# Legato Spoof In Modern Scoring Strings Expansion?



## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 17, 2022)

Hi there!

To me it sounds like Modern Scoring Strings Expanded Legato doesn't feature actual intervals of the articulations it features and instead reuses one generic legato sample-set for all of the playing styles of each instrument.

The sound is slightly different per playing style and the intervals decay at different rates, but it sounds just like match EQ to me. The envelope ADSR also has some difference - The sul pont intervals decays/cuts off more quickly than the rest.

The actual "performance"/recording of the intervals with all their unique quirks and details sound exactly the same per group.

In this video I am going into Kontakt and "solo" the legato groups of the performance styles. That way we can hear only the legato intervals, without the sustains.
It's a bit slow and stumbling because I kept having to change from the interface back into Kontakt itself, till I figured out during the video that I can also use the interface from within Kontakt by selecting the right slot in the "scripts" tab.
I've also turned of an internal EQ on the sordino intervals before recording the video.

I'm furthermore doing a bit of EQ boosting here and there to highlight certain characteristics of the sound, like noises or resonances and then compare the groups.
At the very end (8:00) and the start (0:32) for instance there is a very peculiar resonance that I'm boosting with EQ so you can pick up on it more easily and then turn it off and continue comparing the groups.



There is nothing on the website I could find that even "suggests" that these aren't dedicated legatos for the included playing styles.
It even explicitly states that, while the sustains are included in the main library, the legatos are not.
This is of course possible, I can only compare the different playing styles and their legatos and conclude that in my opinion there is one type of interval being used for all the playing styles.
I don't know if that interval is from the main library.
It sounds just like a normal legato in isolation so it "could" be from the main library, can't compare because I don't have it. If that's the case we'd start getting into a dark territory. But again, can't check.

I'm only checking out the cellos here, I have the same impression of the others though but I'm short on time so I might or might not follow up with more. Feel free to ping me if you really want to hear those.

I only know what I am hearing... there is the video so everyone can listen and decide for themselves before purchasing.

And yes, this is my second "sample spoof" contribution here. I'm starting to miss the old days of pen and paper. Even though I'm 24 and can't even read music hah.

Might take 1-2 days for me to reply to anything here since I technically have no time for this stuff but it felt too important to share.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 17, 2022)

Just out of interest I also checked the legato groups (via group solo in Kontakt again to get the legato without sustain) of Berlin's Special Bows Sul Pont and Sul Tasto (cellos too for comparison sake, I only have low strings = cello + bass anyway) and the difference is massive.
A great example of just how incredibly different actual recorded intervals can be between playing styles.


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## Sarah Mancuso (Dec 17, 2022)

I can't say I'm really surprised to learn this. Legato is the most expensive articulation to sample, by far, so it's not uncommon for developers to cut corners on the sampling depth so that they can offer more breadth of articulations instead.

A _lot_ of beloved libraries are just using EQ in Kontakt to fake something as "simple" as having multiple dynamics for the intervals in their standard legato patches, so when you're playing legato at low dynamics you're just getting filtered high-dynamic samples instead of an actually softer performance.

(Now would be a good time for me to mention that we recorded three real legato interval dynamics for TSS. You can hear a huge difference in the soft dynamics compared with many other libraries.)


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## Obi-Wan Spaghetti (Dec 17, 2022)

Sarah Mancuso said:


> I can't say I'm really surprised to learn this. Legato is the most expensive articulation to sample, by far, so it's not uncommon for developers to cut corners on the sampling depth so that they can offer more breadth of articulations instead.
> 
> A _lot_ of beloved libraries are just using EQ in Kontakt to fake something as "simple" as having multiple dynamics for the intervals in their standard legato patches, so when you're playing legato at low dynamics you're just getting filtered high-dynamic samples instead of an actually softer performance.
> 
> (Now would be a good time for me to mention that we recorded three real legato interval dynamics for TSS. You can hear a huge difference in the soft dynamics compared with many other libraries.)


All very interesting. May i ask how many velocity layers does the legato sustain have?


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## Sarah Mancuso (Dec 17, 2022)

Obi-Wan Spaghetti said:


> All very interesting. May i ask how many velocity layers does the legato sustain have?


In TSS? It has 5 sustain dynamics (regardless of whether you're playing legato) and 3 interval dynamics.


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## Markrs (Dec 17, 2022)

I would be surprised if this was the case as given they charge extra for these over the main library and it is 60gb in size. However, I can see the evidence you have presented in the video. Maybe Audiobro and reply to the question.


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## Casiquire (Dec 17, 2022)

Sarah Mancuso said:


> In TSS? It has 5 sustain dynamics (regardless of whether you're playing legato) and 3 interval dynamics.


I think this is a forgotten question for devs when new libraries come out. "Five dynamic layers? But how many transition layers?" I think we tend to assume these things are one and the same.

I'm not sure how I feel about it all. It's disappointing on the one hand, but on the other hand, if it's so well done that we have to directly compare to be sure, the library gave me what I needed from it. Nobody knows what's going on behind the scenes of most libraries, and as we've seen with modeled instruments out there, sometimes the scripting IS what you're paying for.


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## Obi-Wan Spaghetti (Dec 17, 2022)

Plus a library could have a 100 transition vel.layer but if the sustain suck and is lifeless etc what's the point? The thing is the transition is often so short it's really not that important one could argue. it's the sustain part people listen. So long as the transition illusion is effective.

Still i appreciate the effort by ISW. These guys always go the extra mile and never cut corners. I need to look into TSS more. Thanks Sarah.


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## gst98 (Dec 17, 2022)

Obi-Wan Spaghetti said:


> Plus a library could have a 100 transition vel.layer but if the sustain suck and is lifeless etc what's the point? The thing is the transition is often so short it's really not that important one could argue. it's the sustain part people listen. So long as the transition illusion is effective.
> 
> Still i appreciate the effort by ISW. These guys always go the extra mile and never cut corners. I need to look into TSS more. Thanks Sarah.


That's not very true. All of the legatos that most people consider 'good' have very long transitions. For example, CSS transitions are nearly 2.5 sections before xfading bac to sustain. Excluding the starting note, almost every iconic JW theme can be played with just CSS transition samples alone. This is why CSS sounds so good, and VSL sounds stale because the transition samples are so short. Some of the old VSL woodwinds actually never faded back to sus samples and that's why they sound better than the new ones _(at least to me)_.

CSS, Appasionata, Adagio all do the same thing. The pixelpoet trick is actually just making better use of all the total recorded transitions and that's why it starts sounding better. 

As far as reusing the samples, this one seems a bit dodgy to me, _if it's true_. It's one thing for something like CSS to use arco leg transitions to make a trem legato (Sonokinetic strings and many others do this too). And yes CSS, also fakes a legato layer (4sustains, 3 legatos). But the difference is this expansion was sold as an additional product, and it's not cheap. 



Casiquire said:


> Nobody knows what's going on behind the scenes of most libraries, and as we've seen with modeled instruments out there, sometimes the scripting IS what you're paying for.


It's often a lot simpler than you may imagine. faking the bottom layers is typically done with a single low pass filter, modulated by CC. I often add it to many of my samples and it takes less than 30s. VSL added a very similar thing to Synhcron brass and called it timbral adjust. Con Sord emulations are often just 2.5khz eq cuts, othertimes IRs.


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## Casiquire (Dec 17, 2022)

gst98 said:


> That's not very true. All of the legatos that most people consider 'good' have very long transitions. For example, CSS transitions are nearly 2.5 sections before xfading bac to sustain. Excluding the starting note, almost every iconic JW theme can be played with just CSS transition samples alone. This is why CSS sounds so good, and VSL sounds stale because the transition samples are so short. Some of the old VSL woodwinds actually never faded back to sus samples and that's why they sound better than the new ones _(at least to me)_.
> 
> CSS, Appasionata, Adagio all do the same thing. The pixelpoet trick is actually just making better use of all the total recorded transitions and that's why it starts sounding better.
> 
> ...


Sure, but now try to match it smoothly into entirely different recorded sustains. It's hard enough to get transitions to sound smooth even when they're playing the same technique and dynamic.


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## gst98 (Dec 17, 2022)

Casiquire said:


> Sure, but now try to match it smoothly into entirely different recorded sustains. It's hard enough to get transitions to sound smooth even when they're playing the same technique and dynamic.


Sorry I don't understand, which bit was that about?


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## Pixelpoet1985 (Dec 17, 2022)

Why should Audiobro offer the expansion if the legatos are the same? The tasto, sordino and ponticello sustains are already in the main library. Don‘t believe this. 🤷‍♂️


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 17, 2022)

Pixelpoet1985 said:


> Why should Audiobro offer the expansion if the legatos are the same? The tasto, sordino and ponticello sustains are already in the main library. Don‘t believe this. 🤷‍♂️


Well, I don't know if the transitions are from the main library, I just think it's possible since the legato sounds like generic legato to me when ignoring the pure tone-difference, not any special articulation. 

It would also be weird to record one generic legato again just to match it to special articulations, but of course it's possible and it would be "reasonable" to capture a neutral legato to match completely different techniques. 

That's the main point. I'd love to check out the main library but don't have it. Maybe Audiobro can send me a review copy haha...

The main part for me is that it seems the intervals are the same for all 3 playing styles.
It sounds good and overall I love the sound of the library but for 400 bucks at non-sale price it's more than reasonable to expect unique intervals for EACH included playing style. It's almost twice as much as most other legato only libraries while being "niche".

And within almost a decade of not releasing other string libraries and not a lot of other libraries there sure was enough time to actually pull that off.


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## Casiquire (Dec 17, 2022)

gst98 said:


> Sorry I don't understand, which bit was that about?


You were saying it's easy to fake or filter a standard articulation to sound like a sordino or a softer dynamic. That can work, but that's not the same thing as making a standard legato recording smoothly crossfade into a true sordino recording, for example


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## gst98 (Dec 17, 2022)

Casiquire said:


> You were saying it's easy to fake or filter a standard articulation to sound like a sordino or a softer dynamic. That can work, but that's not the same thing as making a standard legato recording smoothly crossfade into a true sordino recording, for example


Isn't that the point though? that's why Lionel made the thread. He didn't think it sounded very convincing.


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## Pixelpoet1985 (Dec 18, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> Well, I don't know if the transitions are from the main library, I just think it's possible since the legato sounds like generic legato to me when ignoring the pure tone-difference, not any special articulation.
> 
> It would also be weird to record one generic legato again just to match it to special articulations, but of course it's possible and it would be "reasonable" to capture a neutral legato to match completely different techniques.
> 
> ...


Totally understand, and you made good points. Maybe Audiobro could chime in to clarify things. 

Another idea: Have you also looked in the wave editor if these are the same samples? 

The main library is great, highly recommended. Don‘t have CSS, but I‘m happy I decided against it. MSS lies between HS and CSS in terms of wetness and emotion, and has so many other features. All the demos don’t make the library justice. For the current price it‘s really a steal.


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## SimonCharlesHanna (Dec 18, 2022)

The library is called "expanded legato". If those transitions aren't sul p/t (which it doesn't sound like they are though im on a laptop) etc I'd be asking for my money back.
It's explicitly stated here actually:






I find it hard to think they would do this though.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 18, 2022)

Pixelpoet1985 said:


> Totally understand, and you made good points. Maybe Audiobro could chime in to clarify things.
> 
> Another idea: Have you also looked in the wave editor if these are the same samples?
> 
> The main library is great, highly recommended. Don‘t have CSS, but I‘m happy I decided against it. MSS lies between HS and CSS in terms of wetness and emotion, and has so many other features. All the demos don’t make the library justice. For the current price it‘s really a steal.


I didn't pay much attention but I'm not sure it would matter whether the samples are the same because you could just do processing to the samples and re-export them. They do sound like match EQ or something was applied, so this could have happened in post-production (which would result it "new" samples" or inside Kontakt. 
I technically have zero time and just wanted this library to save me time because the sound is possibly my favorite out-of-the-box string sound. And still is. The time-saving thing didn't work, didn't it?


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## muk (Dec 18, 2022)

Maybe Sebastian @dxmachina can shed some light on this. Maybe it's a glitch/something wrong with your installation. If it's just one transition for all playing techniques that would be disappointing to say the least.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 18, 2022)

muk said:


> Maybe Sebastian @dxmachina can shed some light on this. Maybe it's a glitch/something wrong with your installation. If it's just one transition for all playing techniques that would be disappointing to say the least.


I'd actually be more surprised about that hah... that glitch would be pretty good at imitating decent legato scripting with false samples. It seems fully intact technically besides the apparently re-used samples.


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## d.healey (Dec 18, 2022)

Sarah Mancuso said:


> It has 5 sustain dynamics


That's cool, how did you handle comb filtering/phasing between the layers when crossfading?


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## Sarah Mancuso (Dec 18, 2022)

d.healey said:


> That's cool, how did you handle comb filtering/phasing between the layers when crossfading?


Thankfully we didn't need to do anything too fancy there, just basic crossfades, though that is something we're going to have to solve for the upcoming solo strings.


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## muk (Dec 19, 2022)

It's not a good look. I really hope a representative of Audiobro can explain what's happening in the video. Currently it looks like Audiobro is selling a library under the title 'Expanded Legato', but are only using one transition for the three playing techniques. If that is really the case, it should be communicated transparently to potential buyers.


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## ka00 (Dec 19, 2022)

I knew we had legato police, but you just made Detective.


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## biomuse (Dec 19, 2022)

From the video, OP is unquestionably correct. It's the same legato. Whether it's the same legato as is in the main library I likewise can't say, as I don't own either of them.

But I do have LASS, from the original version to the present v3, and a great deal of the innovative edge that LASS has introduced over the years, in addition to the comprehensive feature set that I'm aware that MSS has, is on the Kontakt scripting end. Which is to say, taking the samples you have and making the absolute most of them. That's a budget thing, yes, but it's also a craftsmanship thing. It has provided a great deal of flexibility to users over those years. So it has been a benefit when, for example, Audiobro was first out of the gate with controllable legato speed (fading across the same transition sample, as CSS still does today), but it does also mean that they're not VSL; every last thing has not been sampled to the endpoint of human limits and beyond (as is so in many but not all of their libraries). As far as I know, Audiobro doesn't own its own recording venue like, e.g., Vienna.

LASS early on had emulated sordino. I wouldn't be at all surprised if their LASS sordino legato expansion (just pre-2.5 IIRC?) reused transitions even back then. Flatly, no one cared to any great degree, because the result was both useful and flexible. So while I don't want to "excuse" AB per se, I do think viewing this as potentially scandalous might be a bit off the mark, depending on one's expectations. Building a good sounding legato patch from anything is a challenge and requires a ton of work and tuning by ear over huge numbers of samples. If that is what was sold to users in the legato expansion, it may be enough. Your listener will not, under any circumstances, be able to perform an A/B/C comparison across the respective playing styles.

Could this be compared to pointing out that the brick wall that's part of a set in a Broadway play isn't actually assembled of individual pieces, but is really just one piece of resin? I'm not sure.
It's definitely true. Does it materially affect the outcome? Does it look good enough to suspend disbelief in the audience?

Also, OP has an excellent forensic ear. I have a pretty OCD set myself, and I'd reiterate Sarah's point above that, once you start peering behind this curtain, you're going to find this phenomenon in a lot of places.


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## Zanshin (Dec 19, 2022)

When I first saw the thread I figured it’d be debunked in no time. If this is true, holy shit.


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## biomuse (Dec 19, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> When I first saw the thread I figured it’d be debunked in no time. If this is true, holy shit.


I'd call it more "oh jeez" than "holy shit." 
Or even "hold my beer..."


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## Markrs (Dec 19, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> When I first saw the thread I figured it’d be debunked in no time. If this is true, holy shit.


Indeed, as time goes on, you do worry that there is some truth in this, which is a concern given you are purchasing 60gb of extended legatos, not 60gb of faked legatos based on the legato in the main sample library.


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## Marko Cifer (Dec 19, 2022)

biomuse said:


> So while I don't want to "excuse" AB per se, I do think viewing this as potentially scandalous might be a bit off the mark, depending on one's expectations. Building a good sounding legato patch from anything is a challenge and requires a ton of work and tuning by ear over huge numbers of samples. If that is what was sold to users in the legato expansion, it may be enough.


Sure, but I think that the high price of the Expansion plays a pivotal role in this. If the Expansion was a much cheaper add-on to existing users than is currently being sold at, I presume we'd be raising our eyebrows and grumble at most, but it's a 400 USD MSRP add-on (which, admittedly, is basically perma-discounted, sold much cheaper quite often, and has a bundle discount if you pick up both the main library and the Expansion) and even on sale, it still feels pricey compared to the main library. 

That's mostly because the sustains of these added patches can still be found in the main library, so the expectation for MSS owners is that you're paying for the scripting and the added transitions. Now, that does mean that the Expansion is more palatable in its price if you're only buying it without the main library, because then you at least get the sustain samples too, but it's still priced high. 

_edit: For the sake of comparison, the 400 USD MSRP of the Expansion would basically let you pick up Sonokinetic's Orchestral Strings and Sordino Strings at their regular price (if you didn't have to pay any VAT, and assuming USD/EUR parity). It's close to letting you pick up TSS at full price. Of course they aren't 1:1 comparable, plus as already mentioned it can be bought cheaper very often, but I just wanted to use the comparison of price as an illustration of value - and how much it plummets if those transitions are "spoofed"._

The price-point comparison does set up some expectations of quality and craftsmanship, and now it looks like (if true) it might have taken frankly unacceptable shortcuts_ for how much it's sold at_, and (if true) _these shortcuts weren't being clearly communicated,_ and that makes the whole package look worse.

It's also the fact that AudioBro is usually pretty good at transparently communicating things, like the Solo Viola in MSS being re-used from LASS, and from what I understand has a pretty stellar reputation otherwise, which I think adds to the optics of the whole thing feeling even worse, if undoubtedly proven true.

As an owner of the Expansion (curse my affinity for Sul Tasto and Sul Pont), if this whole thing is true (and so far it's leaning towards that, though I don't wanna over-dramatize this or jump to conclusions yet), this stings at the very least and would make me cautious of any further purchasing from the developer. Doesn't make the patches themselves unusable though.


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## Zanshin (Dec 19, 2022)

biomuse said:


> I'd call it more "oh jeez" than "holy shit."
> Or even "hold my beer..."


I mean... the sustains that the expansion uses are included in the main library right? If the legatos used are also in the main library... what are you paying for? some scripts, and you also lose 60GB of SSD space for duplicate samples. $200. Feels like holy shit to me. 

I hope it's not true.


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## biomuse (Dec 19, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> I mean... the sustains that the expansion uses are included in the main library right? If the legatos used are also in the main library... what are you paying for? some scripts, and you also lose 60GB of SSD space for duplicate samples. $200. Feels like holy shit to me.
> 
> I hope it's not true.


If each of those things is true, which we don’t yet know, then yeah this edges into Kirk Hunter Brass territory. I also hope it’s not that simple.


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## John Longley (Dec 19, 2022)

Has anybody reached out to Audiobro for comment yet?


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## mussnig (Dec 19, 2022)

biomuse said:


> Kirk Hunter Brass


Curious: what was the issue with these?


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## biomuse (Dec 19, 2022)

mussnig said:


> Curious: what was the issue with these?


My recollection of a certain KH brass (re)packaging (b/c I deleted from my drive quite a while back) was massive duplication of samples with simple filtering but reprinted as new velocity layers, totaling over 80gb footprint for what was optimistically 15gb of material, which further appeared to be cobbled together from different older libraries. Was usable at a basic level but those limitations were readily apparent. 

To be clear: nothing of THAT degree seems to be going on here. 
For one, and as OP points out, the MSS legato expansion actually sounds great, which to me is the most pertinent metric.


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## John Longley (Dec 19, 2022)

@dxmachina can you please comment on this situation?


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## Evans (Dec 19, 2022)

It would be a bit odd of a thing to specifically not be clear about, given the transparency in the reuse/remix of the LASS solo viola for MSS.


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 19, 2022)

biomuse said:


> My recollection of a certain KH brass (re)packaging (b/c I deleted from my drive quite a while back) was massive duplication of samples with simple filtering but reprinted as new velocity layers, totaling over 80gb footprint for what was optimistically 15gb of material, which further appeared to be cobbled together from different older libraries. Was usable at a basic level but those limitations were readily apparent.
> 
> To be clear: nothing of THAT degree seems to be going on here.
> For one, and as OP points out, the MSS legato expansion actually sounds great, which to me is the most pertinent metric.


Sounds like SoundPaint…


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## Frederick (Dec 19, 2022)

biomuse said:


> For one, and as OP points out, the MSS legato expansion actually sounds great, which to me is the most pertinent metric.


My sentiments exactly. 

To me the main disadvantage of this otherwise great and feature rich library is that resonances build up quite easily. If the mic positions would have been decorrelated, that also would have been a considerable improvement.


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## mussnig (Dec 19, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> Sounds like SoundPaint…


You know that Soundpaint doesn't have reprinted velocity layers in the samples, right? It creates them on the fly ... However, the file format they use is considerably less compressed than Kontakt's (I assume that otherwise the whole thing would be too CPU intensive).


