crash is Samplitude. It's too bad, because BB is not a bad library at all; its got some stuff in it I quite like. I'd use it fairly often if I could get it stable in my main DAW. 

The workaround involving the "Learn" button requires that you hit it before touching anything else, including sending a MIDI event from your controller.  If your controller is sending a constant CC message or something, that could blow BB up before you could do anything.
 
As far as the included sample library, I have found that all of the percussion samples are unlocked. There is some good stuff in there for sure!
 
So if you have another sampler, you can map the samples out across a keyboard yourself!!! 

occide
SoniVox is out of business, just like Air Music Tech - both have been sold to..? I forgot. M-Audio? Which has been bought by Akai? Is that remotely correct?
 
All their products are regularly on the bargain counter and come with no support at all, except for a dude named "Bill" on a generic support forum. For any problem you encounter with these tools Bill will recommend re-downloading and re-installing until you finally give up.
 
And yes: the tools are full of bugs.

All the above are owned by inMusic brands now.  http://www.inmusicbrands.com/
 
Avid sold M-Audio and AIR Music Tech a few years back. 
 
inMusic owns M-Audio, Akai, Alesis, SONiVOX, AIR, and much more.  Especially more DJ brands ... maybe that's where the big money is now.

occide
 
I own the Air Complete Bundle and 2 SoniVox products. Especially the Sampler "Structure" is completely unusable for anything but playing back the sample library, if you're lucky enough to get that going. It's still sold for over 120€ sales price afaik.
 
One of the FX Plugins has a broken gui, another just outputs noise on 0dB. All the products seem to have similar issues when it comes to file operations, that lead me into thinking they where compiled against an old Windows dll that has been subject to significant change over the years. If that was true it would mean fixing all of them would be a matter of recompiling on a modern system, maybe adjusting less than 5 lines of code. Nothing that would take even the worst coder in the world 2 years or more. That's how long some of these bugs existed.
 
P.S.: Funny enough, M-Audio has still a brilliant hardware support, the best I've ever encountered in my life. The guy literally sat down with me and discussed the circuit of my broken device, sent me parts of the relevant schematics (with blanks) and helped me to fix the electronics of a $200 keyboard, which's warranty had been over for a decade. That was just a few month ago.

I have all of the AIR instruments and most of the SONiVOX.  I have no regrets with the AIR stuff, it all mostly works for me and there are some great sounds in there.  The only exceptions I have seen with them is with Strike, when trying to export files, and with entering text in Structure.  Sure the interfaces may be dated but the sounds are very usable.  I didn't bother with their FX, as I picked up the Select bundle, rather than Complete.
 
But SONiVOX plugins seems to have a few more rough edges that need some attention. 
 
I imagine that it is all in the hands of inMusic now to decide how to allocate their development resources.  It would help the product line tremendously if they would just do a refresh, fix the bugs and Win 10 compatibility, and maybe update some program browsers. 
 
I bought my first PC MIDI interface from MIDIMan, the company that started M-Audio.  I am still rocking a 1st gen Axiom keyboard and an M-Audio FW-410 interface that all still works on Win 10.  So no complaints there, but I have heard some grumbling about certain legacy hardware drivers not seeing updates as they are end of life.
 
I really don't want to say what I'm thinking about inMusic, because there is still a chance that they may surprise us all! 

wst3
it's a funny company. I own one of their bigger bundles, and TimewARP2600, which I purchased separately. I've had zero problems with TimewARP, and nothing but problems with the rest. In fairness, last time I tried I was able to get everything re-authorized and updated, but it required some hoop jumping, and as much as I like some of these, and I do, they are no longer worth the effort required.

Pity!
 
And in the future I might choose to get them all working again... but I'd need some free time to make it happen.

I got the entire SONiVOX bundle with TimewARP2600 included, for less the the price of TimewARP alone.  Plus I also got the Eighty-eight ensemble, the sampled Steinway with some sweet layers.  Those two work for me without any issues at all, so I'm not complaining.
 
I grabbed the SONiVOX bundle for the Orchestral Companion stuff, but now I'm thinking of jumping on the IK Multimedia Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE for $42, on sale this month.

BobF
The bad news is that it took 3 attempts to get E88 straightened out.
 
The good news is that on 2 of those attempts, a real person answered the phone and helped me.
 
 

 What did they say?

I actually like the sound of 88 compared to the True Pianos Amber that is included with Sonar.  Must be a modeled vs. sampled thing ...
 
I have heard some comments elsewhere regarding modeled pianos playing more like the real thing, but sampled pianos can sound better.