Cine-toms, Drums of War, review please.

So what do you guys think about these? Cinesamples

Any good?

They sound good and the price is cheap. That's all I can say with my limited knowledge

Excellent library. Also consider Taiko, by Sean Beeson. I consider it to be a superior product with a LOT more bang for the buck.

Curious, what would be the EWQLSO equivalent to the Drums of war and Cinetoms? Are these better? Cheaper?

East West has StormDrum and, more recently, its sequel. Each one retails for hundreds of dollars though, so it's an entirely different price range. They're also much larger. Both of the ones previously mentioned are only a few gigabytes in size, whereas SD is about 6GB and SD2 is 12, I believe.

EW doesn't really have an equivalent library to compete with these ones directly within the same price range and scale.

Thanks Marius for the input. Since I know you know a lot about these subjects I'll ask you another question. To use the Drums of war and other cinesamples with a Daw like Sonar which runs with my EWQLSO plugins, do I need to get Kontakt or can it be used standalone like EWQLSO? And if I have to get Kontakt what exactly is it? I guess thats more than one question.

Let me see if I can answer those one at a time for you. :)

Yes, you'll need Kontakt to run the libraries. EWQLSO comes with Kontakt Player, but most other libraries you buy will require that you already own a full copy of the sampler (Kontakt, in this case). The reason is that Kontakt Player does not allow for the level of sample tweaking and manipulation that its full version does, and many of the libraries are specifically designed to be tweaked.

Kontakt, getting to your second question, is a sampler. It's like Gigastudio, or EW's new PLAY, or Garritan's new ARIA. Kontakt is, in my personal experience, the most versatile, stable, and efficient sampler on the market right now. It's had time to work out its issues, whereas Gigastudio is now defunct (purchased by Garritan actually, but that's a different story) and the other two are brand new so they've still got some kinks to work out. In any event, the purpose of a sampler is to take a sample library and allow you to run it either in standalone or from within your DAW, and also manipulate those samples at a very precise level, make your own patches, apply lots of cool effects, and just generally give you huge amounts of control over the sounds you use to produce mixes.

I went to the Kontakt site and I was confused at which program I needed. This will probably be the last question, which one do I need?

What you need is Kontakt — Kontakt 3, the full version. Here:

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS : Products : Sampling Line : Kontakt 3 : Pricing And Updates

Though, since you already have EWQLSO (and therefore the Kontakt Player that comes with it) you could save some money and buy the crossgrade. That's what I did. :)