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## Justin L. Franks (Dec 19, 2022)

mussnig said:


> You know that Soundpaint doesn't have reprinted velocity layers in the samples, right? It creates them on the fly ... However, the file format they use is considerably less compressed than Kontakt's (I assume that otherwise the whole thing would be too CPU intensive).


Although there still needs to be at least two dynamic layers to morph between.


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## mussnig (Dec 19, 2022)

Justin L. Franks said:


> Although there still needs to be at least two dynamic layers to morph between.


Yes of course. I am just saying that the reason their libs need so much SSD space isn't because they pre-printed 127 velocity layers.


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## dxmachina (Dec 19, 2022)

Hi folks,

Well this thread shocked me out of my holiday stupor. There are definitely some proprietary _recording_ and _editing_ technologies at play here. One of our main goals (and this goes back to LASS over a decade ago) is to have a higher than expected level of portability in our legato articulations. IE, we want MIDI performances to translate (mostly) seamlessly between the various legato articulations in the expanded library. That's no easy feat with up to 18 hand programmed legato articulations per divisi (each also discretely hand-programmed at different speeds).

I hope I've banked enough credibility here over the years that you'll forgive where I can't expound further on the technology. FWIW, MSSEL is my 2nd favorite sounding library of all our libraries (just behind Genesis), and the scope of development was as large as the main MSS library (which is to say, painfully enormous). If the implication is that we've taken a shortcut, I can assure you that is not the case.

If you really still have any concerns shoot us an email.


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## novaburst (Dec 19, 2022)

Loaded the Main library and the expanded Sordino, together , the main library has a very different Character than the expanded, all reverbs off and auto off

the main as you know is full of content that is mind blowing the strings sound very wide smooth and broad

The expanded sounds very intermit the Sordinos and the ports .sul tasto

But isn't this what we want the library's pleased me, the how it was done i am not that interested 

Not really after the ingredients just the taste will do, 

The library still taste well


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## Justin L. Franks (Dec 19, 2022)

Yup. Sausages still taste good even after you learn what's in them and how they're made.

I don't own it, but MSS sounds great. However they managed to do it, that does not change.


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 19, 2022)

mussnig said:


> You know that Soundpaint doesn't have reprinted velocity layers in the samples, right? It creates them on the fly ... However, the file format they use is considerably less compressed than Kontakt's (I assume that otherwise the whole thing would be too CPU intensive).


Doesn't mean they aren't just using basic filtering to "create them on the fly". And TBD why their libraries are so big given that or their "hyper acoustic" legato claims. Either way, not the thread to debate that.


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 19, 2022)

SimonCharlesHanna said:


> fark that's grim.


Not really. Read Sebastian's response. In the end, use your ears on how it sounds. The only people that truly know what is going on is the developer and we should be careful to give too much weight to what other folks think they've discovered (as that can be quite unjustly harmful to developers).


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## SimonCharlesHanna (Dec 19, 2022)

Justin L. Franks said:


> Yup. Sausages still taste good even after you learn what's in them and how they're made.


Great analogy - except if I found out it was made out of skunk instead of the advertised wagyu beef, I'd still ask for (and be entitled to) my money back, regardless of how it taste.

The answer wasn't a simple "yes we did record extended legato techniques" (for an extended legato library with a retail price of $399.00) but rather a few paragraphs on how the smoke and [redacted] works. The promise that it was "a lot of work" is meaningless.

Happy to steer clear. Really disappointing.



ALittleNightMusic said:


> Not really. Read Sebastian's response. In the end, use your ears on how it sounds. The only people that truly know what is going on is the developer and we should be careful to give too much weight to what other folks think they've discovered (as that can be quite unjustly harmful to developers).


Right and I have and they sound middling to me. In fact, when the sul pont plays fast, it no longer sounds of sul pont (what's the point?).

Unless of course that they stated somewhere on the website that they have not recorded legatos for the extended artics - that's a different story (I haven't looked thoroughly - perhaps they do).

And this would all be a moot point if they weren't charging decent $$$ for it, but they are.


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## Studio E (Dec 19, 2022)

I just bought this library, and damn it, if small children weren't sacrificed to create those extended legatos, someone's going to get a stern talkin-to!!!


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## SimonCharlesHanna (Dec 19, 2022)

Studio E said:


> I just bought this library, and damn it, if small children weren't sacrificed to create those extended legatos, someone's going to get a stern talkin-to!!!


or you know, receive what was advertised to you?

Man it's bizarre being in a room of yanks who have this ingrained notion that companies can do anything they want with impunity (I guess that it is true in the states, so).

Oh well. The lowering of standards only further paves the way for AI anyhow.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 19, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> Not really. Read Sebastian's response. In the end, use your ears on how it sounds. The only people that truly know what is going on is the developer and we should be careful to give too much weight to what other folks think they've discovered (as that can be quite unjustly harmful to developers).


I provided a video with examples while actually having zero time for that nonsense so that everyone can make up their own mind rather than relying on me. That's exactly the point. If I just made a thread putting out the claim without demonstration your statement would make sense.

I don't even regret the purchase amazingly because I love the sound and mean to use it like a "normal" library anyway.
But if I had bought it for authentic legatos of special articulations (which obviously was still in the back of my mind) I'd be very disappointed.
I actually got the feeling that something was off, that's why I investigated. I made this discovery within a day or two of buying the library. So all that great a job they didn't do haha.

There is no content in Sebastians response really (I guess you learn it in business school to write a lot without saying anything) but I read it as confirmation of my discovery but that it doesn't matter because somehow a lot of work was involved... well, my guess is match EQ but who knows hah.
As long as those intervals aren't actually legato examples of the playing styles I didn't pay for what was advertised.
Not a single person in this thread commented that it they didn't expect legatos of extended playing styles in a library that strongly suggests this in it's name and website description.

This gives me the idea of remaking other peoples music and sending it to publishers.
At the end, if it sounds great and a lot of work is involved (which is the main content of Sebastians' response) noone should have any problem with it. No easy feet to figure out the arrangement and production of Thomas Bergersen hah


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## Studio E (Dec 19, 2022)

SimonCharlesHanna said:


> or you know, receive what was advertised to you?
> 
> Man it's bizarre being in a room of yanks who have this ingrained notion that companies can do anything they want with impunity (I guess that it is true in the states, so).
> 
> Oh well. The lowering of standards only further paves the way for AI anyhow.


Hey, no offense. I'm just making light of it because I am sometimes just really amazed that some of you are smart enough to figure this stuff out. To me, if it sounds great (it does) and sounds as advertised (it does to me), I really don't care if they used sheep flatulence for the new legatos. To me it's still a new library that achieves as advertised, what it's supposed to achieve. It's not that I don't see your point, if it's valid, but it sort of circles back to the thread about sample libraries being to expensive. They are a means to an end, and if I perceive the new legato library as playing the role I bought it for, I don't really care how they made it or if it cost them way more or not for new recordings. It just serves it's purpose and I have no regrets.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 19, 2022)

Studio E said:


> Hey, no offense. I'm just making light of it because I am sometimes just really amazed that some of you are smart enough to figure this stuff out. To me, if it sounds great (it does) and sounds as advertised (it does to me), I really don't care if they used sheep flatulence for the new legatos. To me it's still a new library that achieves as advertised, what it's supposed to achieve. It's not that I don't see your point, if it's valid, but it sort of circles back to the thread about sample libraries being to expensive. They are a means to an end, and if I perceive the new legato library as playing the role I bought it for, I don't really care how they made it or if it cost them way more or not for new recordings. It just serves it's purpose and I have no regrets.


I really don't think anyone should defend dishonest advertisement (if the discovery is fully accurate).
Doesn't matter whether you're happy with the purchase, I am too actually, at sale price haha.

If the opposite of what was advertised is being sold (generic legato instead of extended techniques legato, with the sustains already being present in the main library) then this what it is.
It simply shouldn't be tolerated, even if the product turned out well.


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## Zanshin (Dec 19, 2022)

If it had been just part of the main library, and they added $200 to the price of the main lib then I would have been "whatever, cool"...

For example I like turning on legato for portatos in Berlin Strings. I accept that OT didn't record intervals for the portatos lol. But OT didn't rip it out and make a Portato Legato Expansion and charge me for the pleasure either (OT is not innocent from shenanigans, it was just an easy example).

I get that sounds good is good, but if I buy a special technique legato library (baby jesus - it's just legatos!), I expect that the transitions are the special techniques too. There's way too much tribalism/copium around these parts lol.


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## olvra (Dec 19, 2022)




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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 19, 2022)

SimonCharlesHanna said:


> Man it's bizarre being in a room of yanks who have this ingrained notion that companies can do anything they want with impunity (I guess that it is true in the states, so).





Zanshin said:


> There's way too much tribalism/copium around these parts lol.


Well the other way to look at it is some people like to give developers, especially small ones that have consistently listened to user feedback here and tried to be as helpful as possible, the benefit of the doubt. While other people think every company out there is trying to pull the wool over users' eyes because "that's what they learned at business school" (which seems like an incredibly insulting thing to say in general).

Of course, if you don't think it sounds good, you don't think it sounds good. No changing that. It is interesting though that for all the time this library has been out, not one mention of this - and all of a sudden the pitchforks come out in full force (from many that haven't even bought the library at all).


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## Zanshin (Dec 19, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> Well the other way to look at it is some people like to give developers, especially small ones that have consistently listened to user feedback here and tried to be as helpful as possible, the benefit of the doubt. While other people think every company out there is trying to pull the wool over users' eyes because "that's what they learned at business school" (which seems like an incredibly insulting thing to say in general).
> 
> Of course, if you don't think it sounds good, you don't think it sounds good. No changing that. It is interesting though that for all the time this library has been out, not one mention of this - and all of a sudden the pitchforks come out in full force (from many that haven't even bought the library at all).


Pitchforks? Hardly. Come on. You've never expressed opinions on libraries you don't own?

The examples I heard from the library sound good. I was gassing over MSS all weekend. I even asked @Trash Panda for help with my gas but he told me to STFU he was busy making a Spitfire Studio Pro template! Any way, still gassing, but much less. If I had paid for the Legato Expansion I would have been pretty fucking miffed. It's not cool, but it's not the end of the world either.


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 19, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> Pitchforks? Hardly. Come on. You've never expressed opinions on libraries you don't own?


Only about Pacific second violins… 😂

If you liked the sound of the demos, why would you be miffed? I own the legato expansion and like how they sound in use, so the “revelations” (which I should point out Sebastian has implied are not the shortcuts that some are implying) haven’t changed that aspect for me. And the money I spent was either because I liked the sound or I didn’t.


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## Zanshin (Dec 19, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> Only about Pacific… 😂
> 
> If you liked the sound of the demos, why would you be miffed? I own the legato expansion and like how they sound in use, so the “revelations” (which I should point out Sebastian has implied are not the shortcuts that some are implying) haven’t changed that aspect for me. And the money I spent was either because I liked the sound or I didn’t.


I am sure others aside from Pacific lol.

To answer your question, because, as I understand it, I would have paid $200 for sample content I already paid for when I bought the Main library - sustains from the library coupled with legato transitions from the main library (EQd or whatever to fit). 

What if OT had released Berlin Con Sordino Strings but the legato transitions were just from Berlin Strings but EQ'd?!!!1111


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## Evans (Dec 19, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> What if OT had released Berlin Con Sordino Strings but the legato transitions were just from Berlin Strings but EQ'd?!!!1111


Or, Embertone Joshua Bell Violin, performed by the legendary violinist. Except for the transitions. Those are not his. Except maybe. You know what? It's secret and proprietary.

(FWIW the only thing I think I'd complain about for MSS is the lack of crossgrade _to_ LASS. Seems like it's only the other way?)


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 19, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> I am sure others aside from Pacific lol.
> 
> To answer your question, because, as I understand it, I would have paid $200 for sample content I already paid for when I bought the Main library - sustains from the library coupled with legato transitions from the main library (EQd or whatever to fit).
> 
> What if OT had released Berlin Con Sordino Strings but the legato transitions were just from Berlin Strings but EQ'd?!!!1111


Fair enough! I do wonder at what point though we as consumers should draw the line when it comes to library specifics. I remember when Spitfire Appassionata Strings came out - there were a few folks that were adamantly demanding Spitfire detail what was unique about the legatos. Spitfire of course did not go into much detail at all (as is their right because things ARE often proprietary for a reason). And should it matter to consumers? More than the sound? I would bet 99.9% of us have never sampled a string section or scripted legato techniques, let alone spent R&D time researching new ways to do things. But still some of us front as experts and thus we demand details on how the dessert is made (or make assumptions) instead of enjoying the taste. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of that at times but I’ve also been unimpressed by technical declarations if I don’t like the sound, which to me is what should matter most.


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## Trash Panda (Dec 19, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> Fair enough! I do wonder at what point though we as consumers should draw the line when it comes to library specifics. I remember when Spitfire Appassionata Strings came out - there were a few folks that were adamantly demanding Spitfire detail what was unique about the legatos. Spitfire of course did not go into much detail at all (as is their right because things ARE often proprietary for a reason). And should it matter to consumers? More than the sound? I would bet 99.9% of us have never sampled a string section or scripted legato techniques, let alone spent R&D time researching new ways to do things. But still some of us front as experts and thus we demand details on how the dessert is made (or make assumptions) instead of enjoying the taste. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of that at times but I’ve also been unimpressed by technical declarations if I don’t like the sound, which to me is what should matter most.


I don’t think anyone was demanding to know the secret sauce. 

It sounds like they’re just looking for confirmation that the $200+ expansion pack has real recorded Sordino, Sul Pont and Sul Tasto legato/port/glissando transition samples and not processed and repackaged transition samples from the original library. 

Seems like it would have been something more appropriate to send to the developer directly, but the developer could have also just said “yes, we recorded real sordino/Sul pont/Sul Tasto transition samples” and put this debate to rest.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 19, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> I am sure others aside from Pacific lol.
> 
> To answer your question, because, as I understand it, I would have paid $200 for sample content I already paid for when I bought the Main library - sustains from the library coupled with legato transitions from the main library (EQd or whatever to fit).
> 
> What if OT had released Berlin Con Sordino Strings but the legato transitions were just from Berlin Strings but EQ'd?!!!1111


well, hard to tell if they are from the main library since I don't have it but the post by the representative was so murky with no clear suggestion the recordings are unique. So, who knows.
Not sure it would matter anyway if it's a normal legato, unless it was specifically recorded to fit all 3 special playing styles... weird but who knows hah


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## Obi-Wan Spaghetti (Dec 19, 2022)

Transparency is always the best approach. And while consistency is a good argument, $400 for essentially sustains with "faked" legato transition would anger me a bit too. $200 sale price right now wouldn't but it's not cheap either. Although there are additional articulations no? Bloom, crescendo, attack?


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## Frederick (Dec 19, 2022)

Jasper Blunk records the transitions for all the sections at the same recording which leads to bleeding, especially with the room mics. People still seem to think his libraries are truly special. With all the dynamic layers in Pacific something has to give I guess. My take on audiobro s response is, that they also had to compromise.

With regard to the price: when you buy only the standalone you are not paying twice for what was already in the main library. If you bought them together the expansion was a lot cheaper.


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## NoamL (Dec 19, 2022)

So how usable do you think these are Lionel? Are the legato transitions not working out when the music is at a faster pace?

there are demos on the MSS Site (https://audiobro.com/modern-scoring-strings-expanded-legato/). Dunno if it's placebo effect, but the sul tasto transitions feel more convincing to me than the sul pont transitions. Which makes sense: the latter are gonna be harder to fake with EQ, by a mile. The con sordinos sound very usable.


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## novaburst (Dec 20, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> the opposite of what was advertised is being sold (generic legato instead of extended techniques legato, with the sustains already being present in the main library) then this what it is.
> It simply shouldn't be tolerated, even if the product turned out well.


There is not a deception going on with the product, weather the same recording or not was used, 

The fact is weather trickery and manipulation was used to make the extended or othe means 

Thats the way how it was developed to achieve the end result (extended) so weather the same stuff was used or not that is the library they pulled off.and decided to call it extended. 

Users don't play the library from a stand point of let's strip it back and see what's going on users play the product from a package point of view and use what's in the package to achieve a result.

Of course you can use the same samples to make something different and then name it a new library there is nothing wrong with that. And you can name it what you want to get a sale and purchase.

Audiobro gave a package called extended weather they used the same samples or not the fact is it sounds different and they can name it extended because that's how it sounds

absolutely nothing wrong there, in the advert or in the writing or in the library,


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## N.Caffrey (Dec 20, 2022)

mmh the reply from audiobro wasn’t very clear in my opinion, which leads me to think (unless it was already obvious for someone else) that they didn’t record original content for this extended thing.


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## homie (Dec 20, 2022)

SimonCharlesHanna said:


> Man it's bizarre being in a room of yanks who have this ingrained notion that companies can do anything they want with impunity (I guess that it is true in the states, so).


Yeah, this forum sadly suffers a lot of Stockholm Syndrome towards developers. It's really cringeworthy at times.


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## Marko Cifer (Dec 20, 2022)

Obi-Wan Spaghetti said:


> Transparency is always the best approach. And while consistency is a good argument, $400 for essentially sustains with "faked" legato transition would anger me a bit too. $200 sale price right now wouldn't but it's not cheap either. Although there are additional articulations no? Bloom, crescendo, attack?


For Sordino legato you get bloom, norm, bowed. Sul Pont legato has norm and bowed. Sul Tasto has no variations. All three have legato, portamento, glissando and a bunch of fine-tuning controls. If you turn off Legato, for Sordino you get the Cresc/Norm/Accent variations on its sustains.

Initially I thought the sustain variations didn't exist at all in these patches, and wrote my response like that, but looking again they do for Sordino - they only show up if you turn off the Legato on the patch. My mistake for saying otherwise initially in this post.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 20, 2022)

Frederick said:


> Jasper Blunk records the transitions for all the sections at the same recording which leads to bleeding, especially with the room mics. People still seem to think his libraries are truly special. With all the dynamic layers in Pacific something has to give I guess. My take on audiobro s response is, that they also had to compromise.
> 
> With regard to the price: when you buy only the standalone you are not paying twice for what was already in the main library. If you bought them together the expansion was a lot cheaper.


I don't understand... what's the comparison there to faking legato intervals?
Pacific will have up to 5 dynamics for legato for instance. While the library we talk about here costs just 200$ less, has only special playing styles, only sustains (with variations) and the legato has only one legato layer as far as I can tell which might just be fake on top.
While having about a decade time for the production.
So... let's not do that!


NoamL said:


> So how usable do you think these are Lionel? Are the legato transitions not working out when the music is at a faster pace?
> 
> there are demos on the MSS Site (https://audiobro.com/modern-scoring-strings-expanded-legato/). Dunno if it's placebo effect, but the sul tasto transitions feel more convincing to me than the sul pont transitions. Which makes sense: the latter are gonna be harder to fake with EQ, by a mile. The con sordinos sound very usable.


I haven't done too much with it yet but what they did turned out well.
Without my hyperfocus and tweaking brain in regards to samples it probably would have a been a while till I noticed something. 
The sul pont sustains for instance are fairly tame in their effect, a bit like half sul pont and half normal, so the legatos work ok and the sound changes they have done are effective.

But it certainly would sound 2 times better if the legatos were actually unique haha. How different the pure legato of extended playing styles actually can be is demonstrated in OT's Special Bows.


Although that goes back to the point above with the Audiobro library's sul pont being way more subtle than in Special Bows, so the difference in the sound of the intervals wouldn't be as drastic as with Special Bows. 


The way it currently looks like to me it would take me an hour max these days to set that up myself if I had the main lib though, if it's just normal legato with processing and the sustains already included (not sure if the "bloom", "bowed" etc extras are included though). 

I'll be making videos to show how to do stuff like that eventually. This library and my discoveries actually inspired me to explore applying legato of one library to another further and the results were intriguing haha)


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## homie (Dec 20, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> I'll be making videos to show how to do stuff like that eventually. This library and my discoveries actually inspired me to explore applying legato of one library to another further and the results were intriguing haha)


Looking forward to this. I wish we could get raw samples and make our own patches for an open source sampler platform. A bit like in the old days when you had a sampler and just bought sample cds. It was then somehow yours not locked away in proprietary players we have nowadays.


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## muk (Dec 20, 2022)

novaburst said:


> Audiobro gave a package called extended weather they used the same samples or not the fact is it sounds different and they can name it extended because that's how it sounds
> 
> absolutely nothing wrong there, in the advert or in the writing or in the library,



That's plain wrong, of course.

If a restaurant has 'pasta with périgord truffle' on its menu, at a correspondingly high price. And they actually serve a pasta without any truffle in it, but trufle flavour instead. Would you go: 'After eating it, you were full, weren't you? So what's the problem?'. Or 'Most customers didn't notice that there was no truffle in it. And it tastes delicious. It's not like you can't eat the dish as it is served. So where's the problem?'. Or 'Most customers don't eat the dish from a stand point of let's strip it back and see what's actually in it'. What a silly notion.

The problem is, simply put, that the menu implies one thing, but you are served another. That's really unsavoury business practices.

So if Audiobro sells a library under the title 'Expanded legato'. Yet the legato transition inside is not actually new recordings, but programmed/repurposed to fit the new playing techniques, I find that misleading. In my opinion that's something that should be communicated transparently. And as a potential buyer I would certainly want to know before buying, to be able to make an informed decision.


