2. It offers a major improvement to the Legato functionality compared to the way it worked in VI-Pro2. (If this is not offered by the new Synchron Player, there will be a lot of unhappy VSL customers).
Still not sure what exactly everyone's expecting here.
The Synchron Player couldn't possibly improve the legato so extensively. In which way could some clever scripting help in this case? There's a reason why people place so much value in "true legato". Generally people prefer recorded transitions to scripted legato. There are reasons for that. From that perspective, it seems odd to me that a piece of software is now supposed to salvage what is supposed to be VSLs new flagship string product.
Even if the Player does something to the legato - would it be just scripting trickery and ultimately a band-aid solution?
I'm also still not quite sure why everyone made up their minds that this is the worst legato since WW2. Compare the Synchron Strings soft legato with the Orchestral Strings legato. It's very similar. The SyS one is a little bit nicer - in a similar way the Appassionata legato was a bit better than the Orchestral Strings one. I don't have Dimension Strings - perhaps their legato was on a whole different level and this is where the disappointment over SyS comes from. But as a user of previous VSL String libraries (Chamber, Orchestral, Appassionata), I can't really tell why the SyS one is suddenly the worst thing that could have possibly happened when in fact it's actually quite similar to what VSL was always doing. Maybe expectations have just shifted since the old VSL times?
If VSL was really to do something about the legato in its current form, I believe re-editing or possibly re-recording would have to be done. I'm not an expert when it comes to editing or scripting by no means, but to my ears it sounds as if they cut into the transition samples quite aggresively, compared to legato patches of some other companies' libraries, and the sustain part is kind of tacked onto that, and the attack is very immediate.
When I compare SyS legato to some of the other string libraries I have - for example Cinematic Studio Strings - then what I'm noticing is that the latter for example doesn't even really have a "standard" legato patch. Every and any legato in CSS is actually VERY slurred, with a very noticeable delay, even with the "classic" patch. And maybe this is what a lot of people kind of came to expect from string libraries - super-slurred playing that's almost portamento.
Hollywood Strings is much more comparable to VSL legato and functions in a similar fashion - the transition samples are separate from the sustain portion - but the transition just seems to be longer, and the crossfade is smoother, so that it doesn't produce that weird bump that SyS has that feels and sounds a little bit like playing some synth keyboard patch.
Spitfire Chamber Strings don't have that excessive slur built in, but the transition is audibly delayed and not that immediate as in SyS, and the sustaining note has a nice smoth arc to it, which is why it feels smoother and natural when playing. I'm not even sure if it's really been performed that way or if the Performance Legato patch was scripted in way that the followup note comes with a slight delay and some kind of smooth crossfade.
But anyways, that's what I'm hearing. Maybe this is something VSL
could re-script in the Synchron Player - leave a bit more of the legato transition in, delay or crossfade into the sustain portion a little more laid back. Don't know. But I wouldn't expect wonders. If the recordings are already the way they are, I'm not sure if there's a way for VSL to make people happy without recording stuff again and mimicking what other popular string libraries are doing because apparently that's what people want.