EastWest have announced the latest version of their Play engine. Play 5.0 is a major performance upgrade making it the fastest version to date with vastly improved sample loading times due to an optimised engine.
 
Doug Rogers, founder and producer at EastWest says "Power users in particular will appreciate the special optimisation settings for SSDs and PCIe-based flash storage systems". 

PLAY 5 includes an array of professional audio processing tools: The SSL and EastWest FX Global Suite, worth $99 is now included for free to all PLAY 5 users. This collection of SSL tools includes a filter, EQ, compressor, gate/expander, transient shaper and stereo bus compressor and EastWest has also included 726 new reverb impulses for the EastWest Convolution Reverb.
 
A new Amp Simulator and the Ohmicide multi-band distortion worth $99 are included free for the EastWest Goliath collection which contains hundreds of instruments of all types from the EastWest product range, and many more unique to Goliath. For film, TV and Game composers or musicians looking for a more edgy sound, this combination could open up possibilities for using real instruments as the source instead of oscillators. 

For the next week, EastWest is going to be offering Goliath for 50% off for anyone that doesn't have this incredible collection. To download PLAY 5 and the Goliath instrument update, go to the EastWest Support Center

With the release of PLAY 5, EastWest have also announced that all ComposerCloud subscriptions are now supported by PayPal so that subscribers will no longer need a credit card to access the collection of over 10,000 virtual instruments.