And I think those are some of their best libraries!  They really did a fantastic job on them.

I don't believe it is fair and here's why. There's no way that when they sell a new library, half the cost goes to the cost of issuing a new license. If that's the case then changing their method of licensing would benefit them even more than the customer, that would be really crazy! But taking their cheaper libraries, some of those single instruments that cost about 40, if it actually did cost VSL half the retail cost of a library that means 20 goes to licensing. Chances are the cost of the license getting issued is unrelated to the cost of the product, so 20 would still be crazy, plus there are free trial licenses available for some software so the cost must be pretty low. I'd feel like anything much more than 20 per license is no longer fair. As it stands some libraries would cost over 300. It's really inexcusable.

This is not an answer, it's a way to profit off the problem. This quote from the protection plan page really highlights that fact.

"Your lost/broken/stolen ViennaKey will be disabled and cannot be used anymore. Your Vienna Protection Plan is now used up."

VSL could simply reissue a new license to people, of course for a fair price to cover their own costs, and monitor trends or suspicious activity or patterns. The licenser keeps their products completely off torrent sites so with such a policy your only way to get the product illegally would be to somehow convince someone who has the products you want to give up their whole licenser...I just find it so unlikely a situation that the potential losses to it are overshadowed by lost profits due to such an ugly license policy.

I have to agree. The libraries are so all encompassing and universally made that they're future-proof to an extent. I don't believe any other developer has created their own version of what VSL does.

 

I agree, and VSL is the most trustworthy company to get that right!

I think that the following statements:

 

The Silent Stage is dry

The Silent Stage has a lot of early reflections

The Silent Stage was built to color the sound as little as possible

The Silent Stage does have its own color

 

are all true statements.  You're all correct, the Silent Stage was built to be dry but even a dry environment still has a bit of color, and early reflections are not the same as reverberance.  I have also previously read that Silent Stage recordings get edited to further reduce the amount of tail that gets recorded, maybe I'm remembering wrong but I thought I had read that before.  All of this just means that the VI recordings were *designed* for a particular type of use, and sure you can use Synchron the same way, but that's not its design, and that does make a difference.

I don't think that asking for more traditional libraries is the same as putting down Synchron. That's not the case at all. And I don't care much whether I'm looking at the Synchron player or VI, both have great advantages and seem useful and well designed. Focusing on who's being "insulted" is a change of subject. There are people who don't want to get into VSL because they don't like dry libraries, and VSL is giving them some truly incredible options between MIR and Synchron. There are also people who don't like wet libraries, and they too have been treated well by VSL. That is their core base of customers and shouldn't be totally abandoned.

I think I'm being fair here, the Smart Orchestra sounds wonderful. The piano, despite being a Yamaha which isn't my preference, sounds fantastic. And the percussion is beautiful! Also having said all that, I still haven't heard demos showing great versatility in the strings as far as realistic flowing lines and expression. Synchron hasn't provided that new leap.

For people like me who prefer dry and aren't crazy about the sound of the strings, it would be sad to see the greatest creator of libraries that perfectly fit my workflow abandon it.

I do agree from 0-39 sounds too distorted.  It's not just "dirty" the way an ensemble might play it, it sounds like microphone distortion. Otherwise very nice, I actually like the performance in that same section the best.

Truly fantastic recording, very well done!  Did you run the woods and brass through MIR?

 

Synchron Strings on the other hand have some strengths and weaknesses.  The sustains are nice sometimes, but it seems difficult to coax a true performance out of them.  You, however, show a real mastery of your tools.  This is great.

I can't consider any library the "best string section" if it doesn't have true divisi.  I love the sound of SyS but between not having divisi, portamento, glissando, or a smooth connected flowing legato sound, it's really nowhere close to the "best strings ection" title.

 

I'm also surprised to see someone say that MIR is complex to use!  It's one of the most user-friendly pieces of music software I've used before.

Short answer, not really.

In more detail though, you can of course set up some very complicated matrices where your playing velocity, playing speed, etc, trigger different articulations which might make the playing feel very expressive to you.

