Vsl have painted themselves into a corner and we shall see what happens. For a long time they rode the wave of creating the most expensive and exclusive sample library ever made, and people with the funds bought it, myself included recently. They said don’t worry, you never have to pay for the same samples twice so the premium++ price is worth it and justified.
They also wanted to insist that because of their insane copy protection, dongle and licensing policies, their sample libraries were and are completely resellable, another justification for their premium++ price.
But eventually I think they sold about as many $10,000 copies of vsl std libraries that they were going to be able to sell at that price, especially since unlike many other libraries, it’s resellable. I’m sure they still sell some, they sold to me, but they needed to come up with something “new”
So then they made dimension brass and strings, appasionata strings and some other add on instruments and indoubtedly sold some of them, but some of the same problems as before, it’s resellable, and often so good that what can they come up with next?
At some point they made mirpro to complement all of their dry libraries, also not cheap for what it does. I love it but for many musicians it’s hard to get good results because you need to understand recording engineering pretty well in order to get good results.
So now vsl needs revenue to keep breathing as all companies do. They need something new again. They decided that an easier to use product that doesn’t require so much knowledge about audio engineering and deep midi tricks may be the thing that can bring in new users and revenue. So we have the synchron series currently evolving and we’ll see where it goes.
I do not think synchron will replace vipro as long as there is still revenue to be made from vipro they will keep selling it. They may or may not add any improvements to vipro unless they can see that doing so would bump up revenue. Synchron will attract new users to vsl undoubtedly and that’s what they are after. A few people that are already happily using vipro might make the leap over to synchron because they like the approach and Vsl should provide a reasonably priced path for that, but many will not. Vsl still has to figure out ways to get more revenue from existing std library customers beyond vep upgrades. Synchron is an improvement in some ways in terms of ease of use but it’s also a step down for power users of vipro. And for many reasons many of those people will not touch synchron anytime soon. But vsl needs revenue to survive as a business. So what can they do? More new instruments, maybe but the approach of appealing to new customers seeking a simpler workflow is not a bad move for the next decade. Hopefully they will continue to support the old plaform. If they stopped doing so I think it would destroy their reputation once and for all and be the end of vsl as a company, so I think they will and we don’t have anything to worry about until after 2030