I decided to go with the Synchron-ized Dimension Strings. After diving in, I had some thoughts about its usage and would like to share them with anyone who might find it useful. Perhaps someone else is trying to decide the same thing?
- Synchron Player is great. It's intuitive, resizable, and easy to work with. With more in-depth patch editing features and dimension control types, I think it could easily become the most flexible sample player out there.
- Set-up of custom presets for dimension strings seems to entail roughly the same amount of work that it would for VIPro. Both involve creating individual patch configurations for every combination of players and playing modes (open string, regular, etc.) that you want. That's a lot of dragging and dropping! Fortunately, the presets cover everything in a very obvious way and the pre-fab groupings make perfect sense, so I don't really see I need to change much of anything.
Note: The way I like to work is to live-play a line in on one articulation (usually perf_legato) and then add in keyswitches manually after-the-fact. With the exception of a few more intuitive set-ups like speed legato or certain sequence maps, I find that live playing with too many controllers is actually slower for me than clicking in articulations (as if I were editing a score with expression marks). The Reaticulate script (for REAPER) makes complex combinations of keyswitches and what not a moot point, so given that tool the complexity of keyswitching in Synchron doesn't matter.
- Where Synchron makes Dim. Strings much easier to work with is in tree structure. In VIPro, it's not possible to have one instance able to access every articulation in every conceivable grouping with every possible string playing mode AND have things like speed legato or velocity detected fp/sfz/sfzz; there simply aren't enough "layers" of selection. In Synchron, there are 8 of them, all equally powerful. This allows me to, from one instance, change sections, string playing modes, and articulations as well as create elaborate crossfades and control set-ups without having a gigantic mess of matrices. That and the ability to automate the mixer levels (as well as add per-player EQ and other effects within one instance) make the Synchron version of Dim. Strings much less cumbersome to use for my personal workflow. I'm glad I went with this one, so thank you all for the advice!
- The Enable slots on MIDI feature is brilliant. What a great way to save time AND RAM.
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As I stated above, a great benefit of the tree structure is the ability to create really deep, nuanced levels of selection that go well beyond what VI Pro can do. However, that depth could be put to much greater use, in mu opinion, if VSL added more ways to control the Dimensions and patches. I can see time-stretching easily being added to the EDIT tab alongside Humanize. Additionally - barring my lack of knowledge as to how the software works - I don't see why interval mapping and sequence mapping couldn't go right along with Speed and Velocity in the available dimension controllers. Interval mapping could be as it is in VI Pro, with slot 1 as the neutral patch, slot 2 as the UP interval and slot 3 as the DOWN interval. Sequence mapping could simply cycle through the dimension slot by slot. Both would require the dimension to be patch level, of course.
Adding these features would allow set up of, say, a dimension where a staccato patch is shortened (via time stretching) the faster one plays, a legato where only the first note is marcato, an ostinato that doesn't require keyswitches to be copied over, etc. And all this while still having 7 layers of articulation selection/organization to keep things nice and tidy. It would be like the best of both worlds!
I'd say of the things I'd like to see ported from VIPro into Synchron, Time Stretching and the Round Robin Selection (the red circles) are the things that I think are quite crucial to getting the most out of certain patches. I'm also missing how to turn of release samples...I'll look again though...
Anyhow, hope these rambling brainstreams help someone. Thanks all for your advice, and have a good one.
- Sam