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## Evans (Dec 20, 2022)

What if Orchestral Tools stopped recording at Teldex but instead started using IRs? What if Spitfire Audio did the same for future AIR releases?

Suppose the new VIs were entirely convincing to your ears. Would you feel misled if marketing materials avoided calling that out and someone uncovered it at a later date?

In this purely hypothetical example, they could still market this as "that famous [stage/hall name] sound" and not be lying. If asked, they'd lightly touch on their proprietary techniques for getting that sound.

Would you care?

I'm not sure what my full opinion is, just curious...


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## dts_marin (Dec 20, 2022)

All of this wouldn't be a problem if we had the *right* to return products no questions asked.

This clusterfuck of an industry is the only one I've seen tolerate this kind of BS. And you know why? Because it's everyone for themselves. There are many pathetic people that benefit from your demise and use every little trick to further their careers.

Only the crypto market is worse than this.

At least the crypto market became mainstream and it will be regulated (for better or worse) and some people will pay for their crimes. (the big ones won't but that's another issue).

This particular case isn't a crime (an alleged one) but what Native Instruments have done and other developers continue to perpetuate with their own proprietary players is.

In other industries a bad round robin sample would be enough to demand refunds. Software not working is more than enough. Taste is a tricky one but for our profession it should be protected because it's a vital aspect of sound.

There are ways to solve this issue so that both parties are happy. We pay for the bandwidth and a small anti-piracy fee to further show our absolute good will. The rest of the money should be returned.

I don't care if NI can't develop a copy protection. Let the developers battle them in court for damages. We can't keep paying for incompetence and greed as professionals.


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## Nashi_VI (Dec 20, 2022)

Evans said:


> What if Orchestral Tools stopped recording at Teldex but instead started using IRs? What if Spitfire Audio did the same for future AIR releases?
> 
> Suppose the new VIs were entirely convincing to your ears. Would you feel misled if marketing materials avoided calling that out and someone uncovered it at a later date?
> 
> ...


Yes of course i would care, not to mention the fact that, by doing it without disclosing it, they would be able to keep the price of their library the same but by having to do less work.
Instead, if they were to do it, but disclose it to the customers, they would "have" to sell us those libraries at a reduced price (only because of how the market works, of course they can sell at whatever price they want) , and if they wanted to still sell them at close or at the same price of their libraries actually recorded in those places, then they would have to make the libraries themselves better, either in terms of playability, sampling dept, scripting etc etc.....and if they did that, i would not be oppose to that, not one bit.


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## homie (Dec 20, 2022)

dts_marin said:


> This particular case isn't a crime (an alleged one) but what Native Instruments have done and other developers continue to perpetuate with their own proprietary players is.


Native Instruments allows selling licences of their products. That's something they have very right. Almost all other devs do not though.


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## Mike Fox (Dec 20, 2022)

Some of the comments here kinda remind me of this.


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## dts_marin (Dec 20, 2022)

homie said:


> Native Instruments allows selling licences of their products. That's something they have very right. Almost all other devs do not though.


No, they develop the most dominant sampler on the market and developers abuse their bad copy protection to excuse this practice. I'd say the problem is the source (NI).

This a Native Instruments, Spitfire Audio and Orchestral Tools issue. They distribute the software (not only samples) and play victims of piracy but they do nothing to solve it because it makes them a shitload of money either way.

That's corrupt behaviour. Knowingly passing the problem to the end user because they are too poor of a developer to afford or make a solid copy protection system. I don't care at all. Their actions have consequences that must be paid. They aren't forced to be on the market by anyone.


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## Nashi_VI (Dec 20, 2022)

Mike Fox said:


> Some of the comments here kinda remind me of this.



This is actually how i picture myself reacting in reall life whenever i see those types of commercial as well ...i am joking...but i am also not, i feel like i can cope way better with being robbed of 200$ (happened to me more times than i woud like to admit) than being tricked into ingesting or consuming something that i didn't want to in my body.


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 20, 2022)

dts_marin said:


> No, they develop the most dominant sampler on the market and developers abuse their bad copy protection to excuse this practice. I'd say the problem is the source (NI).
> 
> This a Native Instruments, Spitfire Audio and Orchestral Tools issue. They distribute the software (not only samples) and play victims of piracy but they do nothing to solve it because it makes them a shitload of money either way.
> 
> That's corrupt behaviour. Knowingly passing the problem to the end user because they are too poor of a developer to afford or make a solid copy protection system. I don't care at all. Their actions have consequences that must be paid. They aren't forced to be on the market by anyone.


You know, they don't hide the fact that you can't resell their libraries. It is very well known. Why don't you just boycott them and stick to somebody like VSL?



Evans said:


> What if Orchestral Tools stopped recording at Teldex but instead started using IRs? What if Spitfire Audio did the same for future AIR releases?
> 
> Suppose the new VIs were entirely convincing to your ears. Would you feel misled if marketing materials avoided calling that out and someone uncovered it at a later date?
> 
> ...


That was a recent topic of discussion if I recall given Berlin Studio and some folks not wanting to download tons of mic positions. I doubt it would sound the same though.


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## rMancer (Dec 20, 2022)

Interesting topic, and I don't own Audiobro products so I can't comment there. But I feel like sample libraries (as with many/most products) are _almost always_ going to disappoint people who peek behind the curtains. There are always going to be tricks, shortcuts, proprietary techniques, illusions, misdirection, smoke, and mirrors. I worked both in event production and high-end catering for years, and you might be surprised how many fancy events attended by millionaires are barely held together by gaff tape ("black gold") and fishing line.

I can't help but imagine high-end sample libraries have a bit of the same sort of thing going on. In the end, for me anyway, it comes down to "does this sound good enough? if so, then who cares?" For instance, I doubt I'm going to hear a song by OP and think "wow, this would be way better if they had used slightly different legato technology."


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## dts_marin (Dec 20, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> You know, they don't hide the fact that you can't resell their libraries. It is very well known. Why don't you just boycott them and stick to somebody like VSL?
> 
> 
> That was a recent topic of discussion if I recall given Berlin Studio and some folks not wanting to download tons of mic positions. I doubt it would sound the same though.


No they don't. They abuse the excuse of pirated samples for their samplers as well. SINE and the Spitfire Player haven't been pirated yet but if you send emails to OT or Spitfire Support they complain about piracy like helpless puppies.

If the *sampler* doesn't work on your system do you know their response? When features like Mic Merge were missing for months but still advertised do you know their response?

The libraries aren't WAV files. They are tied to a proprietary sampler which needs to work properly. I don't care it's free. That's a sneaky loophole to make you think that the sampler isn't the product.

Why should I be a pariah and settle with VSL samples because OT, Spitfire and Native Instruments are scumbags? I'll fight until they are the pariah. I don't care. Scumbags should find another grift.

I take the music industry very seriously and I want the same respect as video professionals or 3D rendering artists that have superior software without gimmicks and snake oil. Music production is a technical field but the marketing is worse than luxury fashion items or voodoo gem crystals.

The way it's done currently isn't the only one nor the best.


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## novaburst (Dec 20, 2022)

muk said:


> If a restaurant has 'pasta with périgord truffle' on its menu, at a correspondingly high price. And they actually


It's not food, it's a wave sample,

If you want to do a new library using existing samples and then expand or re invent what already exist that's perfectly ok to do so 
Nothing wrong with it, you still needed to do a lot of work to get it where it is now the extended library.

What matters now is what you can do with that development.

In any case views are views, and there are many of them but if you are going to go with the flow just because your going to get a tick in the box then that's pointless


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## muk (Dec 20, 2022)

novaburst said:


> If you want to do a new library using existing samples and then expand or re invent what already exist that's perfectly ok to do so



If you clearly and transparently communicate what buyers get, then yes. If your press text obfuscates the fact that it is reused samples, or misleads customers into thinking it's new samples, then no. Not okay at all. In extreme cases, misleading press text can be fraudulent. I'm not suggesting that that's the case here. But if it is indeed only reused transitions from the main recording, I don't think that's perfectly ok either.



novaburst said:


> What matters now is what you can do with that development.



Nope. If you pay for 'expanded legato', but get reused legato transitions that you already have, it doesn't matter what you can do with it. You are buying something on false premises. The marketing text doesn't read 'You can achieve an expanded legato effect with this library that combines new recorded samples with a repurposed transition'. It reads 'expanded legato'. That you apparently fail to see a difference between the two doesn't mean that there isn't one.


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## novaburst (Dec 20, 2022)

muk said:


> Nope. If you pay for 'expanded legato', but get reused legato transitions


If i have done something different with a used legato and built another library that also sounds complexly different i can call it what i want there is no misleading what so ever another library was built by using existing tools and that's that there really isnt anything else to add

A developer can use or do what ever they want and name that llibrary what ever they want, all they needed to do is adjust the legato to some degree then that legato become new what ever way they choose to do it, no misleading was displayed what so ever 

How ever they developed it, it does actually works it does not play, or feel, or sound like the main library,


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## muk (Dec 20, 2022)

'A developer can do whatever they want?' Jap, sounds reasonable.


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## Zanshin (Dec 20, 2022)

Not in response to @novaburst ... but I do want some of what he's smoking...

If Audiobro had explained how the expansion was made, I don't think it would have sold well at all. That it's origins were and still are obfuscated - it's a kind of dishonesty in my opinion. It erodes customer trust. I don't think this kind of thing is good for Audiobro, in fact I think it's bad for the industry as a whole. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but I think we should be able to expect that - what it says on the label is what's inside.


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## Markrs (Dec 20, 2022)

For argument sake if I recorded a violin, but sold a string quartet sample library, by doing some processing on the violin recordings, would that be okay? At no point do I specifically say I recorded the viola, cello or bass, but the recordings do sound similar to those instruments and some people have said they liked the sound, is that okay?

If I imply something through a description but the product is not what I have implied, is that okay?

Personally I think Audiobro is on shaky ground with this and it does effect trust, which is pretty important in an industry like this.

I really like MSS and Genesis, and was thinking of getting the extended legatos with MSB, but some of that trust I need to make a large non refundable purchase has gone.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 20, 2022)

Marko Cifer said:


> For Sordino legato you get bloom, norm, bowed. Sul Pont legato has norm and bowed. Sul Tasto has no variations. All three have legato, portamento, glissando and a bunch of fine-tuning controls. If you turn off Legato, for Sordino you get the Cresc/Norm/Accent variations on its sustains.
> 
> Initially I thought the sustain variations didn't exist at all in these patches, and wrote my response like that, but looking again they do for Sordino - they only show up if you turn off the Legato on the patch. My mistake for saying otherwise initially in this post.


To me it sounds those are the same with a different name. Technically the terms also mean roughly the same thing. Bloom = Crescendo (the sound swells/blooms), Bowed = Accent (bow changing generally leads to a more accented sound).
Maybe just a leftover from scripting rather than yet another way to bloat the perceived content. That's how I'm taking it for now haha


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## Lunatique (Dec 20, 2022)

Has anyone reached out to Audiobro for clarification?


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## Zanshin (Dec 20, 2022)

Lunatique said:


> Has anyone reached out to Audiobro for clarification?








Legato Spoof In Modern Scoring Strings Expansion?


Although there still needs to be at least two dynamic layers to morph between. Yes of course. I am just saying that the reason their libs need so much SSD space isn't because they pre-printed 127 velocity layers.




vi-control.net


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## Markrs (Dec 20, 2022)

Lunatique said:


> Has anyone reached out to Audiobro for clarification?


They replied earlier in the thread


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 20, 2022)

homie said:


> Looking forward to this. I wish we could get raw samples and make our own patches for an open source sampler platform. A bit like in the old days when you had a sampler and just bought sample cds. It was then somehow yours not locked away in proprietary players we have nowadays.


sometimes you can export raw wav files like this.
Leave "compressed samples" unchecked and select "patch + samples".
Give the patch a different name so you don't overwrite the original one. Ideally just do everything in a new folder to be save.
The raw wav files will be exported into a folder in that location.
Doesn't work with most libraries that can be added to the "libraries tab" on the left.


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## Marko Cifer (Dec 20, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> To me it sounds those are the same with a different name. Technically the terms also mean roughly the same thing. Bloom = Crescendo (the sound swells/blooms), Bowed = Accent (bow changing generally leads to a more accented sound).
> Maybe just a leftover from scripting rather than yet another way to bloat the perceived content. That's how I'm taking it for now haha


The variations in the sustains indicate how the attack of a sustain was performed, and the characteristics are pretty much as you've said yourself. Bloom is indeed a crescendo, so it swells into the note. Norm / normal is basically what pretty much every library uses for its attacks in a sustain. Bowed is a more powerful accent, thus features a heavier attack (not quite a Marcato attack though).

I do feel like they're a very welcome and useful addition to MSS. AudioBro also goes into great length to say on their website, repeatedly, that they're not just edits or pre-enveloped sustains, but genuinely recorded attack variations. So, basically, what we wanted to hear on the topic of this thread.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 20, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> Not in response to @novaburst ... but I do want some of what he's smoking...
> 
> If Audiobro had explained how the expansion was made, I don't think it would have sold well at all. That it's origins were and still are obfuscated - it's a kind of dishonesty in my opinion. It erodes customer trust. I don't think this kind of thing is good for Audiobro, in fact I think it's bad for the industry as a whole. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but I think we should be able to expect that - what it says on the label is what's inside.


That's exactly the problem. 
The response basically contains nothing, which is supposedly about keeping special techniques secret. 
Which nobody asked for. It's just about whether it's actually true con sord, sul pont and tasto legatos.
Whether that's the case or not doesn't reveal any recording or editing secrets. 

The only way out of this IMO would be to APOLOGIZE for the misleading advertisement and be straight about this simple query. 
Instead we get an offensively washy corporate response. The amount of likes is beyond me.


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## Evans (Dec 20, 2022)

I appreciate that this thread has been running for a while. Either Mike is unaware or he's doing a great job (in my opinion) at feeling out where this goes. That said, I'm not sure there's anywhere to go from here at this time.

My suspicion, which may be wrong, is that we won't get further response from Audiobro on this topic. At least, not before the holidays run their course.

I can understand if people want to inform others about this whenever Audiobro products come up. I can understand if some people reach out to Audiobro one-on-one for further information or for (unlikely) refunds.

I'm just curious what new purpose this thread will serve with this repetition of posts. I don't want to Ignore it in case new information comes up, but right now it seems like just back-and-forth between A) people who say if it sounds good it is good and B) people who care and feel the developer response didn't say much (admittedly, paraphrasing both).

What do y'all want out of this?


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## Akoustecx (Dec 20, 2022)

The wording is definitely a little sly, and I can see how some might consider it a trifle snide. But "Expanded Legato" is a reasonable definition of getting extra articulations that can be played legato, where once they couldn't. How that has been achieved is not mentioned, meaning there's quite a lot of cloud shouters venting here.


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## gedlig (Dec 20, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> The amount of likes is beyond me.


Welcome to fanboyism (probably) and people who can't read between the lines.


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## Markrs (Dec 20, 2022)

Evans said:


> I appreciate that this thread has been running for a while. That said, I'm not sure there's anywhere to go from here at this time.
> 
> My suspicion, which may be wrong, is that we won't get further response from Audiobro on this topic. At least, not before the holidays run their course.
> 
> ...


I think the discussion became not only about Audiobro and the extended legato but the ethics and what processing is fair in a sample library.

For example many libraries don’t sample chromatically and will use whole note recording. This is probably acceptable to many, even though it is processing some samples.

Whereas if for example EW HO Strings had sold a con sordino library (rather than offer a free script in Opus) that was in fact actually just processed normal strings processed, most would be unhappy if they had paid for that.

It is just where a line is crossed. I think for me it is that the extended legato is a separate paid upgrade. If it was included or even if MSS library cost $50 more I wouldn’t have been as bothered, whilst giving you 80% of the sound might be okay for many. 

I think by selling the upgrade it feels more deceptive than if they had been included in the main product, after all you wouldn’t feel like you had bought the legato samples twice, but with added processing.


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## Nashi_VI (Dec 20, 2022)

Evans said:


> What do y'all want out of this?


I am going to bet that most people that bought, or that want to buy the library on sale, are not 24/7 on this forum, so they probably don't even know about all of this yet.....i also wrote another lenghty and detailed other reason...but i don't really want to start another debate, and reading it back i realized it would only lead to people to exclusively talk about the second part of my message without actually adding anything to this thread and making it only a word sparring ground, so i deleted it and i am not gonna post it.


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## novaburst (Dec 20, 2022)

Markrs said:


> For argument sake if I recorded a violin, but sold a string quartet sample library, by doing some processing on the violin recordings, would that be okay? At no point do I specifically say I recorded the viola, cello or bass, but the recordings do sound similar to those instruments and some people have said they liked the sound, is that okay?
> 
> If I imply something through a description but the product is not what I have implied, is that okay?
> 
> ...


In the end its what product that meets your need i think we need to get over this legato not only with AudioBro but with every library, we often are moved far to much about other users opinion on a library and so scared to just use our own ears, if something sounds good, but you are unhappy with how it was made why walk around in circles and fester a debate that prolongs negativity on a developer, and i mean on any developer. 

There is so much choice out there to choose from if you are not happy, if you hear a sound that you like then go for it weather it Be CSS, OT, VSL, PS and AudioBro there is a time when we just need to be your own self and choose what you want and limit the influence of others who may just turn out to be not so friendly with that developer. and the first negative thing they hear they are all over it with their negative views and you become a a tennis ball being knocked out of your senses cant even make up your mind and be your self and choose your self with out the interference of others, is that who we want to be.

Cant we use our own ears anymore so what you dont know how long AudioBro has been in this business of sample library, many years and are you going to like every thing they do are you only going to hear good things from a developer as a developer company and you as a person are going to go through shit times and also great times but if i have known you for such a long time and then the first thing i hear about you maybe is not so good am i going to trash you now

Lets move on


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## Trash Panda (Dec 20, 2022)

novaburst said:


> In the end its what product that meets your need i think we need to get over this legato not only with AudioBro but with every library, we often are moved far to much about other users opinion on a library and so scared to just use our own ears, if something sounds good, but you are unhappy with how it was made why walk around in circles and fester a debate that prolongs negativity on a developer, and i mean on any developer.


So what you're saying is...


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## mussnig (Dec 20, 2022)

Evans said:


> I appreciate that this thread has been running for a while. Either Mike is unaware


So you think he would shut down a thread in the Sample Talk section that not only is 100 % about samples but also about a quite serious issue (at least in my opinion)? I am serious about the question.

Sure, I guess moderation will be necessary if certain lines are crossed but if one were to shut down this thread or delete it, people would have the impression that they can't talk freely about samples anymore.

But of course there might be good reasons to shut such a thread down which I am simply not seeing at the moment. And I have the impression that most of the mods here have far more experience and intuition for something like this than I have.


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 20, 2022)

I'll admit this language on the website indicates the transitions are the main selling point of the expanded library. If those transitions were not newly created / recorded / edited for this expansion, that would be pretty deceptive. If those transition were newly edited, but not newly recorded and were more "simulated", I can understand why folks may be upset. Unfortunately, without AudioBro confirming the details, we're just guessing for the most part on what is actually going on (despite what we think we see in Kontakt).

*"While the main MSS Full library includes Sordino, Sul Tasto, and Sul Pont sustains, it does not offer the legato transitions of those articulations – these are only available in this library."*


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## Evans (Dec 20, 2022)

mussnig said:


> So you think he would shut down a thread in the Sample Talk section that not only is 100 % about samples but also about a quite serious issue (at least in my opinion)? I am serious about the question.


Why cut my quote off where you did? I think it's his forum, and if it's not unheard of to cut off a topic that gets excessively redundant without going anywhere. All I was saying is that I appreciate this one having breathed for nearly five days already.


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## mussnig (Dec 20, 2022)

Evans said:


> Why cut my quote off where you did? I think it's his forum, and if it's not unheard of to cut off a topic that gets excessively redundant without going anywhere. All I was saying is that I appreciate this one having breathed for nearly five days already.


I cut it off because I was seriously curious about that part of your statement. Your second comment gives more context and makes sense to me. 

Initially, I had the impression that you were suggesting that he might shut down the thread to protect the dev. Which would be quite suprising to me.


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## Casiquire (Dec 20, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> I'll admit this language on the website indicates the transitions are the main selling point of the expanded library. If those transitions were not newly created / recorded / edited for this expansion, that would be pretty deceptive. If those transition were newly edited, but not newly recorded and were more "simulated", I can understand why folks may be upset. Unfortunately, without AudioBro confirming the details, we're just guessing for the most part on what is actually going on (despite what we think we see in Kontakt).
> 
> *"While the main MSS Full library includes Sordino, Sul Tasto, and Sul Pont sustains, it does not offer the legato transitions of those articulations – these are only available in this library."*


I think the response spoke volumes, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. It sounds to me like there are indeed shared, altered, or simulated transition samples, but that it's not accurate to characterize that as a cost-saving or "lazy" or manipulative design choice, but that it's tied to their goal and system of delivering such a consistent library across divisi sections from first violins down to basses.

