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VSL Synchron Strings I Announced (Nov. Release)

That's also how I read it... sort of like their Orchestral Strings are now sold as OS1, violins and violas, and OS2, cellos and basses.

The last frame of the video is credits for the video.. It has 'Composed and Arranged By', 'Directed By', and 'Played By', which lists the instruments used in the music.
 
Things that jump out at me from the announcement:

- "We’ve developed a new sampling process wherein all performances are recorded and edited at “fixed gain”. The result is that all pitches, dynamic layers, articulations and instruments match 100% perfectly with each other. For example, a pianissimo articulation of an ensemble sounds exactly as it was played at Synchron Stage and painstakingly matches the pianissimo performances of all the other instruments."

Balancing a wet template just got a million times easier. I've never understood why Spitfire and OT don't do this.

- "Legato – fast 8 velocity layers, 6 variations"

I know Berlin Strings includes an "Ostinato Legato" with legato RR transitions, but only in 1st Vlns and Celli. Having 6x legato RRs consistently across all the instruments is groundbreaking as far as any VI's I know of. Legato ostinatos have long been the achilles' heel of VI string libraries.

- Each of their long notes includes "10 variations".

This is slightly terrifying from the perspective of RAM utilization but they must have a good reason to have sampled this many. I'm very curious.

- "Our upcoming Synchron Player will deliver unprecedented streaming performance, able to trigger more than 300 voices per instrument simultaneously!"

300 voices per instrument means there's an insane amount of sample blending going on, so I'm assuming the "articulation list" they're showing will be treated more like building blocks with crossfading happening (automatically and/or manually controlled) in all kinds of interesting directions.

- "8 velocity layers"

I'm hoping that this means what I think, and that it will give us a huge dynamic range up to really aggressive bowing. (Honestly I'm not hearing this in the intro video, but there's a lot being overpowered by the percussion.)
 
The last frame of the video is credits for the video.. It has 'Composed and Arranged By', 'Directed By', and 'Played By', which lists the instruments used in the music.
Yes i’m now inclined to think that this is just the demo.. hope it’s not just wishful thinking. But since they don’t have any of the harmonics or the Sordinos, that’s probably the space that Synchron Strings II will fill up.
 
The size of the library :
  • 427 GB available hard drive space for Full, 215 GB for Standard

Now I have to decide which of my other string libraries to move from SSD to hard drive to make room for Synchron Strings. Or I could buy yet another SSD. I have 4 in my computer now, so maybe I should just offload another string library to HD.

My bigger worry is RAM. Will this library need oodles of RAM like OT stuff? I have 64GB but will that be enough? Will everyone be forced to use slaves?
 
There will be a lot to look forward to on these new librarys from VSL, brass, woodwinds, efnic Instruments, and I feel the one that many are waiting for the choir.

Some mouth watering library's to come from VSL and at a impeccable high standard.
 
As I’m mostly using Spitfire I’m a bit worried how useful this one would be when also this one is a wet library. Both the sound of Air and Synchron Stage. What do you think?
 
As I’m mostly using Spitfire I’m a bit worried how useful this one would be when also this one is a wet library. Both the sound of Air and Synchron Stage. What do you think?

If you like the large ambiance of Air Studios and can live with the idiosyncracies of Spitfire's VIs (my greatest frustrations tend to be legato transitions in many of their instruments), then there's no reason to take on Synchron.

You'll probably find that the Synchron libraries are extremely consistently recorded, concentrate on very reliable performances of a limited set of articulations (compared to Spitfire which has lots of exotic patches), and have a more detailed, exposed sound with less wetness than you're used to (even the Spitfire close mics can be echoey).
 
If you like the large ambiance of Air Studios and can live with the idiosyncracies of Spitfire's VIs (my greatest frustrations tend to be legato transitions in many of their instruments), then there's no reason to take on Synchron.

You'll probably find that the Synchron libraries are extremely consistently recorded, concentrate on very reliable performances of a limited set of articulations (compared to Spitfire which has lots of exotic patches), and have a more detailed, exposed sound with less wetness than you're used to (even the Spitfire close mics can be echoey).

My ideal sound is when it’s both lush and intimate so it might be a good combination. But just worried it will be difficult to give a sense of one room in the final mix.
 
My ideal sound is when it’s both lush and intimate so it might be a good combination. But just worried it will be difficult to give a sense of one room in the final mix.
Spitfire can do intimate with their Chamber Strings quite nicely, so you don't necessarily have to switch horses to get that sound. I agree, you could end up fighting a bit to get samples from Air & Synchron to sound similar.
 
Spitfire can do intimate with their Chamber Strings quite nicely, so you don't necessarily have to switch horses to get that sound. I agree, you could end up fighting a bit to get samples from Air & Synchron to sound similar.
Spitfire are doing more dry libraries recorded in their new sound studio: LCO, BHCT.
 
Given that there is no portamento listed (and I had VSL support confirm that the slurred legato was not intended to be portamento, as well as the fact there is no col legno) I would assume that there will be a second library with further articulations, rather than muted articulations as they have done before.
 
- "We’ve developed a new sampling process wherein all performances are recorded and edited at “fixed gain”. The result is that all pitches, dynamic layers, articulations and instruments match 100% perfectly with each other. For example, a pianissimo articulation of an ensemble sounds exactly as it was played at Synchron Stage and painstakingly matches the pianissimo performances of all the other instruments."

Balancing a wet template just got a million times easier. I've never understood why Spitfire and OT don't do this.

Are you sure? Working with not normalized samples is nothing incredible nowadays. So even if Spitfire and OT don't publicly say "Samples not normalized", it's likely that they aren't normalized. To me that sentence from VSL sounds like they just changed their way of sampling and not this is an incredibly innovative idea. Considering the wetness of the library and the amount of dynamic layers, normalizing would have caused more problems than what it supposed to solve.
 
Are you sure? Working with not normalized samples is nothing incredible nowadays. So even if Spitfire and OT don't publicly say "Samples not normalized", it's likely that they aren't normalized. To me that sentence from VSL sounds like they just changed their way of sampling and not this is an incredibly innovative idea. Considering the wetness of the library and the amount of dynamic layers, normalizing would have caused more problems than what it supposed to solve.
I don't think that recording at fixed gain is the same as normalizing the samples. IIRC it would mean that they are recording all the instruments with the same gain on the microphone preamps - this is why the person you are replying to said that would make balancing templates much easier.
 
Given that there is no portamento listed (and I had VSL support confirm that the slurred legato was not intended to be portamento, as well as the fact there is no col legno) I would assume that there will be a second library with further articulations, rather than muted articulations as they have done before.

That might be what they plan to do, but since they have not confirmed, or said anything about this, we are just guessing.
 
Those are the exact sizes for Synchron Percussion I, so that might not be correct.

It's good you caught that. Yes, I don't think that is the right info. , hopefully VSL will post it when they have the figures. Plus, why would iLio have that info. published if VSL doesn't have it on their website, must be a mistake from iLio.
 
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