TerraSin
I own most of the EW libraries. Play use to be pretty terrible. It's gotten much better over the years than it was. Hollywood is a BEAST of a plugin though so make sure your machine is fit to run it if you go that route. Play Pro has also been announced for later this year. I am not sure how I feel about that yet but we'll see what happens.

Just watch out with EW and announced. They suck at making deadlines. Play Pro was announced over 5 years ago. Initially called Play 2, they changed it on the suggestion of people since it was confusing in that it was an upgrade, not a replacement. They even put it on preorder sale. Then... nothing, for years and years nothing.
 
With EW, never believe a product until it is on the market. They are notorious for pushing their deadlines again and again.

 VSL is quite impressive on all fronts. You can buy a la cart.  VEPro is even more impressive.

I started small with Goliath and now have several of the Composer Collections. It works very well for me. In early version 3 I had some problems but that was then. Play 4.2.2 is trouble free.

No problems at all.

I used to have problems in rendering the close microphone to audio, I'd get all sorts of noises that weren't in the original. One day I decided to experiment and opened the Play interface, opened the Mixer tab and muted the stage and surround mics, then went back to render out just the close mic but this time I did a realtime bounce. Perfect, no noises! Ever since I do a realtime bounce of the close mic and fast bounces of the stage and surround mics. If you're having problems still give it a try :)
 
Bill

SycraftJust watch out with EW and announced. They suck at making deadlines. Play Pro was announced over 5 years ago. Initially called Play 2, they changed it on the suggestion of people since it was confusing in that it was an upgrade, not a replacement. They even put it on preorder sale. Then... nothing, for years and years nothing.
 
With EW, never believe a product until it is on the market. They are notorious for pushing their deadlines again and again.

Yah, they learned a hard lesson with that. I now believe they won't announce something with a date attached unless they are sure it will be somewhat accurate because of the lashing they got with some of the products like Play Pro and Forbidden Planet; both which were announced years ago and remain not completed.

Used Play with Sonar for around 5 years. I have never had a serious issue. I visit the EW website a couple of times a day and it seems that those that have problems these days are more often than not on Macs. Most people seem to have no issues but then there is the random individual who for whatever reason seems to have a nightmare. Not sure why but that is just the way it is.