Also, this thread absolutely has value and hasn't become nasty, in my opinion. I don't want it to close, I want to learn more. I want to hear more not just from Audiobro, but about all libraries. How long did it take you to realize that more often than not, libraries aren't sampled in half-steps? Or that your four dynamics might only have one legato transition dynamic? I think there's a lot to gain from open mindedly sharing opinions about these things


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## Mike Fox (Dec 20, 2022)

Trash Panda said:


> So what you're saying is...


This should be a t-shirt.


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## WhiteNoiz (Dec 21, 2022)

homie said:


> Yeah, this forum sadly suffers a lot of Stockholm Syndrome towards developers. It's really cringeworthy at times.


I think it's mostly PTSD from some devs vacating the premises due to criticism and drama (and then coming back, in some cases). And members overcompensating defensively, as being able to chat with the devs on here is certainly an attraction for many (trying to abstain from extreme dramatisation and asking for verifiable facts seems to be the more healthy option... Or, at least, agreeing to disagree). But the same has also happened with members... It can happen. Drama, mischaracterisation... As long as it's not totally unhinged, it should be solvable, if you're really interested in that.

Having devs actively posting without feeling harassed is one thing. But what if the critisism stands on solid ground (objectively)? We should probably try to isolate the facts and judge/continue based on those as much as we can. Then, everyone can act accordingly... To their likes, dislikes, preferences, justifications etc. I mean, we don't really need to crucify anyone*. We just need proper information available. Most criticism on this thread seems to be rather level-headed.

I do believe that companies should have a healthy fear of the consumer and not the opposite (being as transparent as possible and being appreciated for it still seems like the better option).

That said, apart from this, I'd say I like AudioBro and what I've generally seen from them. (That can change, of course, but I don't really have the will or need to trash them for no reason)

*The issue will obviously need to be considered differently for the actual buyers that went in on false assumptions (which could be avoided with more transparent info).

TLDR: Having clearly presented info and verifiable facts to base opinions and critisisms upon is better for everyone, so they can judge and act accordingly.


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## Markrs (Dec 21, 2022)

WhiteNoiz said:


> That said, apart from this, I'd say I like AudioBro and what I've generally seen from them. (That can change, of course, but I don't really have the will or need to trash them for no reason)


Very much agree with this that I really like Audiobro and love how much they think about their libraries and the options they offer. Maybe why this feels a disappointment, compared to say if it was a different company. This issue doesn’t mean I wouldn’t buy from them again, but I would probably be a bit more cautious when reading the features of a library from them.


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## novaburst (Dec 21, 2022)

Trash Panda said:


> So what you're saying is...


I wasn't saying to forget about legato, if it sounded like that,

There are other articulations and many other parts of music that are just as important if not more important than legato but legato has its role

But not the be all and end all


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## giwro (Dec 21, 2022)

I’m gonna chime in here from the perspective of someone who produces samples…

Now, I know 99% of this forum doesn’t use Hauptwerk nor the samplesets therein, but a lot of the concepts transfer quite well. In some ways, pipe organ samples are easier, in some ways, not - usually they get used by talented amateurs and professionals who are utilizing the samples for practice.

I doubt there are many string players who use a string library instead of playing their instrument - same probably goes for most other instruments….

So, for Hauptwerk samples, we find a clientele that really is often very intimately acquainted with how a “real” organ sounds… and if it isn’t right, they will let you know. I happen to be a professional organist, so I get that.

What is sometimes challenging to manage, is that there are some users who will sit down and painstakingly go through all of the notes, stops, playing to trigger the different releases, try all of the controls…

Their aim is not to enjoy the samples nor to use them for work/practice. It’s simply to see if they can find fault and then they (often) gleefully go on a forum somewhere and broadcast their findings.

There’s nothing wrong with looking for faults like this, really. But… if that is what gives you joy (and if you are as good at it as some are!) you should be a beta tester. In nearly all of the cases I’ve seen over 18 years of creating samples, maybe 1-2 people who do this when approached to do beta testing will agree and help. Most all decline, demur, and are not interested. Nor do they react well when you request that issues be first referred to the developer privately before posting publicly.

I want to fix issues I’ve missed. And, I want to be transparent about content in my samples. If I’ve done some processing, I may not want to share that publicly, but I usually wil divulge that if asked privately. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that public posts like this can be very damaging to sales and reputation… I’ve seen one careless comment tank a release, and then it takes months to repair.

As a sample producer, I want to be up-front and honest if asked. (And I get some folks feel like they got slipped a mickey here, but I doubt that’s the intention). And, if you are the type of personality that loves to look for stuff, well then, join the team and help me flog it through beta and make it better. If you simply like to do that on your own and then go public and gleefully make a public pronouncement… 

Um. Well. Can you see how that’s hard to handle? 

I am probably over-reacting a bit, but I feel for the folks at Audiobro. And maybe I’m a bit triggered as I’ve watched this play out in my arena for years. I took over some content from another company, and they had a reputation for bugs and lesser quality. It took me nearly 3 years to build a reputation of quality of those samples, and in several cases, I ended up doing a nearly complete re-do from raw samples.

That reputation problem was completely warranted. The samples and product did have quality control issues. And so, as tough as it was, I knew I had to just suck it up and put out good product/re edit stuff in order to rebuild. That’s a completely different situation, but it illustrates how long it can take to come back from a reputation hit…


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## Batrawi (Dec 21, 2022)

Markrs said:


> Maybe why this feels a disappointment, compared to say if it was a different company.


This is what I feel exactly. I love audiobro and consider them a top tier developer, not just for their quality products but also for their fair business, at least from what I've seen ever since I knew about them long time ago. I used to see them always being crystal clear when it comes reusing existing samples to expand on their content, for ex:













... so yeah, when all of a sudden they separate a reprocessed existing content with its own (relatively high) price tag as if it is a new content.. then it would feel like a different company to me. Not that it's something that they don't have the right to do, but it should have been more clear to potential buyers.

Still love them and would still buy from them but I wish they stick to their higher transparency values as they always did.


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## Snarf (Dec 21, 2022)

giwro said:


> If you simply like to do that on your own and then go public and gleefully make a public pronouncement…


I don't think you are painting a fair picture of Lionel. I know him as extremely meticulous and detail-oriented when it comes to sound and production - you instantly hear how it pays off in his music. Therefore it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that he would notice something like this. You are making it sound like OP is going out of his way to find whatever flaw they can find in order to publicly humiliate the developers, and that is just not what is happening here.

Having said that, I acknowledge the point that premature criticism and subsequent pile-ons (especially when expressed in dramatic fashion) can genuinely hurt developers too. Some members here are jumping unjustified conclusions, or are using this case to vent about issues they deem related, which in turn creates an unnecessarily tense atmosphere.

Edit: Lionel is actually a beta tester for several developers 😅


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## Evans (Dec 21, 2022)

giwro said:


> I guess what I am trying to say is that public posts like this can be very damaging to sales and reputation… I’ve seen one careless comment tank a release, and then it takes months to repair.


Very interesting topic and response. I think everyone here (most, at least?) appreciates this type of insight. Reading this type of post from developers (or like Mike's thread on a choir project) is a solid reason why I come here now. Thanks for putting yourself out there, and your products seem awesome.

That said -- trying to put myself into the mental model of the unhappy users -- I think there is a big difference between your examples and the one with Modern Scoring Strings, in which some users (overreacting or not) feel misled about the _*core nature* _of the product.

I'm not bothered by this myself, since my ears are happy (though it is kinda fishy re: marketing comms). But I can see how this is perceived as different from, say, poor QA from a small dev; sample stretching on sustains or borrowing adjacent recordings for RRs; applying some EQ to correct some issues with the room; etc.

It's probably got a *lot *to do with the name itself: "Expanded Legato." I think there's a common inference that potential customers can make there.

Anyway, yes, a small developer can be (extremely) damaged by such topics. I'd gladly, easily argue that they'll be *far *more hurt by these topics than any customer would be by the implementation techniques.

But that's the high risk/high reward scenario when someone starts up a small business (which my wife has done, herself), and why transparency wins. They didn't have to share techniques used, but a mention of "proprietary methods to adapt recordings to additional playing techniques" could, in theory, have been mentioned.

That may seem excessive. It may have resulted in lower sales. But then it wouldn't have disgruntled users (or at least the same ones for that reason). Gotta usually pick one or the other, unfortunately. What was a potential differentiator in the market became something to be criticized.

EDIT: Finally, I'll argue that the difference between these issues for small companies and large companies aren't as different as some think (or in some cases worse).

I lead product development for a high annual revenue product suite for a high annual revenue software company. If I or a colleague screws up (leaves in a security hole or has potentially misleading billing metrics), it's not just me at risk. I'd be potentially causing dozens of people their jobs. I could be causing tens of millions of dollars damage to each, individual customer.

The only people (usually) coming out like champs are the C-level executives, often rich dudes who came from rich families (speaking for myself and the company I work for, as a white dude who just isn't all that wealthy yet still inherently privileged).


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## Marko Cifer (Dec 21, 2022)

Evans said:


> They didn't have to share techniques used, but a mention of "proprietary methods to adapt legato recordings to additional playing techniques" could, in theory, have been mentioned.


That's it, really, at least for me. I would have just wanted to be informed in advance.

Going back to the post from the person at AudioBro, they mention that they wanted to achieve a high level of portability and being able to use the same MIDI across all the legato transitions (of the same type). This is actually valuable to me, and I'm okay with the trade-off that supposedly happened here to achieve this. 

*But only if I was told that in advance! *Finding out the way that I did however just makes me feel sour on the purchase, even if I do generally like the patches and will definitely continue to use them. It feels like a bait-and-switch, instead of a conscious choice I could've made (_and to be fair, I probably would have picked it up in a bundle like I did had I known in advance_).

I do think that, at least at some level, there's also this issue of user perceived value versus production costs happening as well. I still feel like the Expansion has a way too high MSRP if I think about it from the perspective of what else you could get for that money (luckily it's offered much cheaper every now and then, but still not a trivial cost), and that the price implied that this was a "no corners cut" kind of product, but through this thread I've come to understand that from a production perspective, it apparently just needed to be priced this way. I don't wanna comment too much further on the topic of pricing versus investment, but as users, we can usually only judge by visible (audible) merit and by comparison, plus how much something is worth to us, so...


There is one more thing. I might be fully off with this one, but please bare with me.

I do think that there's another thing in play here: I feel like, generally, AudioBro's marketing kind of assumes you're a bit more experienced, need their more advanced scripting, tweaking opportunities and malleability features and that you're able to tell from their messaging if the product is for you.

But I feel they aren't the best at making it look and sound appealing out of the box (just how many times will we read "MSS/MSB is great - once you turn off the default processing" or "I picked up MSS/MSB when I saw a third party walkthrough where it was pre-tweaked and with external processing", and yes, I was among those). It expects a level of expertise and willingness to put in the work and tinker at things until you're happy with how it sounds and behaves.

So maybe, at least on some level, the assumption from the developer's perspective was that advanced users would implicitly understand that if the implementation needed some sleight of hand to allow the level of flexibility on offer, that it was a worthy trade-off, and that those advanced users knew from experience with other products and being in the industry for long enough that stuff like this is needed sometimes, and that they would both understand and excuse it.

But once you start to do sales and start to offer your highly-tweakable but more complex piece of kit to people who simply can't shell out as much on a library at full price, or higher price, those pre-existing notions and experience might not exist as widely as before and the expectations change, and people from the new market segment simply got the impression, based on the marketing as-is, that the product uses actually-recorded transitions for each technique. Honestly, so did I. 


So, to go back to your original question of "what people expect out of all of this":

Hopefully this will be a learning experience for them on how marketing mis-communication and misaligned expectations can happen, intentionally or unintentionally, so that they're a bit more careful about managing expectations. I don't think this was maliciously done (seriously, just look at the other examples when they've been truly transparent), but I also think they have to improve at their marketing and communicating skills, and to improve further on what we usually perceive as a high level of transparency otherwise.
The marketing for Expanded Legato should be updated, at least to some level, to include what we know now, as not everyone reads this forum and this particular thread. That way, their purchasing choice will be more informed.
The dev, as a sign of good faith, offers a way for existing customers who "still have any concerns" a way to communicate with them - again, not limited to just this forum/thread.
Other developers can learn from this to avoid future pitfalls.
Hopefully, users can also learn some things from this thread about the realities of production and how some features need to be "spoofed" if you want to also have some other features at the same time.
As for me:

I'll still keep using the library, as the malleability really is quite something. But I'll always feel, at least slightly, like I got bait-and-switched.
I'll be more wary of AudioBro's marketing from now on.


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## Markrs (Dec 21, 2022)

I was recently thinking about Mike Greene’s Realitone company as they have a sale on and their 2 string products Sunset Strings and Nightfall. Now Nightfall is using the samples that came from the Sunset Strings session and were then processed to give a specific style to them. We know this as Mike has been completely trasparent about it.

I have not heard anyone complain that the samples were reused, because a: they get a discount for owning Sunset Strings, and b: they sound fantastic and c: Mike told everyone upfront about it.

If Audiobro had been transparent about the processing of existing material already in MSS that would not have been a problem for most. You would know what you are buying. 

If there is some positive to take from this, is the importance of honesty and transparency with your customers. This then helps creates trust and loyalty with that company.

I still believe in Audiobro as a good company that have quality products and I am willing to look at this as a blip on what otherwise was a very solid reputation.


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## Casiquire (Dec 21, 2022)

Marko Cifer said:


> [*]The dev, as a sign of good faith, offers a way for existing customers who "still have any concerns" a way to communicate with them - again, not limited to just this forum/thread.


They have a very actively monitored forum. They're a responsive dev in general


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## jbuhler (Dec 21, 2022)

Casiquire said:


> I think the response spoke volumes, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. It sounds to me like there are indeed shared, altered, or simulated transition samples, but that it's not accurate to characterize that as a cost-saving or "lazy" or manipulative design choice, but that it's tied to their goal and system of delivering such a consistent library across divisi sections from first violins down to basses.


Yes, this is my read too. I've been looking at getting these legatos as a way of testing out MSS, which is where my interest comes. I think Audiobro's response makes it clear that each articulation in the expansion does not have its own recorded legato. If that was the case, he would have said so in the response. I do suspect that the legato for the expansion involves different recordings in some way from the legato in the main library, since no one has shown otherwise, even though this wasn't explicitly stated in the response either. The main reason I think this is because I think repackaging samples from the main library and selling it at this price is too deceptive given that Audiobro has usually been rather forthcoming about reuses. But it is still consistent with a single new legato that is being processed and programmed to fit with the various articulations in the expansion. And, no, we should not discount the amount of work that goes into scripting and we should acknowledge that scripted legato can be excellent.

Here's the text from the Audiobro site:



> *Expanded Legato* is an *add-on* library to the main MSS library with an additional *60GB worth of Sordino, Sul Tasto, Sul Pont, and… legato, portamento, and glissando articulations *(not available in the main MSS library). Mixed down to four different microphone mixes, the breadth of articulations and bowing techniques were chosen to offer an enormous range of colors and emotions for your productions. Enjoy these new delicate and inspiring string sonorities with extra legato features like “*Bloom,” “Crescendo,” and “Attack.*“


So what we are being promised here is first of all 60GB of new material over what's in the main library. ("an _additional_ 60GB worth..."). 

And then elsewhere:


> While the main MSS Full library includes Sordino, Sul Tasto, and Sul Pont sustains, the “main” library does not offer the legato, portamento, or glissando transitions for those articulations. We felt it was better to split out the 60GB of additional legato articulations to a different add-on library to give users the option based on their needs.


All the text implies not reuse of any material from the main library but new recordings of it, and indeed "60GB of additional legato articulations." Since the library is also 60GB, the clear implication of the ad copy is that nothing is being reused from the main library, and that instead we are getting new legatos, portamentos and glissandos of these articulations that can then be fully integrated into the system of "Bloom, Crescendo, and Attack." I haven't been following all of this carefully since the library was released, but it seems that at some point it became common knowledge that the sustain portions of these articulations in the expanded library are reused from the main library (none of that is reported in the ad copy as far as I can see, which repeatedly claims "additional"), and if so a good deal of that 60GB is in fact not "additional" except insofar as it forms a part of the "additional legato articulations." So a real sleight of hand. If nothing else, Audiobro really needs to rewrite their ad copy to be transparent about this.

Nevertheless with all this emphasis on new and additional material, what makes sense to me and does not rely on presuming that Audiobro ad copy is simply lying (which is of course possible but doesn't seem in character), is that there is indeed at least one new recorded legato (most likely sul tasto, possibly sordino) and this has been processed across the set of articulations available in the expanded library to fit each articulation more or less. The sustains themselves may well have been reprocessed to fit with this new legato as well so that the library is consistent and so the claim that this is a library in "addition" to the main library is warranted and earned.


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## giwro (Dec 21, 2022)

Snarf said:


> I don't think you are painting a fair picture of Lionel. I know him as extremely meticulous and detail-oriented when it comes to sound and production - you instantly hear how it pays off in his music. Therefore it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that he would notice something like this. You are making it sound like OP is going out of his way to find whatever flaw they can find in order to publicly humiliate the developers, and that is just not what is happening here.
> 
> Having said that, I acknowledge the point that premature criticism and subsequent pile-ons (especially when expressed in dramatic fashion) can genuinely hurt developers too. Some members here are jumping unjustified conclusions, or are using this case to vent about issues they deem related, which in turn creates an unnecessarily tense atmosphere.
> 
> Edit: Lionel is actually a beta tester for several developers 😅


Fair enough.

I still maintain (from a developer standpoint) that it’s much better to bring this up PRIVATELY with a developer before gleefully posting about it on a public forum. It doesn’t matter what one’s intent is - if you do things like this it will affect reputation and trust me, it DOES affect sales. You can have the purest intentions in the world, and it still will have negative effect. 

Now…

If you bring up an issue privately and get no satisfactory answer after a reasonable amount of time then sure, go ahead and post away. 

My point here isn’t to slam Lionel, it’s to say “hey, actions have consequences, be careful”. 

Finally, MSS was on my list to buy this holiday season, but I was wavering. I’m gonna put my money where my mouth is and go ahead and get it, if for no other reason than to support a fellow sampler and push back a bit against any negative press.


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## Zanshin (Dec 21, 2022)

giwro said:


> Fair enough.
> 
> I still maintain (from a developer standpoint) that it’s much better to bring this up PRIVATELY with a developer before gleefully posting about it on a public forum. It doesn’t matter what one’s intent is - if you do things like this it will affect reputation and trust me, it DOES affect sales. You can have the purest intentions in the world, and it still will have negative effect.
> 
> ...


"gleefully posting" lol. #lioneldidnothingwrong

"“hey, actions have consequences, be careful” should be applied to what AudioBro has done in this case as well.


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## gst98 (Dec 21, 2022)

giwro said:


> to support a fellow sampler and push back a bit against any negative press.


Users, who have paid hundreds of dollars with no ability to demo or refund the product, simply pointing out the truth where developers have lied or mislead is not “negative press”.


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## giwro (Dec 21, 2022)

gst98 said:


> Users, who have paid hundreds of dollars with no ability to demo or refund the product, simply pointing out the truth where developers have lied or mislead is not “negative press”.


I think several folks are missing the point.

I'll say it one more time...

If you find something about a set of samples/product that you question, or you think you have found a bug....

*please contact the producer for support privately before posting about it on a public forum*

If (within a reasonable amount of time) you don't get a response (or never get a response) then sure... go ahead and post your beef on a public forum.

But one's first inclination shouldn't be to go to a forum and post about it. 

This has nothing to do with whether Audiobro is in the right or not. It's simply common courtesy to make the first step to contact privately FIRST and give the producer the opportunity to fix/come clean/whatever.

I'm sure Lionel just wanted to share what his painstaking investigations discovered (and kudos for the good ear and detective work).

All I am asking is that we consider our FIRST "reporting" of a concern is to the producer, not to a public forum.

Did I mention that I think it's best practice and common courtesy to contact the producer first?

I understand why some people are feeling like they were taken, or that Audiobro could have been more transparent or worded things more carefully. I'm not saying that their feelings are invalid or wrong. I get it. 

What I am saying, is I think it's best practice and common courtesy to contact the producer first...

Hope that clears things up. If not, 🤷‍♂️ I' m not sure how much clearer I can make it. And yes, I'm probably triggered a bit by this because I see it happen over and over, and it just so happens I was in a rare mood today... usually I simply shrug and move on.

Peace out.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 21, 2022)

giwro said:


> I’m gonna chime in here from the perspective of someone who produces samples…
> 
> Now, I know 99% of this forum doesn’t use Hauptwerk nor the samplesets therein, but a lot of the concepts transfer quite well. In some ways, pipe organ samples are easier, in some ways, not - usually they get used by talented amateurs and professionals who are utilizing the samples for practice.
> 
> ...


well I don't understand the point of this generic post.
It's all fairly true... in isolation. But none of it relates to the specific issue at hand here.

A lot of random principles everyone can agree on and leave their likes for. But nothing that relates to the issue at hand.

It's not a matter of "bugs" or "issues" but a matter of dishonest advertising of an expensive library.
Feel free to create your own topic with nice principles about library criticism etc, but this one is about selling a library with legato for extended playing styles that doesn't exist.

I wanted to inform people as quickly as possible considering the recent sale and popularity of the dev/library.

