Hi Midiman and MarkLeake,
I remember us having this discussion after Expansion 1 with Midiman and I stand by what we said back in the day. Also until today nobody else has emailed us regarding intonation, so if we believe that it is correct to include these samples and we don't get it reported by a percentage of the users, we do not change it. We believe in choice rather then 100% pristine intonation perfect samples. We don't micro tune parts of our samples, they are parts of real performance as captured. The main reason is that Intonation perfection is highly unnatural. When I hear a pitch perfect performance where each note lands exactly right within x ms I know it is virtual instantly. I know that some people prefer pitch perfect at all times, but we are strong believers in variety and with the vast choice of our legatos as well as bow directions there is always a pitch perfect variant available as we have excessive true legato landing note options compared to what is usual and all of these are of course chromatically sampled, but more importantly they are true to the performance that they were part of and not really touched up by us to be better then the real performance which is important part of our concept.
Every Concept has it's tax and avoiding paying it will break the concept!
In EXP2 we have replaced a few samples from EXP1 that we deemed in need of replacement, but it wasn't many, but much more importantly EXP2 brings over 20k more variants to use which I feel is a much better solution then micro tuning samples, which is more commonly used approach in VIs as they usually have a lot less sample variety for legatos. It will always contain some samples with odd landings as well as all other things that happen when playing in real phrase and instead we allow the user to force something different on to get closer to their desired performance.
Special note on Iterative development process.
Main issue with iterative development is that you can never satisfy everybody, especially if you replace/remove parts. This would be double true about something we haven't received complaints about, hence we rather add variations then take stuff out.
Main comments about EXP1 that drove EXP2 development were in order of requests -
1. Loading time is desired to be better ( insanely hard to achieve when adding 20k samples, but improved in EXP2 using our scripted background loading for as much as possible as well as improvements that UVI made for us that enabled us to map and call on samples differently which we are very grateful for),
2. Desire for longer bows after legato (resolved using Lasting Bow now added to Violin EPX2 and big variety of really nice rebows which are longer allowing for smoother playing).
3. More Plonkability ( This is further enhanced beyond original version as in combination with all the legatos available now as well as lasting bow it is by far the most plonkable library I have ever used)
and those were the main requests.
The rest we have worked out with our friend composers as well as what we ourselves saw as in need of evolution.
We have also added 2 new moods that will be unveiled during Beta and one of them puts very strong preference on Fingered over slurred legato, so that in effect leads to more pitch perfect performance.
I hope the above explains in depth why it is so hard to make changes that could potentially break the instrument even though it might not appear as dangerous to the users.
Performance overall is improved in EXP2 when it comes to loading, saving ect..
Passionate Regards
Ondrej