Just got an e-mail with the download for the full samples sets. Haven't played with it yet, but should be fun. Tons and tons o' strings samples :D.

Oh oh....I better start saving up...........when's the group buy?

I still haven't tried all the instruments in CS2!

Please give us a report when you get it DL'd. I've been saving up for it, but I'm moving soon and that is sucking up all my money. I don't know if I should go for a lower LS version or save up again for the FS version. Could you post a short example of the LS version vs the FS?

I have CS3 Edition 5 FS. Have not played with it much as I don't usually need this type of library. What little I have played with it I can say it hits the CPU hard.
 
I have 2 month old Studio Cat Pro with All Samsung SSD's and it will still bring it down when using Multis. If I raise the audio buffers up to 1028 I can get some decent polyphony at the expense of latency. Not really sure how I will use this unless I do a lot of bouncing to audio.
 
Although, It does sound Very Good!

bitflipper
I still haven't tried all the instruments in CS2!

No worries. Neither has anyone else.

rtucker55
I have CS3 Edition 5 FS. Have not played with it much as I don't usually need this type of library. What little I have played with it I can say it hits the CPU hard.
 
I have 2 month old Studio Cat Pro with All Samsung SSD's and it will still bring it down when using Multis. If I raise the audio buffers up to 1028 I can get some decent polyphony at the expense of latency. Not really sure how I will use this unless I do a lot of bouncing to audio.
 
Although, It does sound Very Good!

If the multi's are bringing down a paractically brand new Studio Cat PC, I can't imagine what it will do to an older system. I wonder if others have also noticed this and if Kirk is working on a solution (if it's a universal prob.).

That's a good question but I have not seen many complaints on the Forum. The multi's came out a few weeks ago and contain from 48 to 60 players so I guess this should require some horsepower.
 
It has been low on my list so I have not contacted Kirk yet but now that the full release is available it will only be a matter of time before issues start to surface.

Sure. As I'm wont to do, this is an old videogame MIDI file, so not at all composed for any of these string libraries. I adjusted the attack style and such to taste, but little other than that. I've got a CS2 version and a FS and LS version of CS3. In both cases the 1st violins and violas are loaded together in a Kontakt instrument. I've posted screenshots to show you settings, though you can't see everything in CS3 since the interface is so huge and Kontakt won't scale up any more.
 
In CS2 I set DivisiLive on, Accent MF style with Marcato accents and reverb off. In CS3 I set it to Marcato articulation, turned loosen entrances down to 6, set it for "bone dry" and turned the violas section down to 12 players to match CS2. As far as I know the auto divisi is always on in CS3. All of them are playing through a QL Spaces reverb so they all have the same verb on them (all set at the same level).
 
Files were produced just be switching the output and bouncing the tracks again, then I cut off some leading silence and normalized them in Sound Forge. No additional processing. There is a bit of apparent level difference since this was just a peak normalize, not something to try and balance apparent volume.
 
Concert Strings 2 (settings)
Concert Strings 3 Full Samples (settings)
Concert Strings 3 Lite Samples (settings)
 
Should give you a rough idea of the sound differences. You'd probably want someone who's an actual composer to do a better demo, but this should help you hear basic differences, and isn't biased towards any of them by virtue of being tracked for generic strings libraries.
 
As others noted, CS3 can hit the CPU pretty hard. I don't think Kontakt threads out its scripts as well as it could because it'll hit one core more than the others. With the big CS3 multi and some pretty crazy input, I was seeing spikes near 100% on a core. Never went in to the red that I saw, but close, and I'm running on a i7-5930K at 4GHz off of SSDs so this is a pretty heavy hitting computer.
 
Something else to make note of if you want to use the big multi is maybe turn down the number of basses and cellos. The thing ships with 16 chairs of basses which gets a bit overwhelming in most mixes. Maybe knock it down to 8 or 6 to start.

Thank you for that, Sycraft. That's the first comparison I've ever seen of CS2 vs. CS3 side by side.
 
The CS3 version sounds as if it was miked further away - more ambient, smoother highs, more Albion-like. I'm not sure it's $150 better based on sound alone, but other improvements might justify the cost, such as the simplified UI and new articulations (portamento is a biggie for me).