I agree with your generic points. In fact, that's exactly how I would operate if I'd make reviews (which I plan to do). Since first considering it always thought I should first send the review to the developer so they can comment or even fix the issues, with a 2 weeks timeline till I upload the video.
So, we agree. But it has nothing to do with the topic. If I'm more than 98% certain I've discovered a scam I will post it as soon as I discover it, especially if it's during a sales push.
I have no interest in what the developer has to say about shady/misleading advertising, except a bit of morbid curiosity how they will squirm out of it, which turned out fairly boring in this case.
The only thing that would have prevented this post is if they would have changed the website description, but I wouldn't expect that to happen. Maybe the next time I try it and see what happens haha... 

If it's a fixable issue or bug of course not, unless perhaps it's very serious/work threating.

And, yea, I have done extremely extensive beta testing of libraries but I think 99% of developers would fire me after the first report which would basically prompt them to rebuild the library from scratch most of the time. I wouldn't even know where to begin with most stuff.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 21, 2022)

giwro said:


> I think several folks are missing the point.
> 
> I'll say it one more time...
> 
> ...


Well... that's not all you wrote though right?
You are accusing me indirectly of "gleefully" posting this.

So it's basically saying I'm in the wrong on this, at least it's easy to read it that way. If you don't want it to be read that way then don't write it like that hah...

And reputation damage is EXCELLENT if it is justified and out of truth being told. 
No problem at all. I'm glad I discovered what I discovered and shared it here. Most people seem to appreciate it.

I think a world where actions don't have consequences would be rather undesirable, right?


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## novaburst (Dec 22, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> The only thing that would have prevented this post is if they would have changed the website description, but I wouldn't expect that to happen. Maybe the next time I try it and see what happens haha...


Then at least you could have contacted and gave a chance for this at least, 

Even if your 100% correct life is not about exposing others especially if you don't no the whys and the how's

Just because developers have made quite a bit of money from us does mean they are not human,

You said it your self you would not have done this if the wording was changed but even so there is no evidence you even tried to contact them 

I know you hold strong in your practice and beliefs or and skill but is our musical and skill or powers if you like are they only to hurt and trash others is that why we become so skilled, 

If you have good skills then help not trash


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## Kony (Dec 22, 2022)

Why is everyone making this about Lionel? Regardless of the points being made about contacting the dev first, that's irrelevant now as a dev rep has responded and practically confirmed (by omission) what Lionel is saying - so why flame him?

Contacting the dev first is a redundant point anyhow - if the dev is in the right, there is ample opportunity to demonstrate that here. Reputational damage only occurs when the dev has misled.


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## Henu (Dec 22, 2022)

Don't shoot the messenger.


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## Jaap (Dec 22, 2022)

I really don't understand the sentiment about false adversiment to be honest and in my opinion that is way too harsh to put it.
They state on the product page:
------------
*Expanded Legato* is an *add-on* library to the main MSS library with an additional *60GB worth of Sordino, Sul Tasto, Sul Pont, and… legato, portamento, and glissando articulations *(not available in the main MSS library). Mixed down to four different microphone mixes, the breadth of articulations and bowing techniques were chosen to offer an enormous range of colors and emotions for your productions. Enjoy these new delicate and inspiring string sonorities with extra legato features like “*Bloom,” “Crescendo,” and “Attack.*“

*Here is a partial list of Modern Scoring Strings’ Features:*


A gorgeous and lush divisi sound that’s easy to use
*Bloom/Crescendo, Attack, and Normal* bowing
*A new Legato Engine* with unprecedented control
*Look Ahead* – minimize tedious MIDI editing
Advanced Key Switching and patch control
*NKS integration*
------------

There is 60 GB worth of those articulations, but it does not say, nor implies that there are all new legato transitions.
What is said is that these new recordings are incorporated into their new legato engine.
So what I read is that in the regular MSS library they used the sustains, but for the expanded legato they recorded additional stuff to make all these legato, gliss and portamento acticulations possible.

I actually love that they gave us the option to buy this as an addon and not incorporated it standard into the main MSS library and therefor had to raise the core pricing.

With them having created such an tremendous deep engine, with such incredible amount of good sampled material, I really don't see them having cut any corners nor trying to make some quick extra bucks from customers.

Audiobro as company is totally not an agressive marketing orientated company. The contrary, I find them quite layback at their advertising and product announcement and for me their product pages for all the products always state exactly what you can expect. I don't see any misleading things.


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## Batrawi (Dec 22, 2022)

novaburst said:


> Even if your 100% correct life is not about exposing others especially if you don't no the whys and the how's


But "whys and hows" souldn't matter if there are other people who can be misled, no? I bet people who where about to hurt their wallets must appreciate this as much as others don't


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## Orlu (Dec 22, 2022)

If you sell an addon library for such a high price, and the only real difference to the main library is that it adds legato to the sustains already present in the main library, everyone and their mother expects these transitions to be real.
So I really can't believe some people are actually defending this behaviour by AudioBro. Yes, it may not be a full-on scam since they never explicitly said that those are real recorded transitions on their product page, but it is extremely shady nonetheless.


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## WhiteNoiz (Dec 22, 2022)

I think that most will at least agree that the description very much lends itself to ...imaginative interpretation. So, it should at least be a lesson in effective and clear-cut communication and management of expectations.

(Nobody's perfect and something could slip, but effort should be put in avoiding these misinterpretations and literary analyses of non-fictional and poetic or metaphorical material...)


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## novaburst (Dec 22, 2022)

Henu said:


> Don't shoot the messenger.


I think we all love @Lionel Schmitt, all that has happened is that the thread has triggered a debate also if you know Lionel he can handle his self no need for your help.

I am sure you can understand that other views would come into play but it's clear much of the views against would be pointed at the thread starter, 

I still maintain AudioBro did nothing wrong, they did not mislead and there was no understanding,in the marketing.

I think it's more about what many expect or assumed how the library would be developed.

But our assumptions cannot condemn someone because we were made to believe AudioBro were to develop the library in a certain way when there were other ways to develop it and so AB took another path perhaps a more certain path, maybe a quicker path, 

But our assumptions thought were different.

You can't condemn someone because you assumed the legato would be created according to your thoughts our what the norm is no matter how disappointed you are 

No wrong was done by AB


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## homie (Dec 22, 2022)

Jaap said:


> There is 60 GB worth of those articulations, but it does not say, nor implies that there are all new legato transitions.


If they had named it say 'Expanded Techniques' instead of 'Expanded Legato' it would have been much clearer what to expect and better reflect what is in there. I think using Legato (even they are legatos) in the name implies it also includes new legato transitions (to me). In the end it might be just a case of unfortunate/careless naming and/or wrong expectations.

ps Lionel is surely not the issue here.


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## JSteel (Dec 22, 2022)

novaburst said:


> also if you know Lionel he can handle his self no need for your help.


I'm pretty sure same goes for Audiobro.


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## Jaap (Dec 22, 2022)

homie said:


> If they had named it say 'Expanded Techniques' instead of 'Expanded Legato' it would have been much clearer what to expect and better reflect what is in there. I think using Legato (even they are legatos) in the name implies it also includes new legato transitions (to me). In the end it might be just a case of unfortunate/careless naming and/or wrong expectations.
> 
> ps Lionel is surely not the issue here.


Well they created new legato articulations didnt they? We dont know exactly the deep ins and outs, but they created a fantastic set of new articulations that sound awesome (which I know Lionel is not contresting) and play beautifully..


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## Stevie (Dec 22, 2022)

Doing this sample thingamabob for quite some time now (I experienced the release of LASS 1.0 and purchased it back then), I can only say that Audiobro is among the finest developers out there.
If you have been on board of the sample train for a while, then you might have experienced quite some drama episodes in the sample dev realm. Not going to drop names here...

I know very little developers that put so much love and energy in their libraries and release updates on a regular basis and take bug fixing very serious (looking randomly in the sample dev crowd).
The scripting is top notch and the sheer amount of samples / articulations in both, MSS and MSB is overwhelming.

I know Audiobro doesn’t need this post, they are grown ups and can handle it. But I thought I might add some opinion from a random guy who has purchased quite a bit of sample libs in the past decade.

Full disclosure: I have written one demo song for MSS and also received the full library.
Also: I have purchased LASS, LADD, MSB and Genesis at normal or intro/sale price.
And I had also purchased MSS full, if the opportunity of writing a demo wouldn't have arisen.

I use MSS regularly, also the expanded legs. Does it sound great? Yes. To me, that's literally all that counts.
I might also add: (no boasting intended) I'm a pro and need to get work done. I use the tools that help me to achieve this.

EDIT: and if you might think that I got contacted by Audiobro to drop a post: NOPE, I'm also a grown up and make my own decisions.


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## Orlu (Dec 22, 2022)

Stevie said:


> Doing this sample thingamabob for quite some time now (I experienced the release of LASS 1.0 and purchased it back then), I can only say that Audiobro is among the finest developers out there.
> If you have been on board of the sample train for a while, then you might have experienced quite some drama episodes in the sample dev realm. Not going to drop names here...
> 
> I know very little developers that put so much love and energy in their libraries and release updates on a regular basis and take bug fixing very serious (looking randomly in the sample dev crowd).
> ...


This is all well and good, and based on what I know about them I agree with a lot of this, but it still doesn't excuse their actions with this particular library.


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## muk (Dec 22, 2022)

Just so we are all on the same page, this is the situation around Audiobro's 'Expanded Legato' library.

The core library 'Modern Scoring Strings' includes the playing techniques con sordino, sul ponticello, and sul tasto. What it doesn't include are legato transitions for these techniques. So they are just sustains.

Now, Audiobro offers a library called 'Expanded Legato' for 399$, which promises to bring legato to these playing techniques. The marketing text reads that the library brings 'an additional* 60GB worth of Sordino, Sul Tasto, Sul Pont, and… legato, portamento, and glissando articulations *(not available in the main MSS library)'.

Lets take a look at the articulation charts on Audiobro's website:






This promises to bring 'Real Legato' to the con sordino, sul tasto, and sul ponticello sustains that are included in the core library.

Lionel now showed that the legato transitions in the 'Expanded Legato' library are not actually recorded con sordino, sul tasto, and sul pont legato transitions. Instead, Audiobro took one recorded legato transition, and through scripting/filters applied them to these sustains. Now remember that the sustain articulations are already part of the core library. What the expanded legato library promises to bring to the table are legato transitions for these.

Confronted with Lionel's finding, Sebastian from Audiobro states that 'There are definitely some proprietary _recording_ and _editing_ technologies at play here.'

That's the situation as it presents itself.


Considering that the sustain parts of the articulations are part of the core library, I am wondering what the '60GB of additional content' actually consists of. Is it 60GB of new content compared to the core library? Or are the sustains that are part of the core library counted into these 60GB, and you are basically redownloading them with the expansion?

For a library with a price tag of 399$ that you can not try before you buy, nor return it, nor resell it. I think it's only reasonable to expect to be informed about its actual content transparently.


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## homie (Dec 22, 2022)

muk said:


> Considering that the sustain parts of the articulations are part of the core library, I am wondering what the '60GB of additional content' actually consists of.


That's indeed very strange. If the sustains are the same as in the core library how can there be 60GB additional content? Up to now i thought they recorded at least new sustained techniques for the expansion but reused/modified the legato transitions from the core lib. But now it looks like all base material is already included in core!? If true the price for the expansion should reflect that heavily if you also own core IMO. For people just buying the expansion the price may be justified as is.


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## Casiquire (Dec 22, 2022)

Every comment referring to this as a scam, or shady, should recognize that they're assuming intent and working backwards from there. We don't know which samples are shared, we don't know exactly why, and the dev has already chimed in that this is in no way a corner-cutting measure with intention to deceive but rather it's a consequence of how they create legato in the first place. I think a lot of people here are stunned that anyone could disagree with what they believe are "simple facts" without realizing just how much assumption is built in.


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## Zanshin (Dec 22, 2022)

Casiquire said:


> Every comment referring to this as a scam, or shady, should recognize that they're assuming intent and working backwards from there. We don't know which samples are shared, we don't know exactly why, and the dev has already chimed in that this is in no way a corner-cutting measure with intention to deceive but rather it's a consequence of how they create legato in the first place. I think a lot of people here are stunned that anyone could disagree with what they believe are "simple facts" without realizing just how much assumption is built in.


Audiobro is the one leaving the room for assumptions. You can't "take the fifth" and then be surprised people assume you've done something wrong.

We know real Legato transitions are expensive and tedious to record. Surely it's cheaper to have one person editing and working some "magic" on the samples. Sure, that's not cutting a corner for the person who did the work of fabricating the content. It probably saved a whole lot of money though. Especially, a whole lot of money for a mid-sized developer.


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## youngpokie (Dec 22, 2022)

giwro said:


> *please contact the producer for support privately before posting about it on a public forum*
> ....
> It's simply common courtesy to make the first step to contact privately FIRST and give the producer the opportunity to fix/come clean/whatever.



I'm struggling to understand why this is owed to a developer. The best explanation seems to be the risk of reputational damage. 

However, that really stinks of dealings behind the scenes. Hush-hush, keep quiet about it, etc. 

It also seems extremely self-serving, considering that this industry model is to treat every user is a future thief, who is not allowed to try, resell or return the software. Taken together, these two principles would seem more than a little one-sided, no?

I would image the opposite should be true - any public question, concern or discovery, such as the OP made, is an opportunity for the developer to _solidify_ their reputation. Transparency, honesty and responsiveness has been highly appreciated and prized on this forum and actually served as reputation enhancers, have they not?

I am assuming AudioBro developed an in-house process that allows them to develop _de-facto new articulations_ as a result of the combination of special recording, application of specific EQ'ing, secret editing techniques and whatever else is involved. 

If this is true, then the physical recording of a legato transition is only a generic raw material and the first step, and it's still ways to go to make it an actual articulation under this standard. This process, as I think they might be seeing it in this hypothetical, is what allows them to feel comfortable making marketing claims about "new/additional" articulations. And yes, it might make the underlying "raw" recordings re-usable or portable. 

If this is true, they should say so. Perhaps some people would not agree with defining "_new articulation_s" in this way and would insist that "_new xyz_" should always mean "_new recording_". But the case of the LASS viola re-used in MSS suggests that's probably not the case.


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## homie (Dec 22, 2022)

I think the lesson for devs is be very detailed in your product descriptions. Many people want to know everything about velocity layers, round robins and repurposed/processed samples before buying. Make it very clear what raw samples are actually included.


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## jbuhler (Dec 22, 2022)

Jaap said:


> There is 60 GB worth of those articulations, but it does not say, nor implies that there are all new legato transitions.


The add copy says there are 60 GB of “additional” material, not that the library is 60 GB some of which is additional. It does not specify that the library is 60 GB of legato transitions, that’s true. But the text clearly implies 60GB of material that is different from and additional to what’s in the main library. That’s the only way I can read “additional” in this context. The ad copy does not hint of even the sustain portion being reused in the expanded library. It doesn’t say, for instance, that this 60 GB library is complete in itself and adds legato transitions to the sustains of sul tasto, sul pont and con sordino that are also found in the main library. The ad copy clearly states that there is 60GB of additional material. “Additional” in this context means different. 

As I mentioned up thread, one could make an argument that this ad copy is truthful if Audiobro provided at least one new legato transition and then processed the relevant existing sustains from the main library in accordance with the legato engine to produce a new articulation. But if the recordings are all being reused and it is just scripting and processing I don’t think it’s legitimate to claim that this library consists of 60GB of “additional” material. That’s an abuse of language even by the standards of marketing language.


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## ummon (Dec 22, 2022)

jbuhler said:


> The ad copy clearly states that there is 60GB of additional material. “Additional” in this context means different.


A high price tag is justified when creating this additional material means expenses like renting studios, hiring players etc.


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## rMancer (Dec 22, 2022)

Ramen broth has pig eyeballs and brains in it. Noodle places generally don't just offer up that info unprompted; it doesn't look good on the menu. But whole pig heads are an essential ingredient for the flavor of traditional broth. If it was delicious yesterday before you learned that, is it still delicious today?

MSS (allegedly) has legato trickery in it. Audiobro doesn't just offer up that info unprompted; it doesn't look good on the website. But legato trickery is an essential ingredient for their sound. If it sounded great yesterday before you learned that, does it still sound great today?


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## jbuhler (Dec 22, 2022)

ummon said:


> A high price tag is justified when creating this additional material means expenses like renting studios, hiring players etc.


The point is that there are no new recording costs if there are no new recordings. There are additional scripting costs, which may indeed be very high, and all sorts of other expenses to be sure. None of this is about whether Audiobro shoukd be able to charge what they feel the library is worth. The issue is whether it’s misleading or deceptive to claim the expanded library as “60 GB of additional material” if the addition is all scripted or created through processing.


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## JSteel (Dec 22, 2022)

> If it sounded great yesterday before you learned that, does it still sound great today?"



If its still tasty, does it matter if the Steak you ordered is made of some vegan stuff?


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## ummon (Dec 22, 2022)

jbuhler said:


> The issue is whether it’s misleading or deceptive to claim the expanded library as “60 GB of additional material” if the addition is all scripted or created through processing.


If it’s all scripted or edited from an existing material then the expenses are not there and the price is too much in my opinion.


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## Evans (Dec 22, 2022)

rMancer said:


> Ramen broth has pig eyeballs and brains in it. Noodle places generally don't just offer up that info unprompted; it doesn't look good on the menu. But whole pig heads are an essential ingredient for the flavor of traditional broth. If it was delicious yesterday before you learned that, is it still delicious today?
> 
> MSS has legato trickery in it. Audiobro doesn't just offer up that info unprompted; it doesn't look good on the website. But legato trickery is an essential ingredient for their sound. If it sounded great yesterday before you learned that, does it still sound great today?


I think your example is not relevant here because you're talking about what's unknowingly added in, not what was (allegedly) advertised that was (allegedly) not fulfilled.



JSteel said:


> If its still tasty, does it matter if the Steak you ordered is made of some vegan stuff?


It does matter. Comparisons to human-consumable food are not going to apply here because there are strict regulations throughout most of the the world pertaining to ingredients, preparation, and potentially misleading representation... even if you're just a one-person "shop" selling small amounts of baked goods out of your home for a school fundraiser. You don't have to share techniques or volume or every last spice, but regulations can still be pretty intense.


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## Emmanuel Rousseau (Dec 22, 2022)

If I made 50 bucks each time someone makes an analogy between food and sample libraries…
(I would buy more sample libraries.)


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## Evans (Dec 22, 2022)

Emmanuel Rousseau said:


> If I made 50 bucks each time someone makes an analogy between food and sample libraries…
> (I would buy more sample libraries.)


You'd be able to buy one heck of a vegan steak.


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## wunderflo (Dec 22, 2022)

I''m not (yet) an AudioBro customer, so no inner conflicts here..

First of all, I'm sure Lionel will be an excellent critic and reviewer. I'm looking forward to watching/reading (?) his reviews as a real contrasting 2nd opinion. We totally need that in this industry where everyone is mostly only praising the latest releases (including myself... I'm just mostly really happy with my sample libraries and amazed by what developers come up with and what's possible today).

I understand the point (that meanwhile has been beaten to death) about AB's description and title of the library raising false expectations. Really shows the importance of communication. Please, keep in mind that those smaller developers likely won't have a professional marketing department/person, though. So give them the benefit of the doubt before yelling "IT'S A SCAM, THEY BETRAYED US!!!". Very likely nothing of this happened with bad intentions.

However, even investigative journalists who uncover a huge political scandal first contact the accused to hear their side of the story. It's only fair, avoids misunderstandings and it also helps the ones reporting. In the end, Lionel could also have been completely wrong. The damage would already have been done. Not too many care to follow and read complete threads. This stuff is not as objective black & white as some of you make it seem. As a critic, you also need to be able to accept criticism.

What I personally strongly disagree with is the notion that how the library was made matters. I'm convinced that this "real recordings" vs. "fake scripting/editing" debate is wrong in itself. I'm definitely in the "if it sounds good, it is good" team.

See, what they really promised is to solve a problem. The problem was a lack of legato transitions for those special articulations. They solved that. They delivered. And they did it in a way that most of you have been completely happy with before reading this thread. What changed?

Imo, this "fake vs. real" debate is BS. In the world of samples, it's all fake, it's all an illusion, and it's all real at the same time. It's a real virtual product. You don't buy recordings, you buy a digital tool that helps you solve specific problems.

What if they did some experiments and discovered that adjusting one legato recording to match the different articulations simply sounded or worked better than recording each one separately? One could argue that the process of editing this legato recording was even more challenging, more complex and smarter than "mundanely" recording everything individually (I'm intentionally phrasing this in a provocative way).

So instead of being shocked about this finding, you could also react like "wow, that's impressive, I had no idea, they went to these lengths and came up with such a smart solution. Makes me feel even better about my purchase".

In the end, it simply doesn't matter, because there's no "real" and no "fake" in this world (that's why it doesn't compare to food etc. - you can only compare it to other virtual solutions), and maybe AudioBro thought the same and that's why they didn't mention it (plus it's absolutely their right to keep their process a secret, so it isn't copied by competitors). 

Additionally, it doesn't matter what legato transitions sound like in isolation. That's like caring about what a track of a song sounds like in solo. It just absolutely doesn't matter, because the listener will never hear it like that. It actually even leads to making mistakes when mixing (been guilty of doing that). The end result is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Conclusion: They could have done a better job describing and naming their product. Wow, huge scandal.

