I normally really like 8dio's stuff. They sound fantastic out of the box with very little tweaking required. I was fixated on Adagietto for a while and was completely hooked by their demos and tutorials. But when I finally shelled out my money and bought it, I felt I got slapped on the face. 8dio's Adagietto was a complete let down, and a rip off for the price (MSRP: $399). This may come as a shock to you because normally whatever reviews there are online about this library, it has been given extremely high praise for an entry level enemble string library. So let me break down the details:
1) String samples not panned to orchestral seating positions
This was probably the biggest shock to me when I first started playing with this library. For those of you who don't know what I am talking about, this picture shows how strings are panned in the stage: http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm260/robbinsrrr/orchestra.jpg
But nope. Whether its ensemble strings or individual sections, it killed me inside to find out that most of the string samples are panned dead centre (but still in stereo). For those of you have atleast some experience in mixing, you should know that you can't just pan things around left and right for orchestral samples if you're aiming to recreate their seating positions in the hall / cathedral / room. If you're a mix wizard, I'm sure you can put in a stereo modeller and reverb to adjust the depth, but you really need something like Virtual Sound Stage to do this for you (if you have an extra $229+). So I'm really not sure whether this issue of the samples not being panned to seating position is a serious bug (that hasn't been addressed in years since this library was released), or 8dio actually expect you to pan them yourself. Because if you listen to 8dio's Adagietto demos and tutorials on Youtube you can hear the violins, violas, cellos and basses are panned to the standard orchestral seating positions...Seriously WTF, 8dio????
2) No control over attack and release
The marcato and bowings patches sound great. But you have no control over their attacks and releases, which essentially means you either have to spend extra effort time stretching these samples or just use them sparingly. Which is a complete shame because the bowed patches are amazing. (They realistically capture the timbral changes of the strings as they are bowed from quiet to loud dynamics, which you simply can't do by automating the volume)
3) This library has a habit of crashing Kontakt and FL Studio
This completely tainted my experience with Adagietto for me. This library seems to have an irritating habit of crashing Kontakt and my DAW (FL Studio 11 / 12) frequently. Even when I'm working with relatively small and RAM friendly templates, Adagietto causes complete meltdown. And these are not just random crashes. These crashes are repeatable and simply running this library and playing something with it for too long crashes it. I have run some pretty big projects using several Kontakt players in the past and didn't face too many crashes. But Adagietto? This thing is completely unusable in FL Studio for an extended period of time.
Final comments
Though the sound of 8dio's Adagietto is great, this library was an utter disappointment for me. I really wish I could turn back time and NOT buy this library because I simply can't use it at all. Most samples are not panned to orchestral positon, there is no control over attack and release and the library frequently crashes Kontakt in FL Studio. I'm probably an isolated case regarding the library crashing frequently because I know some people who have apparently had a good experience with this. I really don't know why Adagietto crashes, and neither do support (who I have chased up). Maybe its my computer, or maybe its just a badly programmed library. Though this doesn't mean I'm going to stop buying 8dio stuff (because their other products are really good), Adagietto is not worth the price its being sold for.
If you're lucky enough to get Adagietto to work for you without it crashing every few seconds, then great! But otherwise, I'd advise to look at other string libraries for around the same price. Leaving the crashing aside, this library still has some serious bugs that 8dio hasn't patched up yet with an update since its release years ago.
UPDATE (June 2015): Been using this library in a few (unreleased) songs. I guess its not that bad as I reviewed it to be here, but I mainly use the spiccato and bowed patches. Atleast those patches seem to be stable enough when my computer is maxing out on its specs. However, I'm still a bit scared to use the legato patches on big projects. Meh, I never liked legato anyway; too damn tedious to edit them convincingly!