Thanks for the reply. I bought SS1 first instead of Pro because I believed that Pro didn't have the cantabile strings, but now it seems as if the cantabile strings are the 'normale' strings in Pro, but with a lot fewer dynamic layers.
Your cantabile demos and the very long, multilayered de/crescendos were also influencing my (and others') decision to go for SS1 – but now it seems that I probably would be OK with only one of the two libraries. Maybe I could sell one of them, or work hard to get the best out of them.
With the cantabile light vib, legato soft, legato normal, legato fast, legato marcato and slurred from SS1, and regular, agile, espressivo, very soft and portamento from Pro, and could possibly emulate a very 'deep sampled' string section with 11 layers, but I understand that there could be some 'hidden' overlaps and/or name changes which makes combining the two difficult. One cannot, for instance, search for and drag in eg a cantabile patch into a new hybrid patch.
Looking at the difference in size between SS1 on one side and SS Pro + SS1 optimized suggests, at least at the surface, that there aren't a lot of new material in SS Pro - installed sizes between these two are almost identical. Removing most of the layers in the de/crescendos has of course freed up some space, but still – it's hard to decide what to go for.
Regarding the long notes and legatos in SS1: they have 5-8 layers, while SS Pro longs and leg, has two. But how many layers does the SS Pro + SS1 optimized (or SS1 + SS Pro) have?
The only thing I really dislike about this package is how the vibrato is set up, needing to using two CCs if one wants to x-fade between different vibrato types (and I want that). The other stuff can probably be dealt with if one has enough time.
Before I decide what to do with these libraries, it would be great if someone could share info about what is gone and what has been renamed between SS1 and SS Pro. I'm also curious about why cantabile light vib was removed (and how I can find it) in SS1 if I want to put it into some SS Pro preset... or if it is there already with a different name (or has been replaced by something else/better). String samples with low dynamic levels containing enough vibrato/passion is unfortunately missing from most string libraries.