Am I crazy, or did OT just skip making a Berlin Strings Expansion C?
I'm looking into buying BWW Exp B (Soloists I). My thoughts, based on what I've seen and heard: Oboe and English Horn sound great. I think this was their primary focus and they got a world class player for those. Flute sounds okay. Clarinet sounds slightly sub-par, maybe this one got neglected a bit. Alto flute sounds bad enough I probably wouldn't use it (mostly because of the excess vibrato, which doesn't sound right in the legato transitions).
Given the new à la carte system that OT is planning to roll out by the end of 2019, it might be a smart move to wait and buy just the Oboe and English horn. Not sure what the prices on individual instruments will look like or if there will be some kind of mark up.
This library was released in 2013 and programming might be a bit dated and lumpy, though I admit I have a hard time assessing this. First, Orchestral Tools isn't doing a great job of demonstrating with a live playthrough, and the documentation lacks important info. Second, there has been one or more updates in which scripting/legato smoothing issues may or may not have been improved. Third, the two live play-throughs done by our fellow VIC members rely partially on playing with the multi-articulation patches. While I'm not 100% sure of this, it seems that the multis in these walkthroughs are only playing the decrescendos, while the single articulation patches will switch between the cresc/decresc according to velocity. It's important to understand the concept behind these solo winds is that there's one single dynamic layer, but to make it expressive all of the longs are either crescendos or decrescendos. Longs do not stay at one flat dynamic.
The reason that it's important is that the cresc/decresc affects the attack and could cause the lumpiness in the transitions. If I had a solo woodwind line and was trying to smooth out the lumps in a performance, I'd want to be able to tweak the cresc/decresc along with being able to make tweaks to the automatically chosen legato speeds (expressive/agile).
Still, at its best I think it is the top choice for a natural sounding solo performance. There are newer solo libraries from other companies that are more flexible and dependable, but they sound less natural to my ear. For solo oboe and english horn, I think these are the best out there.