I'm probably grabbing this tomorrow, and straight away, I'm going to input a few bars I've written that will hopefully decently explore some of the elements that people are concerned about: flexibility of shorts and longs, legato agility, etc.
It'll be in the context of some other elements from the BH Toolkit, as a further experiment with how well the two will play together, but I'll upload the strings on their own too.
I'll try to have this done soon, in case it may help anyone with their decisions before the promo price expires.
I haven't been able to do this demo yet, but I did want to give some first impressions after quickly playing through the Core version.
First, the shorts. Full disclosure, I'm not a short note junkie, so you might not be so easily pleased, but I think that the spiccatos paired with Time Machine give me all the flexibility I really need there. The usable range before artifacts are introduced is very wide. I've actually never used Time Machine before. It's kind of fun having that on the modwheel....
If you have the BH Toolkit, they respond just the way that those spiccatos do with TM. BH Toolkit is also a very accurate preview of what this library is like, sonically speaking. It gets along just fine with reverb. I tend to use a lot, and SStS (is this what we're calling it?) doesn't mind, although having the other mic's in the Pro version would definitely be useful for nailing down the right sound for your reverb choices.
The regular longs have 2 round robins, so I've been able to approximate some "long-short" bowings like détaché. It's not perfect, but it works. This is using a breath controller; it may be less easy to execute with a wheel or fader.
The legatos are reasonably agile. 32nd-note runs at a fast tempo will probably not convince you, although they fared better there than I might have expected, and there's a very wide range of speeds where these sound absolutely great. Again, if you have BHT, that is a good example of what you'll get here.
I've only had a few minutes with it so far, but my main takeaway is that this is *fun* to use, and it gets the musical juices flowing. I am always let down when I can't play a VI in a way that feels natural and musical, but I absolutely can here. I think I'm going to be making a lot of music with this.