PS: Some people are born critics. Good for us. But make sure you really want to go down this road of dissecting everything you once were happy with under a microscope. Usually, this just leads to being unproductive and miserable. Personally, I prefer to enjoy my sample libraries - but I'm also grateful for those who critically dissect them. It's a healthy reality check and 2nd opinion.


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## Mike Fox (Dec 22, 2022)

These food analogies that revolve around a “What they don’t know won’t hurt them” type of theme just crack me up. 

It’s like a chef trying to justify rat turds in your steak, because you had no idea they were there, and the steak was delicious.


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## JSteel (Dec 22, 2022)

Mike Fox said:


> These food analogies that revolve around a “What they don’t know won’t hurt them” type of theme just crack me up.
> 
> It’s like a chef trying to justify rat turds in your steak, because you had no idea they were there, and the steak was delicious.


I thought it is obvious that i meant it the opposite way. Of course does it matter whats in it.


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## Mike Fox (Dec 22, 2022)

JSteel said:


> I thought it is obvious that i meant it the opposite way. Of course does it matter whats in it.


There were a lot of other comments before yours that I was actually referring to. 

Like you said, it DOES matter what’s in it.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 22, 2022)

Jaap said:


> I really don't understand the sentiment about false adversiment to be honest and in my opinion that is way too harsh to put it.
> They state on the product page:
> ------------
> *Expanded Legato* is an *add-on* library to the main MSS library with an additional *60GB worth of Sordino, Sul Tasto, Sul Pont, and… legato, portamento, and glissando articulations *(not available in the main MSS library). Mixed down to four different microphone mixes, the breadth of articulations and bowing techniques were chosen to offer an enormous range of colors and emotions for your productions. Enjoy these new delicate and inspiring string sonorities with extra legato features like “*Bloom,” “Crescendo,” and “Attack.*“
> ...


Well, your post sounds just as washy to me as everything coming from AB. Maybe it's a developer thing haha...

what does


> recorded additional stuff to make all these legato, gliss and portamento acticulations possible.


even mean?

You don't need bloom/bowed etc attacks/sustains to make any legato "possible". Or which "stuff" do you mean?

At the end it's fairly simple.
If you sell a library whose ONLY attraction is LEGATO for extended playing styles (with some variations as mentioned above) which is sold at the price of CSS (!!!) I think noone in their right mind would NOT think that those aren't actual LEGATO recordings of Sul Pont, Tasto and Con Sordino.
It's not on the customer to spend 10 hours in a Zen stage contemplating about what a website description means and preparing an interview for their support with questions to ask to iron out all doubts that come up during these 10 hours of reflection.
It's about clearly stating what a library is.

If it doesn't offer Sul Tasto/Pont and Con Sord LEGATO while costing as much as you'd expect for that it MUST state that since it's 95% of the purchase point.

Of course it doesn't explicitly state otherwise, that would be a crime basically (I'd love to check if the transitions are actually from the main library, because it explicitly states that they are NOT in the main library, it would be odd to record a new regular/generic legato for expanded techniques but... maybe that's what they did. I hope so.).

The vast majority here so far seems to agree that the advertising is at least problematic.
So if you write your website in a way that only a small handful of people like you can understand it, it's still problematic.

And, if noone can assume anything that isn't explicitly stated otherwise it would it scary to buy anything and opens the doors for a lot of deception. That's basically the core philosophy of misleading advertisement. "Well, we didn't say this is real coffee, we just said it's "coffee" "

I'm already looking forward to libraries with the room sound faked with IR's of the scoring stage advertised.

(shhh, the IR's, not the samples. It doesn't state otherwise - no false advertisement, It was a lot of work to get that sound, no short cuts here)


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## rMancer (Dec 22, 2022)

Mike Fox said:


> These food analogies that revolve around a “What they don’t know won’t hurt them” type of theme just crack me up.
> 
> It’s like a chef trying to justify rat turds in your steak, because you had no idea they were there, and the steak was delicious.


Your logic doesn't really hold up here. The chef is not intentionally putting rat turds in your ramen. However, they _are_ intentionally putting pig heads in there. Completely different thing. Audiobro didn't "accidentally" let some rat turds slip into their legato and then be like "welp, still tastes good!" They made deliberate choices.

And it's not about "what they don't know won't hurt them," it's more like "don't put the entire recipe on the menu" (or rather, the diner being upset that the recipe isn't printed in full on the menu).


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## richhickey (Dec 22, 2022)

This isn't about subtle secret ingredients, it's about the nature of the dish itself. It's not shallots in your hamburger, it's textured soy protein instead of hamburger. 

A con sordino library should be recorded with a mute, a sul point by the bridge. Anything else is emulated. Plenty of libraries emulate these and say so. For the money (more than half again the price of the main library, which included the sustains) and the disk space, most of us expected real recordings, and nothing that was said in the marketing made it clear they weren't.


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## Jaap (Dec 22, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> Well, your post sounds just as washy to me as everything coming from AB. Maybe it's a developer thing haha...
> 
> what does
> 
> ...


You state your point of view and I state mine and Audiobro did their statement. Now others can judge for themselves based on different point of views what they do with this all this info.


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## Zanshin (Dec 22, 2022)

Mike Fox said:


> These food analogies that revolve around a “What they don’t know won’t hurt them” type of theme just crack me up.
> 
> It’s like a chef trying to justify rat turds in your steak, because you had no idea they were there, and the steak was delicious.


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## Casiquire (Dec 22, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> Audiobro is the one leaving the room for assumptions. You can't "take the fifth" and then be surprised people assume you've done something wrong.
> 
> We know real Legato transitions are expensive and tedious to record. Surely it's cheaper to have one person editing and working some "magic" on the samples. Sure, that's not cutting a corner for the person who did the work of fabricating the content. It probably saved a whole lot of money though. Especially, a whole lot of money for a mid-sized developer.


The dev keeping vague about how the sausage is made doesn't give us the right to continue the conversation as if there are no new transitions in the expanded legato package. The burden of proof is still on the person making the claim, and we flew right by that straight into the outrage.

I do hope the dev chimes in with more information, but we don't seem willing to give any benefit of the doubt even where I think it's been earned, repeatedly, for over a decade


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## Mike Fox (Dec 22, 2022)

All this food talk be making me so hungry!


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## Zanshin (Dec 22, 2022)

Casiquire said:


> The dev keeping vague about how the sausage is made doesn't give us the right to continue the conversation as if there are no new transitions in the expanded legato package. The burden of proof is still on the person making the claim, and we flew right by that straight into the outrage.
> 
> I do hope the dev chimes in with more information, but we don't seem willing to give any benefit of the doubt even where I think it's been earned, repeatedly, for over a decade


More of this sausage!? If it was "real legato" sausage (recorded not manufactured, con sordino etc legato intervals) I think we would have heard so by now.

I do want to say @Casiquire even though we don't see eye on this particular issue I appreciate the evenness and reasonability you bring to topics like this. I don't know here you hail from but you come across to me as a fellow stoic Midwesterner lol.


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## Getsumen (Dec 22, 2022)

I'm amazed at everyone defending this stating how audiobro could have been more descriptive, etc.

They're not stupid and they know what the default assumption would have been when they expanded legato with 60GB of content! Conscious decision to _not _mention how the samples were reused (if they were).

I'm not sure how people are justifying paying hundreds of dollars for something advertised when it wasn't that. Would you pay 200$+ for an EQ filter button on CSS or BST? No matter how "good" it sounds. What about a library with only one mic position but 9 more through IRs that was advertised as having 10 mic positions? 

The fact that they won't say they outright recorded new transitions (putting this whole thread to rest) makes it pretty clear to me that they didn't, at least not for all intervals. Nothing proprietary or shocking to say that they recorded new transitions. Simple as that


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## Trash Panda (Dec 22, 2022)

Zanshin said:


> More of this sausage!? If it was "real legato" sausage (recorded not manufactured, con sordino etc legato intervals) I think we would have heard so by now.
> 
> I do want to say @Casiquire even though we don't see eye on this particular issue I appreciate the evenness and reasonability you bring to topics like this. I don't know here you hail from but you come across to be as a fellow stoic Midwesterner lol.


He's too polite to be American. Definitely must be one of our friendly neighbors to the north.



Casiquire said:


> I do hope the dev chimes in with more information, but we don't seem willing to give any benefit of the doubt even where I think it's been earned, repeatedly, for over a decade


If @dxmachina had simply stated all legato transitions were real recorded sordino/sul pont/sul tasto/sul etc. this thread would have died down fast. If that is the case, he's perfectly capable of shutting down the drama by simply coming back and plainly stating it.

I have no dog in this fight except that I'm running out of popcorn and I just want to see how the movie ends already.


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## biomuse (Dec 22, 2022)

Stop with the food analogies everyone. You’re making my head hurt. They just don’t map. At all. 

First of all, in this analog universe, we’re not the “customer” (diner). Generally speaking we’re the chef, prep cook and restaurant manager wrapped up into one. The *listener* (I.e. consumer of our music) would be the diner. 

We buy artistic functionalities and we sell ephemera. No one has ever been poisoned or malnourished by sound levels under 70dB.


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## Casiquire (Dec 22, 2022)

Getsumen said:


> They're not stupid and they know what the default assumption would have been when they expanded legato with 60GB of content!


Again. We're assuming that there aren't different transitions in the expanded legato than in the main. All we know is that some transitions within the expanded legato are shared within the expanded legato.


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## jbuhler (Dec 22, 2022)

ummon said:


> If it’s all scripted or edited from an existing material then the expenses are not there and the price is too much in my opinion.


I wouldn’t say this myself. Scripting is an art and requires a lot of labor. The library seems like it’s worth the price it usually sells at (that is, its sale price). But the ad copy is clearly promising something the library isn’t delivering if it is reusing samples from the main library and especially if the expansion is not providing any new legato recordings but is only reprocessing existing recordings. There is not 60 GB of additional material. Rather it’s a 60 GB of recordings from the main library with additional scripting and processing.


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## chopin4525 (Dec 22, 2022)

rMancer said:


> Ramen broth has pig eyeballs and brains in it. Noodle places generally don't just offer up that info unprompted; it doesn't look good on the menu. But whole pig heads are an essential ingredient for the flavor of traditional broth. If it was delicious yesterday before you learned that, is it still delicious today?


Except your Ramen broth was made with leftovers from other clients and some of those are even leftovers from the past week. If that info which doesn't look good on the menu is not offered, it would still be delicious to you as it was yesterday?


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## Obi-Wan Spaghetti (Dec 22, 2022)

That's it I'm never going to a restaurant ever again!


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## chopin4525 (Dec 22, 2022)

Obi-Wan Spaghetti said:


> That's it I'm never going to a restaurant ever again!


Good choice in general. Or rather choose restaurants where you can see the workspace or know the chef. Intimately.


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## JSteel (Dec 22, 2022)

All in all, the absence from AB after one post doesn't make look it any better.

Why not using the opportunity to clearify this?


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## rMancer (Dec 22, 2022)

JSteel said:


> All in all, the absence from AB after one post doesn't make look it any better.


They're working on aging their Genesis samples into a choir of adults.


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## Obi-Wan Spaghetti (Dec 22, 2022)

chopin4525 said:


> Good choice in general. Or rather choose restaurants where you can see the workspace or know the chef. Intimately.


That's what i was just thinking. This thread got me paranoid a little like why is there a wall between the kitchen and the place where i eat?.. ...But then i remembered pizza!🍕
Yea I'm not very sophisticated when it comes to food or anything really.


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## JSteel (Dec 22, 2022)

rMancer said:


> They're working on aging their Genesis samples into a choir of adults.


As long it sounds good, right?


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## Trash Panda (Dec 22, 2022)

Obi-Wan Spaghetti said:


> Yea I'm not very sophisticated when it comes to food or anything really.


Just lift your pinky while you eat or drink and no one will be the wiser.


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## Obi-Wan Spaghetti (Dec 22, 2022)

Trash Panda said:


> Just lift your pinky while you eat or drink and no one will be the wiser.


Funny thing is i actually do that naturally. Don't ask me why...


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## biomuse (Dec 22, 2022)

rMancer said:


> They're working on aging their Genesis samples into a choir of adults.


don’t laugh. It’ll happen.


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## JSteel (Dec 22, 2022)

Obi-Wan Spaghetti said:


> Funny thing is i actually do that naturally. Don't ask me why...


There must be some blue blood in you.


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## ummon (Dec 22, 2022)

jbuhler said:


> But the ad copy is clearly promising something the library isn’t delivering if it is reusing samples from the main library and especially if the expansion is not providing any new legato recordings but is only reprocessing existing recordings.


I agree that ad copy should be clear if there are new recorded material or not. Although it's possible to think that by merging zeros and ones you can create "new" material. But in this industry (and if it's not physical modeling) additional material refers to audio in some form or other - at least in my book


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## lettucehat (Dec 22, 2022)

A lot of what's being written here in the vein of "who cares how the sausage is made" is negated by the fact that a random user with _no_ behind the scenes access came across this simply by using his ears, and then investigating further. To risk another food analogy, he tasted the soylent green and said "hm, this tastes a little people-y" (don't ask how he knows, flawed analogy..)

It's also worth mentioning that competitors' products in the sul tasto / sul pont / sordino realm have set a certain standard for what these "special" legatos consist of. And it's newly recorded legato transitions. And they all could have been doing under-the-hood trickery for years now, but when they said they made special legatos they did it this way instead. OT used to emulate sordino (completely, not just the transitions) and they said so. But Special Bows, SCS, even LASS Sordino were new recordings unless I'm very mistaken. Combined with all of the other things Audiobro says about the expansion it creates a clear impression. Especially when you consider that Audiobro is very upfront about reusing material elsewhere in MSS.


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## PickledPat (Dec 22, 2022)

Evans said:


> Or, Embertone Joshua Bell Violin, performed by the legendary violinist. Except for the transitions. Those are not his. Except maybe. You know what? It's secret and proprietary.
> 
> (FWIW the only thing I think I'd complain about for MSS is the lack of crossgrade _to_ LASS. Seems like it's only the other way?)


There's only 30 euro discount from lass 3 full to mss for me anyway


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## Nick Batzdorf (Dec 22, 2022)

Disclaimer: Andrew K (AudioBro) is a friend.

But even so, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over this. It just doesn't feel like anyone is getting ripped off, regardless of the story.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 22, 2022)

Since the thread has become messy I'm just making my (last) comment cohesively re-stating my own point as the poster.

I'd say when buying a library that claims to feature legato of sul tasto, sul pont and con sordino you'd expect... legato of sul tasto, sul pont and con sordino.
Not a single normal legato with processing. Whether it's from the main library (which could make this whole thing criminal if the case) I don't know, don't have it. I hope not. 

That's basically the whole point. It doesn't state that they are unique recordings per playing style, but it's very reasonable to assume the legato intervals are also performed in the style they are applied to, otherwise it wouldn't really be an example of sul pont etc legato. 
Not stating otherwise is misleading at best IMO. The full price of about 400$ is also on the high end, considering it's just sustains with variations and legato.


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## Laddy (Dec 23, 2022)

Question: is legato sampling only about the transition between notes or also about the note you transition TO. ? I ask because first, I know nothing about legato technology and second, 60gb is a lot of data. I think the original library is about 120gb, and I doubt that 60 of those are just the sordino, sul tasto and sul pont sustains


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 23, 2022)

Laddy said:


> Question: is legato sampling only about the transition between notes or also about the note you transition TO. ? I ask because first, I know nothing about legato technology and second, 60gb is a lot of data. I think the original library is about 120gb, and I doubt that 60 of those are just the sordino, sul tasto and sul pont sustains


With legato you usually two assets - sustains and intervals. The intervals play when you overlap 2 notes (sometimes they don't need to be overlapped) and are relative to the 2 notes you overlap, like a one-way trill in a way.
After that interval fades out, the "target" sustain of the next note fades in... that process repeats for all further notes.
Usually that's it but some developers of course go further with it.

Legato data can be very huge since you need a lot of audio files to represent all the ways in which you can transition between notes - upwards and downwards. Each needs a unique audio file, although often samples are stretched by one and sometimes and two (rarely more) semi tones so you for instance only need 6 samples for 12 pitches (talking about regular samples here with the numbers, not legato. With legato it's too much for my non-number brain to come up with numbers, you need a LOT of samples with or without stretching)

So it's not strange that the main library and this one aren't extremely far away from each other sizewise since legato always eats up most of the space. 

In the case of the expanded legato library here you could easily get that size with actual audio samples of sul tasto, pont, con sord etc that are still derived from the same recording.
So, even if the source legato samples are the same, they could have re-exported them after processing them for each playing type (regular legato processed into sul pont = reexported, same legato processed into sul tasto = reexported etc), which would explain the size.
Not sure why it should only be because of the sustains. There of course are still legato samples included. Maybe even unique physical audio files derived from the same recordings for each playing style.

Although also keep in mind that each section has 2 sets of samples. Each section is split into 2 divisis. So, all ensemble are actually 2 different divisi sections. Violins are 4 divisi sections because there are Violins 1 and 2. And each of them has 4 mic positions when including the full mix.
+ There are 3 types of sustain (crescendo/bloom and bowed/attack seem to be the same but if not it's actually 5) AND Solo Violin and Cello.
So I think it's actually not big considering all that, even if it's just one set of audio files per playing style. 

I'm not an expert either but I probably spent many days in total tweaking legatos in libraries I own haha... so I'm somewhat familiar with what happens.
Can't ever resist legato nerding, even if I said my last post was above


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 23, 2022)

My guess is they did record new transitions for this expansion but maybe not for each playing technique. Instead they found a way to record something that could be extensible to all three techniques based on some post-recording processing. This does save time but given the amount of legato transitions they wanted to support (all five sections, divisi), I can understand the desire to “innovate” here on the traditional method.


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## biomuse (Dec 23, 2022)

Mulling it over, I’ll also go out on a limb and suggest this may have to do with their lookahead feature, another burst of Audiobro innovation. One could indeed hand-time individual legato transition samples for every divisi of every playing style, in order to nail the necessarily homogenized transition time that would make a global lookahead feature work; but I expect that would be prohibitive in time as well as cost and would also explain why they would use convolution to obtain acceptable transition samples that are a consistently identical length for all playing styles, allowing them to be treated interchangeably by the global lookahead.

I suspect we might hear a little more along these lines after the holiday ends.


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## Laddy (Dec 23, 2022)

(Deleted. Too long post about me finding out how legato works).


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## Vik (Dec 28, 2022)

Marko Cifer said:


> If the Expansion was a much cheaper add-on to existing users than is currently being sold at, I presume we'd be raising our eyebrows and grumble at most, but it's a 400 USD MSRP add-on (which, admittedly, is basically perma-discounted, sold much cheaper quite often, and has a bundle discount if you pick up both the main library and the Expansion) and even on sale, it still feels pricey compared to the main library.


I just discovered that the price now is $149 for MSS users. Anyone here who knows how long that will last?


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## Chocolino (Dec 28, 2022)

Vik said:


> I just discovered that the price now is $149 for MSS users. Anyone here who knows how long that will last?


As I understood @dxmachina until December 31.


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## Mucusman (Dec 28, 2022)

Chocolino said:


> As I understood @dxmachina until December 31.


Almost. According to an email today from Audiobro, the sale ends "midnight on January 2nd (EST)."


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## Chocolino (Dec 28, 2022)

Mucusman said:


> Almost. According to an email today from Audiobro, the sale ends "midnight on January 2nd (EST)."


Even better. More time to try to save up for MSS


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## Jrides (Dec 28, 2022)

mussnig said:


> I cut it off because I was seriously curious about that part of your statement. Your second comment gives more context and makes sense to me.
> 
> Initially, I had the impression that you were suggesting that he might shut down the thread to protect the dev. Which would be quite suprising to me.


it wouldn’t be surprising to me.


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## Soundbed (Dec 28, 2022)

Good ear, Lionel!



wunderflo said:


> So instead of being shocked about this finding, you could also react like "wow, that's impressive, I had no idea, they went to these lengths and came up with such a smart solution. Makes me feel even better about my purchase".


I’m more on this side of things.^^^

I like consistency (these days). For me, if the trade off of recording individual legatos for each of the 3 techniques was that things behaved less consistently (e.g., had less predictable timing) then we’d have something different to pick apart/complain about. Or, they’d cost even more due to additional recording, prep and scripting.

What I’m getting from the most frustrated responses is the “marketing copy” aspect. 

I paid $649 for the bundle and the only thing I’m disappointed by in the extended legatos is that they are fairly “tame” sounding, especially the sul pont, but I’m not disappointed by the marketing language.

I grew up in a family of advertisers. 

And I don’t have the time or energy to be frustrated by this; because the product works.

To get away from food metaphors:

It’s not like a bridge bolt that wasn’t manufactured to spec and a highway will collapse when that bolt fails, leading to loss of life.

It’s more like I bought a bolt “able to withstand 10,000 pounds, made of pure steel” and I came to find it can withstand 10,000 pounds *but* it’s an alloy that doesn’t negatively affect my purpose. So, in this comparison, the bolt can do what I want and need it to do, but it isn’t made out of what I read on the tin. Fortunately for me, the “alloy” doesn’t impact my use case whatsoever. Could have been a lot worse. For instance, if I’d needed it to be magnetic and it was not — but I would have discovered that instantly. Anyway, can’t push these metaphors too hard. 

