Spitfire's woodwinds are unbeatable for the tone. The tree mic and the bass clarinet is pure premium delicious wonderful butter. It's said some people have died from not being able to handle all the goodness at once. The Flutes, Tuba, Celeste, xylo, and timpani all gain so much from the hall that I look at most other sample library devs like they're completely deaf. I like OT's capsule more than Sandbox. I like Aaron Venture more than all of them. But for getting an orchestra to sound like it should, Spitfire gets tone very very right. If I didn't own Spitfire perc already, I'd have done that instead. I just don't mind adding a few percussion via a MIDI export if needed.

I thought Berlin & SF Chamber would layer or I could add extra staves for divisi... but I hear mock-up problems that SSS StaffPad demos just do a better job of, so if I could only pick one string library, I'd have done that. I just didn't as I already own it in Kontakt. For a sweet string sound, SF Chamber beats Berlin easily. It's lush and that old Hedwig's theme runs demo... geez. It's beautiful. For flexibility and most string writing, Berlin beats SF Chamber and still (mostly) sounds superb. SSS sounds better to me. Berlin Brass would be nice for individual horns... but for a typically good sound and for consistent ff dynamics, Spitfire + CineBrass are more convincing. Years of my life were spent on the trumpet. If JXL brass came to StaffPad and had trills, I'd have got it instead of Cinebrass.

Libraries I'll never buy:

• CineStrings
• CineWoods (sounds fine, but cheap legato)
• Berlin Woodwinds (what wind player could even like this lib? I don't, sorry)
• Berlin Percussion (solid, but CinePerc offers more and sounds better than Teldex IMO)