Pete14 hould VSL spend more time on programming/modeling and less on recording a bunch of samples?
It isn't quite so cut-and-dry as this. The piano libraries are only part of their business and their developers were stretched pretty thin.
Part of the issue was until last year, many of libraries were developed for two sample players that they made in house - the very old Vienna Instruments player and the Synchron player. They were different enough that work done in one had to be re-done in the other. Maintaining both players was causing enough extra work that they were unable to take on big new enhancements due to this.
Finally last year they decided to discontinue the Vienna Instruments player for these reasons and this infurtiated a lot of long time users who had wanted to stay on the old player for as long as possible. I was not one of those infuriated, as I saw this coming and stopped investing in the Vienna Instruments libraries long ago and moved everything to the newer player. I figured it was the case that this would happen, and advised people to buy the newer Synchron versions instead of the older ones, but often a group of enthusiasts of the old Vienna Instruments would enter the thread and convince them to spend their money on the old release instead. Now suddenly those people will have to pay an upgrade fee.
Regardless of whether you hate their decision to discontinue Vienna Instruments or not, the fact is that their development has significantly ramped up. For their regular sample libraries (outside of the piano libraries), they had this classic Dimension Tree that tended to scare new users away, and have implemented a much more inviting Flow View. They added much requested tuning capabilities for alternative tuning systems, allowing microtonality with their instruments. It is a noticeable step up in development since they've been unshackled from having to continue to support Vienna Instruments.
But the flow view related programming is obviously taking up a lot of their resources, and in addition to that they are doing lots of back end programming work that benefits all of the players including the piano player. