Everything is all laid out which is a terrific time saver especially if you have a director over for a spotting session or brainstorming session and you can quickly bring up one of the lovely patches. WIthout this, solely relying on Symphobia would result in some lazy composing. Those libs have solo and section samples. I use this library in tandem with VSL and EWQLSO. The only worry I have with a library like this is that the hobbyist will get it home and realize they are boxed into a corner in terms of flexibility. Brass get treated to the same playing techniques as do winds. For strings this means col legno (playing and/or hitting the strings with the wood side of the bow), tremolo, clusters (dense grouping of notes a semi tone apart), glissandi (sliding up and down the string) and more for a very unpleasant eerie sound. Symphobia also specializes in effects patches meaning samples of instruments playing in non traditional ways. There are also some long sustained patches combined with some percussion as found on "blockbuster". I can channel Jerry Goldsmith's sound with a couple presses of my mouse by loading up something like "Domestic Trouble:" which combines pizz. The choices of programming are inspired if you ask me. MULTI patches combine the single patches by layering brass with strings and winds. Project SAM has single and MULTI patches. I myself had have a plethora of ideas hit me while playing one of their epic MULTI sounds. Why would Project SAM do this? Well, because Symphobia was designed to capture moments quickly. Brass and winds are done in the same fashion. Violins, violas, celli and basses are spread across the range of the keyboard and have some overlapping notes too for seamless transitions. You cannot choose simply celli or violin1 to record. String patches (staccato, spiccato, legato, etc) are all combined and mapped across the 88 keyboard range. Unlike most sampled orchestral libs, Symphobia DOES NOT have individual solo nor section samples. I do not own SoniVox but from what I have heard, Project SAM eclipses their sounds in terms of realism. I did not have to choose this over another library since I own VSL's VI players instruments as well as EWQLSO PLatinum PLAY which are to the two big boys in the world of orchestral sampling. The 1.6 Edition of Symphobia 3: Lumina offers over 16 new features, including improved control over articulation locking, legato performance, round robin and mic output routing.Although Symphobia is what one would call a niche market item, and as such its price tag is relatively high compared to how much you get (3 DVD roms worth about 18 gb of RAM), the quality of sounds is totally worth the price tag.