Thanks, mplaster and Tom23. I am sorry that I got the facts wrong. I had thought that Solo Strings I meant the Standard Edition, and Solo Strings II meant the Extended Edition. Thank you for correcting me.

Obviously I have expressed too much frustration and disappointment in these pages. I invite everyone over when they're in London and we can drink a few beers and laugh about some of the silly things that have transpired. But my joy will be even greater if I can find solutions to some of the problems that have surfaced in my attempts to use Solo Strings.

Hi everyone,

I feel obliged to throw in my two cents since Londoner has cited my own previous posts in some of these discussions.

First off, we all know that VSL is a great product. I bought the Solo Strings first and proceeded to purchase numerous other libraries and a dedicated computer to run these over the course of the following six months. (I am a private individual so VSL is very expensive for me... in fact the most expensive music technology product I've bought in 5 years). So no bones there.
I'd also like to point out that some of the remarks made in this thread (but more especially in the more recently created accompanying thread here), I find some of the comments to be less then gracious (though as previously pointed out an angry title never helps). The accusation of trolling and working for the other side have been raised against myself also despite my attempts at constructive criticism. And Londoners comments (despite the underlying anger) really did point out issues which are important to people like myself who work in a certain way. I think the defensive attitude of many here shows a reluctance to accept that there might be issues with our beloved VSL systems into which we invest so much time and money. But there are some issues which are a nightmare for many of us VSL users... no matter how elegant the workarounds seem for some of you... they are not practicable in the context of those who work primarily on Sibelius or Finale composition systems. I think the point is that VSL is the best system if you want your VSL work to be used as the final output (say in a film or TV score) but less then ideal if you are composing for a real orchestra and VSL is being used as a mock up.

My main concern with VSL with regard to the sustain issues which seem so central to the issues both I and Londoner appear to be having is that VSL does not seem to have the capacity to update these files. The decision to loop or not to loop appears to have been made at the editing stages of the samples when developing the solo strings. As someone who has in the past been commissioned to make sample libraries myself I can attest to the fact that at the recording process there is indeed no guarantee that things will work out as planned and that seems to be the case here. I would really welcome a version of these samples which was less then ideal in terms of sound quality but which at least looped. And it would be great if an update were made available which addressed these issues. From what I can gather Solo Strings I was one of the first libraries created and issues which encountered then have since been addressed in more recent libraries.

Hope these comments are met with non knee-jerk reactions folks...

jurgen from Ireland

Hi William,

I'm not sure who you mean by "you people"... however my reference to knee jerk reactions is, I believe valid, in so far as many of the responses to some of these issues fail to give any consideration to the wider requirements of the VSL user base preferring instead to take a default defensive position in light of any criticism. (The OP can of course be blamed for the tone on this particular topic and I'm not here to defend that.)

But the central point for both myself and the OP is that decisions were made in the creation of the Solo Strings libraries (and some others also) which make life exceptionally difficult for those who use VSL to make mock-ups of orchestral works before sending the scores to a real orchestra for performance. For us, the suggested workarounds are less then ideal and the inconsistencies within the Solo Strings are frustrating (especially as these often only come to light after weeks of frustration and subsequently analysing what we might be doing wrong). If VSL works well for you then I'm delighted for you but you must respect that there are others who have different requirements and where even a slight compromise in terms of sound quality would have been happily accepted if this were to mean all sustained instruments actually sustained. Jumping in with comments without taking this into account could very easily be seen to be a knee jerk reaction no?

The sample libraries were privately commissioned by music publishers/composers who required specific libraries not then available (late 90's). One of these was a sample library for Chester Music London's specific use with the Grammophone award winning artist Carol Cerasi and her period harpsichord and the library in question has since been used by numerous other artists and appears on a number of releases including a recent appearance on a Planet-mu label release.

By the way I'd be very interested in your own working method... does your VSL output end up being your final output or is it just a tool for composing? If the latter then perhaps you might put forward some more constructive advise to those of us facing the above problems.

Thanks Albert,

i actually moved to Sibelius last year though your workarounds can be transferred to this programme also. However the problem being referred to here is that in some instances sustain patches in the solo strings are in fact not looped or in some cases only looped for a specific dynamic level. So unfortunately this soloution won't work in this instance.

Thanks!