You both crack me up! Let's all just take a big deep breath! :) - but anyway...
"Of course you have to fine tune. You are creating a performance"
This is true, whether sampling or not fine tuning is done... Forget all the specific suggestions on this thread for a second... what we are really saying is that the less fine tuning we have to do with a sampled orchestra, the more like a real orchestra it would be (workflow-wise)... which is what we want - as this means less work programming and more writing music. This is not a new request; I would even say that it should be as much of a focus as 'realism' is for the sounds. It wouldn't matter how good the sample library is, if it takes 1 year to program a piece, it wouldn't be worth it. VSL doesn't take nearly that long obviously, but it takes a much longer amount of time than what I think users want.
One other point on this that is very important. I don't think that it should all be done for me and be automatic... I simply feel it should be less work, like a real orchestra. I put PP on a page and people know what it means... I conducted a group that wasn't getting what I wanted... I simply said to the low brass, "make it sound like an elephant, stomping his way around" and they played it perfectly. This is a simple instruction. Obviously it wouldn't work for a sample library, but if there were simpler ways (presets, faders, ???) of changing the sound with less work in the fine tuning process... I think this is what we want. I think if VSL misses this concept, other companies will certainly do it eventually and I wouldn't want to see that happen. I love VSL, I expect the best from VSL, and I think that this is a main problem to approach in getting there...
"I would agree that the Brass staccatos in VSL take a lot more work to make sound good than they should, and this is probably one area where more work could be done automatically (and I have a good idea how to fix this), but I haven't heard anything better else where yet"
I can see times where that would actually be pretty useful... but in general I wouldn't want it. The only reason I can even think it could be useful is to approach the less work problem, but I don't think it's the cause... I think it would be better just to have a more intuitive and organic approach to performance, like a performance 'humanize' function. It can be turned on and off AND you can control how much affect it has.
Humanize Performance Tool - If you were to draw a melody in Cubase without using any midi cc's it would be very dead expressively, obviously. - There are times to be very unexpressive on purpose as well... but if there was a humanizer for this and I turned the 'expressive' fader up, I should be able to write a melody and have it sound somewhat decent from the start. - I realize this may seem unrealistic and that I am not wording this very well, but consider a few points...
1) Not avoiding programming, but less time doing it means more time writing and is more productive.
2) It might not seem very easy to design VIP to do this, but if it was the benefits would be monumental. People often say that EW is better out of the box, and VSL is far better but with more work to get it that way. I realize it's usually directed at the dry/wet debate... but if VSL sounded good out of the box midi programming-wise it would be an amazing thing and a great time saver. I think the humanize idea would balance the ability to adjust it and the ability to control how the tool would function.
3) Anything that would provide more accurate playback in a way that saves more time is definately a good thing. If VSL was 'human' enough that I wouldn't even need to draw in crossfader patterns in cubase, then I wouldn't be using cubase... I'd be using Sibelius.
To me the ultimate goal of a sample library would make it work in a way that sounded real and that I only had to use a simple notation tool like Sibelius to get that real sound out of. To me the humanize mentality is the way there.
Maybe this seems odd to someone used to the sample world, but how many people wanted to learn midi, cubase, etc, when they started... I wanted to compose. Even though VSL is greatest library to me, I still end up doing more work to get things to sound like a real orchestra than I'd prefer and I do more work to get the right performance out of VSL than it would take for a real orchestra... thus why I think these feature concepts are useful.
-Sean (and sorry, I know... I'm a long winded guy)