That’s my perspective. And, if others feel strongly that marketing text (etc.) should be more transparent, I’m ok with that in the universe, too. Live and let live.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 28, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> Good ear, Lionel!
> 
> 
> I’m more on this side of things.^^^
> ...


well, it does affect the purpose greatly if you pick up on the fact that it's actually not sul pont/tasto intervals, or at least that it just doesn't sound "right" without hearing the trickery itself. I think I noticed something wasn't right within the same day of installing it.
Can't remember the process of discovery but I usually don't check for spoofery so quickly.
It's far from perfect.

"Works" isn't really the aim of the game IMO.
It could be a lot better with actual intervals of the playing styles.
And for 400$ it should be. It's not a reasonable price for a single set of intervals that doesn't relate to the sustains, even if it "works".
That price isn't much behind a lot of full string libraries these days.

Of course you have to put in the work to have them consistent, without timing/timbre issues etc.
That's the way the avoid the issues you mentioned above.

The first idea to achieve consistency when producing a library of 400 dollar shouldn't be to just hit "copy paste", whether that has some fancy tech behind it or not.

Consistency comes from good sampling and editing, not reusing things.
Maybe it would be a lot more consistent if the legatos would be recorded uniquely per playing style. 
We'll never know unfortunately.

Well, too bad I couldn't stick to my 'last post' claim. The passion!


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## QuiteAlright (Dec 28, 2022)

biomuse said:


> Mulling it over, I’ll also go out on a limb and suggest this may have to do with their lookahead feature, another burst of Audiobro innovation. One could indeed hand-time individual legato transition samples for every divisi of every playing style, in order to nail the necessarily homogenized transition time that would make a global lookahead feature work; but I expect that would be prohibitive in time as well as cost and would also explain why they would use convolution to obtain acceptable transition samples that are a consistently identical length for all playing styles, allowing them to be treated interchangeably by the global lookahead.


You might be correct about lookahead being the motivation behind this, but it's definitely not necessary to fake transitions just to get lookahead. This could have been done, albeit with more effort, with real samples as well.


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## QuiteAlright (Dec 28, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> And I don’t have the time or energy to be frustrated by this; because the product works.
> 
> To get away from food metaphors:
> 
> ...


I respect your stance, but I really disagree. If you bought a diamond, and later found out that it was a cubic zirconia, would you feel angry?

I think this argument boils down to "the vendor lied, but I couldn't tell the difference, so it doesn't bother me".


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## Stevie (Dec 29, 2022)

Just to let everyone know: unwatching this thread!

And yes, I totally agree with your very last sentence, Lionel.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

Suppose an automobile company has two models in it’s product range: A standard model and an extended, where the latter is marketed to come with a more powerful engine.

One day however a buyer finds out the same engine is used in both car models!

Can you imagine how disastrous this would be to the automobile company?

Nobody would be making excuses for that company. Nobody!

When a company markets something as being an extended version of a product and makes customers pay extra for it, but then have set things up so it simply reuses stuff already in the standard version of the product, it’s called a scam.

Nothing more, nothing less.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 30, 2022)

Stevie said:


> Just to let everyone know: unwatching this thread!
> 
> And yes, I totally agree with your very last sentence, Lionel.


Of course only viewpoints you agree with are allowed, I see.

It was a respectful discussion till you came in... or out rather haha.
I haven't attacked anyone and you should be careful because to me it looks like the majority of opinions in total was siding with me. 

I think nobody cares which threads you read...


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## Casiquire (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Suppose an automobile company has two models in it’s product range: A standard model and an extended, where the latter is marketed to come with a more powerful engine.
> 
> One day however a buyer finds out the same engine is used in both car models!
> 
> ...


But nobody has shown that's what happened here.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

Casiquire said:


> But nobody has shown that's what happened here.


What do you think has happened?


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## Casiquire (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> What do you think has happened?


I'm keeping my speculation minimal. We know samples within the Extended Legato are reused. We don't know that they're the same legatos as in the main library. Actually Sebastian's comment specifically mentioned translation across sections in the Extended Legatos, which to me indicates that they aren't the same


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## Lionel Schmitt (Dec 30, 2022)

Well, this was never part of my point at least. I don't know whether they are the same as in the standard because I don't have it. I think I said that around 3 times, including the OP haha...
But since it sounds like "normal" legato it's a possibility for me which I hope isn't the case. 
For now there is no ground at all to assume they are. 

My actual point is just about the legato transitions themselves apparently not being sul pont/tasto/con sord each with no indication of this on the website.

I figure it's worth commenting again to be being clear about that.


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## Casiquire (Dec 30, 2022)

Lionel Schmitt said:


> Well, this was never part of my point at least. I don't know whether they are the same as in the standard because I don't have it. I think I said that around 3 times, including the OP haha...
> But since it sounds like "normal" legato it's a possibility for me. But that's all.
> 
> My actual point is just about the legatos apparently not being sul pont/tasto/con sord each with no indication of this on the website.
> ...


I know that's not the point you were trying to make, but it's the point a lot of people are walking away with. That's why I'm unmoved when you say "most people here agree with me."


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

Sul pont/tasto/con sord are each supposed to come with separately sampled legato transitions. But it sounds like the 3 articulations come with “normal” legato transitions.

That’s it, right?


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## Zanshin (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Sul pont/tasto/con sord are each supposed to come with separately sampled legato transitions. But it sounds like the 3 articulations come with “normal” legato transitions.
> 
> That’s it, right?


Yeah that's my understanding too. Normale legato but EQ'd/filtered/whatever to fit the sordino etc sustains. If it's just normale legato why would they record that twice?? Pfft that doesn't make sense.

From a customer trust standpoint I think it would behoove Audiobro to shut down the speculation and be explicit.

At this point I look at the rest of the catalog ... Are the MSB horns actually all different source recordings? The ad copy just says "MSB was performed by true brass masters and was recorded one player at a time. ". To be clear - I don't know (and that fanboys don't know either), and I'm not claiming that there is any funny business in MSB, but as of right now, the seed is in my head that there COULD BE.


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## Vik (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Sul pont/tasto/con sord are each supposed to come with separately sampled legato transitions. But it sounds like the 3 articulations come with “normal” legato transitions.


I may be wrong about this, but I'll give it a try.

Since the expanded library has been out for a while, and very few – if any – seems to be 100% sure that one can hear (during normal use) that the legato transition samples are derived from the normale legato transition, I'm wondering if it would be a problem if they are.


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## Markrs (Dec 30, 2022)

I feel that if it hadn't been faking Sul Pont, Sordino and Sul Tasto legato, but instead faking velocity layers, people wouldn't be so okay with it.

For example, if you paid $400 for a string library and it said 8 velocity layers. You think great, finally a string library to a good number of velocity layers. Initially, you like it and use it. Then you find out they only recorded 1 velocity layer and faked the rest, and the reason for doing this was for better cross-fading, and the developers feel everyone should be happy with this reason.

I doubt in this situation most won't think that was $400 well spent, given it clearly would have cost the developer a lot less than if they had sampled so much, but yet charged you as if they had. Technically they haven't lied to you as they never said each velocity layer was recorded, just that it has 8 velocity layers.

I feel if a developer did this, there would be a lot of disappointed people.

If you imply (and it was implied given I and many others did think they had recorded the various articulations rather than fake them) something but actually deliver something that was much cheaper to produce (again this can't be in question even if it took some time to fake these, it isn't the same as having a string orchestra doing lots of legato articulations), you have a right to feel like you have been short-changed on the deal.


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## Vik (Dec 30, 2022)

Markrs said:


> I feel that if it hadn't been faking Sul Pont, Sordino and Sul Tasto legato, but instead faking velocity layers, people wouldn't be so okay with it.


Wait... are the long notes (Sul Pont, Con Sordino and Sul Tasto) and not only the short legato transitions only emulations??


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## Markrs (Dec 30, 2022)

Vik said:


> Wait... are the long notes (Sul Pont, Con Sordino and Sul Tasto) and not only the short legato transitions only emulations??


No, as far as we know, it is only the legato transitions that are faked.

Also, if my analogy is a bit too far from the issue in question, you could change it to where multiple Legato Transition velocities are mentioned, but only one is actually recorded and the rest are fake. If the library was pretty expensive you would feel pretty cheated, given all your other libraries have one legato transition velocity, so if you didn't want to buy another one that was the same but that had faked the effect of more velocities.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

Vik said:


> I may be wrong about this, but I'll give it a try.
> 
> Since the expanded library has been out for a while, and very few – if any – seems to be 100% sure that one can hear (during normal use) that the legato transition samples are derived from the normale legato transition, I'm wondering if it would be a problem if they are.


Your question is completely irrelevant to the problem though, which is this:

If a developer makes a product with Sordino, Sul Tasto and Sul Pont sustains, and then also markets an Expanded Legato-edition containing the Sordino legato transitions, the Sul Tasto legato transitions and Sul Pont legato transitions, does it matter if it’s in fact not these legato transitions you get in the product but instead the “standard” legato transitions, i.e. the legato transitions belonging to the normal sustains?

To be clear, if the company’s homepage said they’d matched the standard legato transitions with the Sordino, Sul Tasto and Sul Pont sustains, and then used EQ and whatnot to make it sound like you were listening to Sordino legato transitions, Sul Tasto and Sul Pont legato transitions, there would be no problem at all.

However the homepage specifically says you’re buying *additional legato articulations*. That is, legato articulations (transitions) that are not in the standard edition.

”While the main MSS Full library includes Sordino, Sul Tasto, and Sul Pont sustains, it does not offer the legato transitions of those articulations. We felt it was better to split out the 60GB of additional legato articulations to a different add-on library to give users the option based on their needs.”


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## Vik (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Your question is completely irrelevant to the problem though, which is this:
> 
> If a developer makes a product with Sordino, Sul Tasto and Sul Pont sustains, and then also markets an Expanded Legato-edition containing the Sordino legato transitions, the Sul Tasto legato transitions and Sul Pont legato transitions



I don't want anything to to be emulated/faked without the company being explicit about it. My comment was only questioning if the legato transitions were faked with results that ended up so good that we can't tell if they were faked or not. That question is at least somehow relevant, because if one enables Sul P, CS or Sul Tasto in the main library, legato is automatically disabled.

If @dxmachina would state that the actual legato transitions in the Expanded Legato product were emulated, but that this has been done in a way which won't be noticeable, many would still buy it, probably including me. I hope Audiobro will chime in with more info.


Btw, I have noticed that if I enable CS/SulP/Con Sord in main CSS, vibrato control isn't disabled, but still: it doesn't seem to do anything. In the Expanded Legato, there is no buttons for vibrato control. 
IMO it would be better if things like vibrato control and molto vib buttons would be graphically dimmed where this buttons have no function.


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## gst98 (Dec 30, 2022)

Markrs said:


> I feel that if it hadn't been faking Sul Pont, Sordino and Sul Tasto legato, but instead faking velocity layers, people wouldn't be so okay with it.
> 
> For example, if you paid $400 for a string library and it said 8 velocity layers. You think great, finally a string library to a good number of velocity layers. Initially, you like it and use it. Then you find out they only recorded 1 velocity layer and faked the rest, and the reason for doing this was for better cross-fading, and the developers feel everyone should be happy with this reason.
> 
> ...


I thought it was already established that there was only 1 recorded layer of legato transitions anyway


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## Markrs (Dec 30, 2022)

Vik said:


> If @dxmachina would state that the actual legato transitions in the Expanded Legato product were emulated, but that this has been done in a way which won't be noticeable, many would still buy it, probably including me. I hope Audiobro will chime in with more info.


I agree with this, for me the issue isn't emulation, after all I like semi-modelled libraries like Infinite Brass and Woodwinds, they can be very effective. For me, it is all about transparency, which when you can't demo, or sell a library it is very important.


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## Soundbed (Dec 30, 2022)

gst98 said:


> I thought it was already established that there was only 1 recorded layer of legato transitions anyway


It was only established that the extended legatos share transitions.



QuiteAlright said:


> If you bought a diamond, and later found out that it was a cubic zirconia, would you feel angry?



Yes but that analogy doesn’t apply to a sample library, which is not the diamond itself. It’s the tool I use to craft the ring. 

See what I did there? Eh? Eh? 

Gesamtkunstwerk! (“Gesundheit!”)

When it comes to extended legato transitions “There can be only one.”

Okay, I’ll see myself out…


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## jbuhler (Dec 30, 2022)

The ad text specifically says 60 GB of additional articulations. So the text is at best deceptive even by the standards of ad copy if the longs are being reused from the main library. But if there is no new legato transition at all then the ad copy is egregious in its claim of “additional.”

None of this is to say that the expanded legato library is mispriced, even if it contains no new recordings. Scripting and processing take labor and having legatos for all articulations that fit within the basic operation of the main library may well be worth the price. But why not just say that in the ad copy:

“For the expanded legato library we applied our same legato engine to the articulations of con sordino, sul tasto, and sul pont, and this is available as a 60GB library. This library brings to these articulations all the functionality of the legato in our main library and is available for purchase as a fully functional separate library…” 

With text like this there is no promise of anything additional other than the legato engine being applied to the long articulations not covered in the main library.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

jbuhler said:


> The ad text specifically says 60 GB of additional articulations. So the text is at best deceptive even by the standards of ad copy if the longs are being reused from the main library. But if there is no new legato transition at all then the ad copy is egregious in its claim of “additional.”
> 
> None of this is to say that the expanded legato library is mispriced, even if it contains no new recordings. Scripting and processing take labor and having legatos for all articulations that fit within the basic operation of the main library may well be worth the price. But why not just say that in the ad copy:
> 
> ...


Agree.

It probably would be a 100 MB download or something then, as you wouldn't need anything but a bunch of .nki-files containing data on how to match existing legato transitions with Sul Tasto sustains etc.

I mean: The legato transitions you already have downloaded with the Main library. Same with the Sul Tasto (etc.) sustains. So no need to download that again.

Edit: Ah, the Expanded Legato is also sold as a separate product. Then the 60 GB download would be necessary in that case if you don't already have the Main product.


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## jbuhler (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Agree.
> 
> It probably would be a 100 MB download or something then, as you wouldn't need anything but a bunch of .nki-files containing data on how to match existing legato transitions with Sul Tasto sustains etc.
> 
> I mean: The legato transitions you already have downloaded with the Main library. Same with the Sul Tasto (etc.) sustains. So no need to download that again.


As far as I’m aware, we don’t know that the recordings of the sustains haven’t been processed in some way when transferred to the new library. So it’s possible that the content needs those GBs. But yes it would be good to know that and if I was an owner of the library I’d be irritated by the expansion duplicating all those samples (if that’s what it’s doing) only to make the expansion seem like it has lots of new recordings. 

We also don’t know that the legato transition used in the expansion is the same recording as that used in the main library. There are reasons to think that is likely, but no one has yet showed that. All we know is that the recorded legato transition is reused across the articulations of the expansion.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

jbuhler said:


> We also don’t know that the legato transition used in the expansion is the same recording as that used in the main library. There are reasons to think that is likely, but no one has yet showed that. All we know is that the recorded legato transition is reused across the articulations of the expansion.


I started watching the video about MSS Expanded Legato to see if anything's said about the legato transitions used.

Here's what's said at 03:59:

”Keep in mind that none of these legato, portamento or glissando transition articulations are present in the Main Modern Scoring Strings library.”

So supposedly it really is a different set of transitions in the Expanded Legato library compared to those from the sustains in the Main lib.

But as you are also touching upon: Does that make any sense?

One set of transitions between normal sustains was recorded for the Legato patches in the Main MSS.

Then another set of exactly the same transitions was recorded for the Expanded Legato patches (Sordino, Sul Tasto and Sul Pont)?

Why not just use the one set you already had recorded?

Recording transitions is a lot of work I can imagine (= expensive). After that comes the meticulous editing (= many man hours needed / expensive).

All this instead of just using the transitions you've already got in the Main lib?

Am I missing something obvious here?

Edit: Ok, meticulous editing would be necessary either way, it's only the recording cost you can save by using the transitions you already have. But that's gotta be a lot of money still (cost of musicians hired for XXX extra recording days, cost of booking the recording space, technicians and whatnot)


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

dxmachina said:


> Hi folks,
> 
> Well this thread shocked me out of my holiday stupor. There are definitely some proprietary _recording_ and _editing_ technologies at play here. One of our main goals (and this goes back to LASS over a decade ago) is to have a higher than expected level of portability in our legato articulations. IE, we want MIDI performances to translate (mostly) seamlessly between the various legato articulations in the expanded library. That's no easy feat with up to 18 hand programmed legato articulations per divisi (each also discretely hand-programmed at different speeds).
> 
> ...


If it's not too much trouble, would it be possible for you to clear up some things here:

- Does MSSEL contain real recorded Sordino legato transitions?

- Does MSSEL contain real recorded Sul Tasto legato transitions?

- Does MSSEL contain real recorded Sul Pont legato transitions?

Answering the above with a yes or no would not reveal anything about the proprietary recording and editing technologies you mention your company uses, right?

@dxmachina


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## jbuhler (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> ”Keep in mind that none of these legato, portamento or glissando transition articulations are present in the Main Modern Scoring Strings library.”


This isn’t false insofar as there are no legato transitions for those articulations in the main library. So the expansion does add that functionality even if the legatos are created by a combination of scripting and reusing the main recorded legato. So I would consider this just within the bounds of ad discourse.



Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Then another set of exactly the same transitions was recorded for the Expanded Legato patches (Sordino, Sul Tasto and Sul Pont)



I can see maybe recording a set of sul tasto legato transitions and then processing those for con sord and sul pont. I can also see a case where they might have recorded all the transitions but found the simulated ones worked better with the legato engine. But it’s all speculation until AudioBro weighs in or someone does the comparison with the main library. 

In any event I don’t think the value of a library lies only in its recording and there is plenty of evidence that con sordino, say, can be reasonably simulated through EQ. Legato often enough can be simulated to good effect and recorded transitions can be effectively utilized across quite different articulations, even without processing, as shown in OT Sine libraries that allow these kinds of exchanges. So I can see a case for the expanded legatos of MSS at this price even with no new recordings. But AudioBro can’t claim that they’ve added 60GB of material when they’ve added scripting and processing to 60GB of materials from the main library. That’s an abuse of language that has the effect of discounting the real labor of musically effective scripting and processing.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

jbuhler said:


> But AudioBro can’t claim that they’ve added 60GB of material when they’ve added scripting and processing to 60GB of materials from the main library. That’s an abuse of language that has the effect of discounting the real labor of musically effective scripting and processing.


Yes, that's the issue right there.

It's a question of what's right and wrong.


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## ism (Dec 30, 2022)

Setting aside the issues of marketing copy, this thread has spurred me to go back and listen to the demos and walkthrough with renewed attention to detail.

And I find that it *sounds* like quite an excellent library for $150. And in particular, it provides a lot of new expressive dimensions, especially with the divisi, the soloists, and the arcs.

So if it does turn out that some shortcuts taken with the transitions, I wonder if anyone has any sense about just how much it actually matters?

In particular, this "Modern" aesthetic of MSS really does mean that this isn't a library (like CSS) where so much of the expression is viscerally baked into the legato transitions. And this is a real merit of this library, which makes it very different from any other libraries I have.

For instance, it's also very different from the Berlin Special bows, which offers a very different interpretation of sul tasto and sul pont. The SB library clearly benefits from distinctly sampled transitions. But in that MSS offers a completely different interpretation of especially Sul Pont, which is much more reigned in, less scratch, and perhaps much more useable, in that the OT Special Bows Sul Pont is so scratchy and dissonant as to make it practically an effect, I'm not sure I hear anything in the actual performance of sul pont that suggests that this interpretation of sul pont it especially harmed by whatever shortcuts may or may not have been taken.

But MSS seems to offer not only a very different aesthetic in the sound, and in the performance, but also in the larger design of expressive dimension. None of which seems to really on hyper-expressiveness in the legato transitions themselves.

So (again, setting aside any issues around marketing copy), as a musicality, and as a library that offer a unique and innovative set of expressive dimension in ways that really don't hinge on the legato transitions very much at all, I just wonder if anyone has any strong opinions on just how much - even if shortcuts of reusing/re-scripting/re-processing samples have been employed - any of this matters vis-a-vis the actual vision of the library?


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## Nashi_VI (Dec 30, 2022)

ism said:


> Setting aside the issues of marketing copy, this thread has spurred me to go back and listen to the demos and walkthrough with renewed attention to detail.
> 
> And I find that it *sounds* like quite an excellent library for $150. And in particular, it provides a lot of new expressive dimensions, especially with the divisi, the soloists, and the arcs.
> 
> ...


If we were to "set aside" what you are suggesting to set aside....there would be no point in this thread to begin with.


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## jbuhler (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> Yes, that's the issue right there.
> 
> It's a question of what's right and wrong.


It's also an issue of acquiescing to the the dominant idea that recorded transitions are the bearer of "true" legato over the labor of scripting and processing, so the focus comes to lie, in my opinion, on the wrong aspect of the thing, as though effective legato lies in the "true" recording rather than in the creation of musically effective transitions between notes.

