PSA: Broadway Lites is currently marked down to $119 from $499 through VSTBuzz.
Full disclosure - I never did get this working in “Notation mode” but haven’t tried in several years. @John_at_Steinberg created a Playback Template for it so perhaps it’s working fine now. I’ll give it another try tonight.
VSTBuzz was acquired by the Audio Plugin Deals guy. It goes on sale on APD for this price every few months it seems.
That’s potentially exciting. If it can function well within Dorico, it’d worth getting, perhaps.
Curious to know how it works for you!
What about VHorns? I’ve created a audio export of a big work I helped to engrave some years ago (our instruments were NotePerformer and Spitfire Percussion at that time), the composer was really happy with the new results (acousticsamples for all windd, Superior Drummer wherever I could replace Spitfire…)
I’ve always been curious about that Fable Sounds and I trust your judgment!
So here’s a brief sample of the Trombone, Tenor Sax., and Trumpet. I had already done this transcription years ago, so basically just used John’s expression maps, added a bit of UAD Capitol Chambers reverb, and Exported audio. I did find the Trombone expression map was off by 2 octaves, so I added 24 semitones to it. Other than that I did no work whatsoever on these.
Get Happy original recording
Broadway Lites
Thanks Todd! I am not convinced that I would need it (since I have the VHorns and VWinds), it is fine but not amazing. I suppose it shows its age (“traditional” sample library with quite some programming compulsory to achieve some degree of realism). Your audio file saves me 119$ 
Thanks @FredGUnn for the honest example!
In this context I would like to know how VHorns and VWinds compare to the Straight Ahead Samples stuff. Is the huge price difference mirroring in quality?
I also don’t want to solely rely on probably highly polished post production examples for advertisement.
I have this library but it does not work for me. My conclusion is that the sounds are ok played solo but the blending needs a lot of work to get it nice and I just want to get quick feedback if it will work in real life. I still prefer Noteperformer for that purpose.
Here’s the same example. VHorns with Trombone set to the J.J.J. preset (of course), Tenor on the Dexter preset, and Trumpet on the NOLA preset. Don’t mind the panning as this was using my big band template and I didn’t bother changing it so all 3 are going to be skewed to the left.
I don’t have the SAS brass, but do have Atomic Big Band, so here’s Atomic with Lead Trombone, Tenor 1, Trumpet 2. Tpt 2 exactly fits the range as it goes too low for Tpt 1. Using the expression maps from their playback template with no editing. I find the attempts at rhythmic phrasing bizarre and unusable personally.
… and here’s the same thing with Smart Delay turned on, which yields much better results than with it off (still not a fan though):
I have no experience using these libraries in Dorico, but I do have V Horns saxophones and the Infinite Brass and Winds libraries. To take advantage of their strengths I find it requires playing the sounds in real time and/or doing a fair amount of editing note velocity and note overlap. I do this in Logic. For me it’s worth the large amount of time it takes, but for others I suspect it might be unreasonable. Since some of these things cannot be controlled from within Dorico—at least not without altering the score—I can’t see how they would perform well.
Wow, thank you for the comparison!
The V… sounds are not far away from real. Without much tweaking this is a really amazing result.
SAS, ouch, that hurts! It sounds like it was badly cutted out of a bigger ensemble.
Talking of ensembles. Is the blend in a brass/woodwind section (open harmonies / lush sound) also nice in the V products or is another library stronger in that regard?
I share your conclusions!