I've never experienced Dimension Strings' bleed through as a problem at all.  It makes the players sound more like a section.  The only time it would be problematic is if you really wanted to use a player as a leading soloist, which is not recommended for so many reasons, the bleed through actually not being the most important of the reasons.  So overall DS is one of my favorite libraries.

 

As for the demos above, they all sound very good, though I do agree that Synchron has a few choppy-sounding moments.  I don't want to point the finger at your programming or at VSL's programming, but overall that's what I'm hearing.  The shorts, however, are really some of the best out there!

Wow, all the overreaction in this thread.  If you're that upset by it, return it.  Get a refund.  Move on.  And maybe this will be a good moment of learning about what early birds and early releases really mean in the world of tech.  They're a risky gamble.  Now you know, and you can be better informed in the future.

One thing that really helps keep it from sounding boxy is finding the right primary vs secondary mic configuration.  I tend to put the main mic right up in front of the orchestra, like the conductor's view.  This makes a more close and immediate sound and gives the sound natural wide panning  Then I play around with the secondary mic.  Also I imagine many composers out there use a separate reverb on their instruments before running them through MIR, or even another reverb after to glue things together, and reduce the wet output in MIR to make up for it.  I find I don't really even need to do that with the right main/secondary configuration.

I think fake sordino can certainly fill in sometimes when real sordino can't be achieved but to make it truly convincing does take some work.  Out of curiousity, did you take DS and "match" the EQ of muted DS?  Or did you try to match it to your idea of what sordino sounds like?  I love comparisons like these so thanks for taking the time!

Just to add a bit of feedback, I'd like to have an option to keep instrument widths visible, if you do choose to have an invisible-until-selected option.  I quite like being able to see all the widths and it would be nice to be able to check them all just at a glance.

That's true, mixing muted strings in gives you a VERY nice sound!

Yes but more importantly than volume, mutes change the sound of the instruments. A muted violin does not sound like a violin played quietly. It's more about getting a softer texture rather than a softer dynamic if you get what I mean.

I see, though the VSL model tends to be to record dry so I'd be surprised if they made something like that.

Hmm I guess for my purposes the performance trills sort of ARE runs.  

I think that demo is more about how the sounds are processed than anything else.  Lots of reverb, lots of warmth without losing too much clarity.

 

There's definitely a point where "more" doesn't actually sound bigger, just fuzzier.

Agreed, MIR plus anything wet can be made to sound good and MIR plus anything dry is instant beauty.  Even the painfully dry sounds such as SampleModeling takes very little work to sound great thanks to MIR.  I've never used another plugin like it.

Doesn't Dimension Strings already have runs with their performance trills?

I agree, DS is a different beast, but the idea still applies. In my testing and in any examples I've heard, DS on its own has never sounded like a large Romantic-era ensemble like the original post was talking about. That doesn't mean it's impossible, it's just not the single ideal library for the job. You're right that complex interaction is present and that's part of the problem: the players in DS are interacting as an ensemble of 8 violins. From what you've said, it sounds like we're actually on the same page here.

Edited to add that your statements about older libraries sounding tinny due to no legatos and such is spot-on!

I'm of the opinion that DImension Strings on its own won't sound like a large ensemble even if it's adjusted to avoid phasing.  Variations of this experiment have been done many times before where a soloist is duplicated several times but it never quite sounds like an ensemble, like the "ensemble" function of Embertone's solo strings which still just doesn't actually sound like an ensemble.  That's not to say that Dimension Strings isn't a perfect library to use when mocking up Romantic-era string writing because it's full of divisi and splits and such, so having a library like that is essential.  It will just have to be combined with other libraries.  If you're already using Appassionata, maybe try seating the DS further back so that they have more reverb and treating them with EQ to get closer to the Appassionata sound, and choose wisely which library takes which splits.

 

DS has been a godsend for string flexibility in my opinion, don't be discouraged by the fact that it might take a bit of figuring out!