I could be mistaken but I thought the whole point of the orchestral sections of the Albions was that they represented ensemble patches for people who want to get something down very quickly for media composition. They aren't meant for creating crafted realistic sounding orchestral compositions. That's what their other libraries with the individual instruments and multiple articulations are for.
This sketching character is arguably built into the Albion One concept ("Start scoring Films now") - fast first pass, broad brush strokes. And the nature of AO is that if you have SSO you can very often get significantly better results by replacing your AO sketches with fully orchestrated SSO lines. That is, the musical space covered by SSO is, with probably a few exceptions, capably of going anywhere AO, and in far greater detail.
But this is less true of Albion Two.
And not at all true of Albion V which genuinely has articulations that you just can't find in SSO or indeed anywhere else.
When it comes to Neo, the section sizes in Neo are very close to SCS. So it's an interesting question to what extent that Neo is to SCS as Albion One is SSS.
I suspect that for basic flautando, Neo and SCS are very directly contiguous. And this adjacency is, in my estimation, best though of not as a duplication, but as a valuable point of continuity that, in the first instance, gives the ability to sketch quickly in Neo, and then go into detail with SCS.
I see similar, and even more valuable continuities with Tundra. Especially if you crank up the ambient mics, mix the strings A & B and orchestrate your chords thickly. In fact I think everything I've heard so really hits the ambient connections with the Tundra ethos pretty hard - which is beautiful, and serves to hilight the continuity of Neo and Tundra as ambient & hybrid libraries well. Though at the cost of ignoring the other vast musical spaces Neo opens up.
There's also a certain continuity with other libraries like the Solo Strings. Emblematically, the "Whisper Trems" Vl articulation blends magnificently with Tundra, OACE, and well, just about anything else. But there are a lot of other solo string articulations here that can be layered amazingly well (See Oliver's video on the Spitfire Harp for an example of how he uses solo textures to great effect with SCS).
But most especially, I feel a real continuity with OACE. Most obviously in the feathered orchestration of the strings make this especially seamless.
But conversely, in working with Tundra and OACE, I've long felt various shades of angst. I can't count the moment I've been working with OACE, and just wishing I had something that would push the space of OACE a bit further.
This angst manifests with working from Tundra, for instance, when I want to keep the feel of the "Tundra-ness" but add finer brush strokes. SCS would be able to provide a certain type of brush stroke I suspect, but in my attempts to mix Tundra and SStS (which I actually have), I find that while the results are interesting in its their own right, it comes at the cost of breaking the Tundra-ness of the overall ethos.
And similarly with OACE (which I use as individual articulations and seldom as an underscore-esuqe evo), I want to keep the texturality of the OACE-ness, while moving subtly into a still very textural space, but again with finer brush stokes, yet without breaking the OACE-ness.
And in using OACE articulations as articulations (rather that underscore-esque evos) less is often more. That is, OACE textures can be even more effective when used sparingly. So the textural, but not crazy evo-grade texturality of Neo addresses this particular angst beautifully.
A lot of the discussion here is formed around "this is no different from Tundra" or "This is absolutely nothing like Tundra", which is interesting. And the DJ video where he implicitly argues that there's nothing new in Neo that he doesn't have in Loegria is another example of this "de-differenceing" mode of criticism.
But the real value here (to echo
@jbuhler 's point above) is in both the continuity with spaces currently accessible (via Tundra OACE, SCS, TM, SSoS etc) and the new musical space that it opens up .
That is, it is both the capacity for sameness together and difference that makes Neo so interesting in its conception.
And here is where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.
When I listen to the orchestral music of real musicians, particularly after spending time working with samples, I'm always acutely aware of just how much expressive space is still completely beyond us.
Tundra was a revelation that woke me from (VSL-SE induced) dogmatic slumber to realize just how immensely limited we were in the space that previous generations of sample libraries allowed us to, and how much remains to be explored.
And the further opening of these spaces since Tundra is a joy to behold.
(Notwithstanding the separate and acute angst of Neo not being conceivably in my sample library budget any time soon)
