Garritan’s Personal and Instant Orchestra libraries give the ability to instantly produce orchestral music easily and are on offer from 1st-30th September with a huge 40% off.
Personal Orchestra is an award winning high quality orchestral library that has become the industry standard. It has developed an enthusiastic following for its versatility and ability to create realistic sounding orchestral music quickly and easily.
Instant Orchestra is for those who do not want to spend time building orchestrations with one instrument or section at a time. It provides pre- packaged groups of instruments, combined sections, orchestral effects, and mood-based presets. Instant Orchestra is designed for those who know little about orchestration or do not have the time to build them. The idea is to provide a large variety of lush, playable orchestrations with the least time and effort.

Until September 30th, 2014, Personal Orchestra and Instant Orchestra are available at the discounted price of £57.95 GBP and £69.95 GBP respectively.
 
http://www.timespace.com/productlist/3/999995/garritan.html
 

Personal Orchestra is okay.  Good in the right hands, but takes some patience.
 
On the other hand, Instant Orchestra is fantastic.  Best of the Garritan bunch that I own by a country mile (as I also own Personal Orchestra and World).

Listened to the audio demo for Instant Orchestra. It does sound pretty good, and $115 is a good price compared to similar products.
 
I use Indiginus' Solid State Symphony which, although based on synthetic rather than sampled instruments, uses the same concept of layering multiple sections for quick 'n dirty orchestrations. I love it (btw, it's only 40 bucks).

I started my adventures with virtual orchestras with GPO (actually GOS, but that was just strings). I learned quite a bit from my time using it.
 
But both my ears and the world of sampled instruments have matured over the the last dozen of so years.
 
I still recommend GPO and JABB as excellent training tools, but I also suggest that they may not be all that useful as your orchestration and arrangement skills improve. If you can swing it I think it makes sense to consider more modern libraries, even as a starting point.
 
Instant Orchestra, on the other hand, left me somewhat underwhelmed. Maybe at $115, but there are so many similar libraries that are considerably more up to date. Think about tools from Sonokinetic, Project Sam or Spitfire, depending on your budget. I think you'll get a lot more mileage from the newer tools.

Bit,
Great tip on Solid State Symphony...There goes my beer money...again...
John

+1   I've got the Indiginus page open right now, and the demos sound nice.   I particularly like how the Velocity Orchestra brings sections in and out, which from the videos seems like a natural thing to do.
 

Solid State Symphony is the only sample library that I just sit and jam with. I like to layer it with piano, then strap on the cans, close my eyes and go all Yanni for a couple hours.

and that would work with the free Kontact 5 player??

I will say that I completely misunderstood the intent of IO when I bought it and was underwhelmed. It gathered dust for a long while as I learned EWQLSO (and others). Lately, however, I have found that taking instruments from several packages and adding parts for them together makes for a much more dynamic sounding result. Still don't like IO on its own though...
 
Regards,
Dan
 

mixmkr
and that would work with the free Kontact 5 player??

Solid State Symphony will *not* work (without limitation) in the free player.
 
Pretty much any cheap-ish library won't work in it because it costs quite a hefty licensing fee to get a library to work in the free player.