u/HorrorBrother713

My first time, be easy on me.

For the most part, I'm pretty happy with the sounds I can find within Sytrus (I'm in FLStudio... 20? I think?) but I do find the horn options and the violin options a bit lacking. I'm working on a soundtrack for a book trilogy and there is a bit of variety in the song styles requested for different parts, and I would very much like to find a good option for these kinds of instruments short of buying a violin myself, lol.

I have tried the Spitfire Audio stuff, and the strings are okay, but I figured I would ask around. I'm on a budget (who isn't, these days?) and would appreciate the free options the most, but open to all ideas.

Thank you.

NOTE: I did a quick search of the sub before posting this and found a couple of mentions, the most recent almost three weeks ago. Check it out, from Max Read's substack:

>What’s so odd about this is that—for a name now so common across the megaplatforms—before 2023, “Elara Voss” did not exist. There is no person named Elara Voss in the United States. No birth certificate has ever been issued under that name; if you search for it in public records databases, you’ll turn up no results. There aren’t even any characters named “Elara Voss” in any book published before 2023. Until two years ago, the two words didn’t ever appear next to each other even by accident.

>But if you direct almost any L.L.M. to generate a sci-fi story or narrative for you, it will name the main character “Elara Voss”—or a similar variation like “Elara Vex,” “Elena Voss,” or “Elias Vance”—with an alarming degree of frequency.

>Elara Voss is not a real person. Nor is she a public-domain literary character. Nor—yet—a figure of myth or folktale. She’s not really anything at all except for name: A string of tokens that has proven irresistibly attractive to a number of different large language models when responding to prompts involving character names and science-fiction and fantasy stories. That is, “Elara Voss” is the text that L.L.M.s seem to have have collectively arrived upon as the best response to a prompt like “what should I name the character in the story I’m writing?”

>When, exactly, “Elara Voss” and its cognates emerged from the latent space to dominate the Kindle Unlimited store is hard to say. I’ve seen some people on Twitter hazily suggest that Elara and kin—let’s call them promptonyms, to coin a phrase—were present in GPT 3.5 (released in November 2022), but the earliest instance of the names I can find online dates back to August 2023, when an account “exploring realms through #AIStorytelling & #AIConceptArt” posted a character sketch of a “visionary physicist and AI researcher” named “Dr. Elara Voss.” (A “Dr. Elara Finch” and a “Dr. Elara Solis” each appear a few months earlier.) Voss appears a handful more times on Twitter in similar contexts over the next few months, and pops up on a fan-authored Warhammer 40k wiki as the name of the “highly respected leader of the Inanis 23rd Voidstalkers.”

I brought this here from HERE because I followed it from HERE, a Bluesky post about Eva Rostova.

Though my opinion (public and private) on AI-generated and AI-assisted writing is low (it really can be boiled down to: just do the fucking work, god damn) I find things like this fascinating. And like Max Read says, enjoy their omnipresence while you can, because the purveyors of fiction software don't like anything which shows their work is anything less than a magic box.

And now, personally, I have a new thing to worry about, lol. A novel I had written in 2015 has been dusted off and is ready to publish (just waiting on the cover, fingers crossed) and one of the characters is names Elias. Woe is me, you motherfuckers. Woe is me.

I was talking to somebody at work today about books, and they said they liked Fantasy, and I was like, "ooh, what kind?" because I was hoping to shill my Urban Fantasy series at them. That wasn't to be, though, because the answer was "High Fantasy."

And that's cool, because people like their doorstop books full of war and lore and what have you. But I got to thinking about the last fantasy I had read that I really, really liked, and it was something which might be considered Low Fantasy.

I'm referring to the Low Town series by Daniel Polansky. Those books read to me like something Robert B. Parker might have written if he had idolized Tolkien as much as he did Hammett and Chandler. There were sections of the D&D movie which made me think of this, too, so I wanted to ask here if people were fans of that kind of noir-style fantasy story.

Fantasy, to me, isn't really a genre, but a setting. Same as the MCU proved the superhero background is a setting more than a genre, or Army of the Dead or Eden proved you could tell all kinds of stories in a zombie setting. I'd like to see more kinds of stories in the fantasy setting, specifically something like maybe Donald Westlake would have written as Richard Stark. Seedy underbellies, or even like The Curse of Capistrano, from where Zorro sprang.

Give me your thinks about this, and if you know of something which hits these notes, let me know!

I used to use Spitfire a while back for the free BBC Orchestra plugin, and since I just put FLStudio on a new laptop, I thought I'd give it a shot again. I am now three new apps deep (Kontakt, LABS, and Instrument) just trying to get everything installed, and still don't have any of my legacy products available to me.

Has anybody gone through this, and if so, WTF am I doing wrong?