Home / Plugins / Orchestral / Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra
by Unknown
Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra is a somewhat old free orchestral SFZ library. Mattias Westlund created the original in 2011, and Peter Eastman has been maintaining and expanding it for years. 0 (free for commercial use with attribution). 0 now covers ensemble and solo instruments for strings, winds, brass, and percussion, plus piano, harpsichord, and chorus. Eastman’s key contribution over Westlund’s original has been looped sustains, which dramatically improve the library for sustained orchestral writing.
By modern bedroom producer standards, Sonatina is pretty dated, but it’s still useful as a free, cross-platform fallback. Where it still shines is in notation software. MuseScore, Sibelius, and Dorico users get a free, cross-platform orchestra that runs anywhere Sforzando or sfizz runs, including Linux. It’s also the fallback when Kontakt Player isn’t an option. If you need production-grade orchestral sound, BBCSO Discover and SSO Discover are meaningfully better, but Sonatina remains the reliable SFZ benchmark.
A community-made SF2 conversion also exists for MuseScore users who prefer the soundfont format.
Links to github.com — the article includes the official download links.
Orchestral
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