This whole affair reminds me quite a lot of the brouhaha over Hans Zimmer Strings, where the ad copy similarly promised something other than what the library delivered, even though the library itself was even at launch quite striking in its own domain. That's my sense here too: the library itself seems excellent and well engineered for the uses it is designed for and has some very innovative legato controls (that are likely made possible by the way it is able to manipulate its legato transitions), but much of that innovative quality is obscured because the ad copy leans into the 60GB of additional content rather than the extension of the legato engine to the other articulations.

I think it's important to keep in mind that it's a problem not of the library per se (or its cost) but of the marketing.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

From a _musicality _perspective, I’d say this may very well matter little, if anything at all, considering the library’s been out for a long time, during which plenty of people have happily used it without even noticing this issue.

It’s just important not to let this affect the way we think about the _moral _issue:

A company should give correct information about the product(s) they sell.

Unfortunately many people in this thread willfully disregard concerns about the moral issue because they think it isn’t important in relation with the former.


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## Loerpert (Dec 30, 2022)

Henrik B. Jensen said:


> From a _musicality _perspective, I’d say this may very well matter little, if anything at all, considering the library’s been out for a long time, during which plenty of people have happily used it without even noticing this issue.
> 
> It’s just important not to let this affect the way we think about the _moral _issue:
> 
> ...


Very well said!


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 30, 2022)

It seems some folks are still assuming the legato transitions are copied from the main library or are just "normale" transitions? There's no evidence or statement confirming that as far I've seen.

I still feel the transitions (of which it isn't just legato, but also portamento and glissando along with legato "starts" of normal, bloom, and bowed) are captured specifically for sul pont, sul tasto, and sordinos. Which would make sense given it is 60GB size. That doesn't mean they are specifically those techniques for the legato, etc. transitions. It could be (as Sebastian has somewhat hinted at) that they captured some type of transition (let's call it Sul Audiobro) and found that it worked across the 3 types. It could be some middle ground they instructed players to play or something else and then applied some processing on top of it. This is what Sebastian was likely referencing when he mentioned proprietary techniques. But that would still mean that these are NEW transitions that were recorded for the expanded library - not just a copy and paste job from the main library. And I'm not sure "hounding" Sebastian by continuing to tag him for more details is really going to bear any fruit.



Markrs said:


> I feel that if it hadn't been faking Sul Pont, Sordino and Sul Tasto legato, but instead faking velocity layers, people wouldn't be so okay with it.
> 
> For example, if you paid $400 for a string library and it said 8 velocity layers. You think great, finally a string library to a good number of velocity layers. Initially, you like it and use it. Then you find out they only recorded 1 velocity layer and faked the rest, and the reason for doing this was for better cross-fading, and the developers feel everyone should be happy with this reason.
> 
> ...


Well, it has been demonstrated a few times now that Pacific Strings' 10 dynamic layers or whatever are all a bit "same-y" sounding. It could be that it was recorded fewer than 10 times and just processed to create different velocities or that the players didn't vary their dynamic to this degree during recording. Where's the uproar there? Are you going to start posting your disappointment in that thread too? Of course, this is just an assumption based on some rather superficial "investigation". But if we're going to go after one developer based on some (possibly flimsy) assumptions, are we going to do the same for other developers too? Who knows what's happening behind a locked library or ones using proprietary samplers. We could make all sorts of assumptions. It becomes a slippery slope IMO.


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## Markrs (Dec 30, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> It seems some folks are still assuming the legato transitions are copied from the main library or are just "normale" transitions? There's no evidence or statement confirming that as far I've seen.
> 
> I still feel the transitions (of which it isn't just legato, but also portamento and glissando along with legato "starts" of normal, bloom, and bowed) are captured specifically for sul pont, sul tasto, and sordinos. Which would make sense given it is 60GB size. That doesn't mean they are specifically those techniques for the legato, etc. transitions. It could be (as Sebastian has somewhat hinted at) that they captured some type of transition (let's call it Sul Audiobro) and found that it worked across the 3 types. It could be some middle ground they instructed players to play or something else and then applied some processing on top of it. This is what Sebastian was likely referencing when he mentioned proprietary techniques. But that would still mean that these are NEW transitions that were recorded for the expanded library - not just a copy and paste job from the main library. And I'm not sure "hounding" Sebastian by continuing to tag him for more details is really going to bear any fruit.
> 
> ...


Much as you think the assumptions mentioned are flimsy, I counter that Lionel has evidenced pretty well. Also, you have no evidence of your assumption of how the legato transitions were created, except guess work, whereas Lionel presented evidence (whether you agree with it or not), of the issue.

The developer could clear all this up, but has decided not to. That is their decision, but it is fair for the community to call this out.

In the end you miss the main point, it isn't about how this was done or even the result, it is about the lack of transparency both before people bought the product and then after the issue was raised.

I say this as someone that owns MSS and Genesis and genuinely like both products. It doesn't mean the lack of transparency with MMS EL is right.

Anyway we are all going around in circles, unless the developer decides to comment further, there isn't much more benefit going around again with the same points.


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## ALittleNightMusic (Dec 30, 2022)

Markrs said:


> Much as you think the assumptions mentioned are flimsy, I counter that Lionel has evidenced pretty well. Also your defence of the developer is flimsy as you have no evidence of your assumption of how the legato transitions were created, except guess work, whereas Lionel presented evidence (whether you agree with it or not), of the issue.
> 
> The developer could clear all this up, but has decided not to. That is their decision, but it is fair for the community to call this out.
> 
> ...


I never commented on lack of transparency or not, so don't see how I missed the "main point". I own MSS EL, so if anything I should be outraged if I felt there was a level of deception that demands it. If anything you missed my point that making assumptions goes both ways in that nobody here knows exactly how the library was recorded or built.

What AB's site says "While the main MSS Full library includes Sordino, Sul Tasto, and Sul Pont sustains, the “main” library does not offer the legato, portamento, or glissando transitions for those articulations. We felt it was better to split out the 60GB of additional legato articulations to a different add-on library to give users the option based on their needs."

Is that some sort of malicious lack of transparency and overt deception or is it maybe just a little vague (purposefully or not)? Maybe it is no different to what other developers say in marketing text where they are not spelling out every single detail of every single scripting and recording decision?

Let me know how far you get by asking other developers to lay out all of the details in how they built their libraries.


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## Batrawi (Dec 30, 2022)

ALittleNightMusic said:


> Is that some sort of malicious lack of transparency and overt deception or is it maybe just a little vague (purposefully or not)?


it is not vague, coz reading that marketing description can likely make one thinks that the library HAS an extra 60GB of recorded true special transitions, which is not the case as presented by Lionel - and that is the core of the problem. The language is alluring buyers to believe in something that is not true


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## ism (Dec 30, 2022)

I'm not usually such a hard core positivist ... but if there's no discernible musicality consequence of the techniques employed ... then I'm not sure I see a hugely compelling moral issue.


But surely what's actually interesting here is what's happening musically? And Lionel's discovery is interesting, and I think it sheds light on the musicality the library is designed to reach towards.

There are issues of transparency etc. I'm just not sure how interesting I find it compared to the musicality that, as we all seem to agree, the library genuinely delivers on.


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## Batrawi (Dec 30, 2022)

ism said:


> There is an issues of transparency etc. I'm just not sure how interesting I find it compared to the musicality that, as we all seem to agree, the library genuinely delivers on.


yeah this thread is presenting a very complex developer/customer situation.. as if you're dating a person and becoming more and more attracted to her inner and outer beauties but then suddenly she slips a fart😶... 
Immediately puts you in an ultra-confusion zone:
View attachment 93875


_(what!....y'all have given your analogies... so there's mine😄)_


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## Trash Panda (Dec 30, 2022)

Batrawi said:


> yeah this thread is presenting a very complex developer/customer situation.. as if you're dating a person and becoming more and more attracted to her inner and outer beauties but then suddenly she slips a fart😶...
> Immediately puts you in an ultra-confusion zone:
> View attachment 93875
> 
> ...


I’d high five the girl for having the confidence to show her humanity. Maybe even give it a 1-10 rating.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Dec 30, 2022)

Trash Panda said:


> I’d high five the girl for having the confidence to show her humanity. Maybe even give it a 1-10 rating.


That reminds me of this movie scene !


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## rottoy (Dec 30, 2022)

Came for the legato police, stayed for the ramen broth.


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## rottoy (Dec 30, 2022)

There's an impressive amount of mental gymnastics in here trying to justify a developer 
deliberately prevaricating making a proper statement on a very good question posed by a customer.
That is an issue, no matter where your loyalties may lie.

Lionel, and others, pointing this out does not negate the legacy of Audiobro as a whole.
They are a developer of the highest pedigree, that's for certain.

Less tribalism and more food analogies, please. I'm working up an appetite.


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## gst98 (Jan 2, 2023)

Soundbed said:


> It was only established that the extended legatos share transitions.


I just checked myself and can clearly see 4 sustain dynamics, but there only appears to be 1 for legatos…


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## Frederick (Jan 2, 2023)

I just hope AudioBro will continue with their preparations for an update to MSB, which I hear is going to add more short articulations to the Intuition patches. Probably yet another free update ...


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## Laddy (Jan 3, 2023)

gst98 said:


> I just checked myself and can clearly see 4 sustain dynamics, but there only appears to be 1 for legatos…


2 really, if both sets of the divisi are playing.


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## rMancer (Jan 3, 2023)

To me, the heart of the matter is not to do with any individual developer, but instead with the marketplace as a whole. By now, we should _all _know better than to take marketing copy as gospel.

Your listeners and clients can't hear the marketing copy (or hyperbole, or misinformation, or whatever) of the tools you purchased. They can't hear how the tool you used was made. All they hear is your music.

Hell, the fact that nobody (even working composers presumably getting paid while using this library) seemed to notice this until someone explicitly pointed it out seems to indicate that it really isn't a big deal in the grander scheme... unless you want to get into a discussion about capitalism and all that crap, which doesn't really belong here.


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## Loerpert (Jan 3, 2023)

rMancer said:


> To me, the heart of the matter is not to do with any individual developer, but instead with the marketplace as a whole. By now, we should _all _know better than to take marketing copy as gospel.
> 
> Your listeners and clients can't hear the marketing copy (or hyperbole, or misinformation, or whatever) of the tools you purchased. They can't hear how the tool you used was made. All they hear is your music.
> 
> Hell, the fact that nobody (even working composers presumably getting paid while using this library) seemed to notice this until someone explicitly pointed it out seems to indicate that it really isn't a big deal in the grander scheme... unless you want to get into a discussion about capitalism and all that crap, which doesn't really belong here.


I think you're forgetting one thing. A lot of us are not professionals and buy these "instruments" to make music but also to just play music with. In that case it's a bit more of an issue if you yourself can hear that it's fake. I mean most people don't hear the difference between a $100 and a $2000 guitar, but as a guitar player I would be pretty pissed if my $2000 guitar was made with the same crappy materials as the $100.

Maybe not the best analogy, but what I'm saying is that I think what you hear as a musician is more important than what the client hears.

Atleast for us hobbyists that is.


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## rMancer (Jan 3, 2023)

Loerpert said:


> I think you're forgetting one thing. A lot of us are not professionals and buy these "instruments" to make music but also to just play music with. In that case it's a bit more of an issue if you yourself can hear that it's fake. I mean most people don't hear the difference between a $100 and a $2000 guitar, but as a guitar player I would be pretty pissed if my $2000 guitar was made with the same crappy materials as the $100.
> 
> Maybe not the best analogy, but what I'm saying is that I think what you hear as a musician is more important than what the client hears.
> 
> Atleast for us hobbyists that is.


I'm reminded of the experiment done to show that wine tasting is kind of BS. In short, they sneakily dyed a white wine red, and a bunch of people overwhelmingly used words to describe it that the researchers had established were strongly associated exclusively with red wines (and used a lot fewer of the descriptors often used for white wines). The point being, a person's perception is wildly distorted by their expectations. They drank a white wine, but because it looked like a red wine, they treated it as a red wine... in essence, it _was_ a red wine, _for them_.

And to your point, yes, a lot of us do this just for the joy of it. And until OP made this thread, none of them seemed to even notice the discrepancy, and were happy making music with a tool they thought sounded great.

If someone liked the tool before this thread, but stopped liking it after seeing this thread, then I'd wager the tool itself is not even the issue.


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## Evans (Jan 3, 2023)

I suppose the big question most people keep coming back to is, "Where's the harm if you can't tell?"

With consumables like food, you need to know what you're putting in your body. With something like clothing, you'd hope that slave labor wasn't used to make it and that it was made with sustainable, environmentally friendly practices. Here, it's more like a slippery slope that I'd like to avoid altogether with a bit more transparency.

It's not absolute make-or-break for me in this scenario, but (generally speaking) the more that a _company _is allowed to be flexible with their language, the worse off consumers will be. This isn't like Microsoft or Amazon or Apple not providing deep details about authentication security in order to reduce risk of breach. This is a simple question: for which playing techniques were there true, unique legato recordings?

That said, jbuhler's repeated question about 60 GB (or however much) of "additional" content is something I'd hope is addressed before I make or recommend another Audiobro purchase. That's a hard one to spin.


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## rMancer (Jan 3, 2023)

Evans said:


> This is a simple question: for which playing techniques were there true, unique legato recordings?


I guess my question is: why is that so important? I don't have a stake in this race, as someone who doesn't use Audiobro stuff, but the way I see it, they came up with a clever way to achieve a goal. It just happens to be a method that most of us aren't familiar with (proprietary tech, and all). It's a departure from tradition, certainly. The thing is, we all have these expectations of what sample libraries _should_ be based on our past experiences (we know what red wine _should_ taste like). So because of those expectations, we _assume_ the dev is following those traditional methods, and then use that traditional method as the baseline as to what is "correct" or "proper" or "true."

Was the copy misleading? Eh, maybe, maybe not. But I think it _feels_ misleading to some because of those expectations of tradition that people seem to have as to how a sample library is "supposed" to be made.

When I ordered a coffee in Colombia for the first time, it came with cream and sugar in it by default. My expectation was the inverse; I thought I was ordering a black coffee, but they just do it differently at the places I went (btw if you want black coffee, order "tinto," not "cafe"). The point is, neither of us was "wrong," we just had a mismatch of expectations.



> With consumables like food, you need to know what you're putting in your body. With something like clothing, you'd hope that slave labor wasn't used to make it and that it was made with sustainable, environmentally friendly practices. Here, it's more like a slippery slope that I'd like to avoid altogether with a bit more transparency.


Even with food, there's a lot of obfuscation. Take the ingredient "Natural Flavors" for instance. It's in so much stuff... with no indication of what those "natural flavors" actually are. Depending on the circumstances, the manufacturer can just say "natural flavors" and call it a day. And we still buy it and eat it and enjoy it, even though they are deliberately misdirecting us as to the contents of the food. And that's not even getting into the various ingredients that you'd need a chemistry degree to understand, that we just blissfully munch away on because, eh, somebody else figured that stuff out.

I see something like legato (the importance of which is already way overblown) as natural flavors. "True legato intervals" isn't inherently better, it's just one way of accomplishing a desired outcome. It's still nowhere near real, at the end of the day ... it's an emulation of a recording of an emulation of a performance.

I wonder how many other clever shenanigans are going on in popular, beloved libraries that people just haven't discovered yet.


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## ism (Jan 3, 2023)

rMancer said:


> I wonder how many other clever shenanigans are going on in popular, beloved libraries that people just haven't discovered yet.


I hear that sometimes libraries don't record all real dynamics and performance, but in fact sometimes only record 2 or 3 different dynamics and then crossfade with programming jiggery pokery - FAKE!

Seriously though, isn't the point of sampling instruments is precisely to fake as much as you can get away with?


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## johncdl (Jan 3, 2023)

gst98 said:


> CSS transitions are nearly 2.5 sections before xfading bac to sustain


This is EXACTLY what I don't like about CSS.


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## ism (Jan 3, 2023)

rMancer said:


> Was the copy misleading? Eh, maybe, maybe not. But I think it _feels_ misleading to some because of those expectations of tradition that people seem to have as to how a sample library is "supposed" to be made.


Yes, I think this is exactly it. 

We're used to the fiction of dynamics that comes from crossfading a small number of "true" dynamic layers - but the implicit conventional wisdom of how legato is "supposed" to be sampled is that it's tied to a particular high romantic style in which the musicality fundamentally lives in the transitions, ie. CSS - which represents a style of performance that simply going get with this kind of trick in sample. But similarly for the OT special bows, which is still in a sufficiently romantic idiom that that sample the legato really matter.

MSS though is different. And this is where it really innovates in expressive dimension. 

What's so interesting about Lionel's discovery, musically, is how it hilights just how little the musicality resides in the actual legato transition. And re-watching the marketing videos with this in mind has really focused my attention on where the "Modern" musicality really does live in the expressive dimensions of the library. (And it's really not the legato transitions themselves).

Because, even though I always appreciated that the "Modern" aesthetic of MSS was precisely an avoidance of the high romantic dependency (some would say addiction) of hyper-expressive legato transition, it's probably fair to say that I still initially considered MSS through at least something of this lens of how strings are "supposed" to be sampled. And maybe I miss something as a result.

So the irony here might be that it's the new attentiveness to where the expressive lies (and doesn't like) that ultimately sells me on this library.


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## ism (Jan 3, 2023)

johncdl said:


> This is EXACTLY what I don't like about CSS.


Exactly. 

But this is also exactly what there is to love about CSS.

And that Appassionatta reigns in the romantic aesthetic of this somewhat (but not too much) is exactly what I like about Appassiontta. 

And that MSS reigns in the romanticism even more is exactly what there is to love about MSS.


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## Evans (Jan 3, 2023)

What if it was a larger company like Spitfire Audio? A company big enough that some people villainize them as often as others fanboy them.

What if they said, "we have 10 dynamic layers in our violin sustains for AR1 Modular Strings," but we later found out that only five were recorded? As in, there'd still be ten layers through which to crossfade, but half of them were recorded and half were proprietary techniques to mimic interstitial recordings.

What if you couldn't discern that there weren't ten recorded layers? Would you care? Would you feel duped?

In this imaginary scenario, they didn't say they "recorded" ten layers, just that they "have" ten layers.

Does this comparison hold water?

(and yes, this is still setting aside the "additional 60 GB of content" discussion)


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## ALittleNightMusic (Jan 3, 2023)

Evans said:


> What if it was a larger company like Spitfire Audio? A company big enough that some people villainize them as often as others fanboy them.
> 
> What if they said, "we have 10 dynamic layers in our violin sustains for AR1 Modular Strings," but we later found out that only five were recorded? As in, there'd still be ten layers through which to crossfade, but half of them were recorded and half were proprietary techniques to mimic interstitial recordings.
> 
> ...


The thing with somebody like Spitfire or OT or anybody that is using locked Kontakt patches or custom players is we don't know what's happening behind the scenes. Even when unlocked, your example of dynamic layers could apply to Pacific Strings for instance (I had brought that up previously given the layers sound pretty similar). We don't know the editing process.

I wonder if Audiobro is watching this thread and thinking to themselves "Maybe these other developers were right in locking their patches". Prevents assumptions being made on how the library was recorded, edited, scripted, etc.


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## ism (Jan 3, 2023)

Well this thread is sure a case study in how severely developers can be punished for not locking kontakt.


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## Nashi_VI (Jan 3, 2023)

ism said:


> Well this thread is sure a case study.


There, i fixed it for you.


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## Evans (Jan 3, 2023)

ism said:


> Well this thread is sure a case study in how severely developers can be punished for not locking kontakt.


And for consumers to obtain more information about products before they purchase, if said qualities or methods matter to them. Lots of knee jerk purchases here ("bought this even before watching the walkthrough" types... not that I'm saying that applies to anyone specific here, just a generalization).


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## jbuhler (Jan 3, 2023)

ism said:


> Well this thread is sure a case study in how severely developers can be punished for not locking kontakt.


I don't know. I think Audiobro could use their ad copy to lean into what is in fact distinctive about their libraries rather than writing ad copy that is at best misleading even by the standards of ad copy. Then it's not even a question of whether Kontakt is locked. Nothing required Audiobro to use this ad copy to move libraries: I very much doubt there would have been appreciably fewer sales with ad copy that was not misleading but just leaned into the benefits of their legato engine applied to the other articulations.

I mean I'm someone who isn't generally interested in the legato transition itself, and I care more about how the legato gets from one note to the next in a musically compelling way and the musical variety it permits than the method used to do that. I really don't care about true legato in and of itself, or whether Audiobro scripted or recorded them. So focusing on the variety of transitions made possible by Audiobro's legato engine would be what I think would be more fruitful for Audiobro's ad copy to emphasize than trying to persuade customers that the expanded legato library is a completely separate 60GB library—especially when that is not remotely the case. Well, it does take up 60GB on your SSD, even though it duplicates the various sustains from the main library, if you have that. But that duplication doesn't really strike me as a selling point.

Like Hans Zimmer Strings, this is another case where the marketing is getting in the way of understanding what a library actually has to offer. And I think that's an issue too. The ad is not just misleading, but it is misleading in a way that is likely to hamper a potential customer's understanding of where the library's distinction lies.


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