ERA II i a fantastic and beautiful collection of medieval, renaissance and baroque instruments. Many of the sounds and timbres are spot on. Especially the wind instruments and some of the lutes are awesome. The UI is beautiful with information and drawn images of each instrument.
Installation was easy enough, but there is not much info on how to do it. You need to figure out for yourself to copy-paste and unpack the files and how to load it up into bestservice engine 2.
My big gripe with this, and the only reason that I don't give the product the full five stars, is that most bowed instruments are monophonic. Instruments like fidule (basically a fiddle) or nyckelharpa should be able to make double stops and drones and the viola da gamba should even get to play full chords (oddly, you can play polyphonic when the gamba in plucked mode, but not bowed). But not with ERA II, unfortunately, What this does is that it becomes hard to play in an authentic way, it makes for a sort of moog-ish quality to the bowed melodies. There are of course ways around it to simulate a real instrument, like doing overdubs, but that makes it much less intuitive and organic while taking more time. It's such an odd choice, it must just be a programming thing right? At least the lutes are polyphonic.
Overall: An amazing product with beautiful sounds and timbres for early music, folk as well as fantasy-style music, that unfortunately looses much of its value for me due to its lack of polyphony in bowed instruments. If Bestservice would update the engine or ERA to deal with this issue I would change this rating to the full five stars in an instance.
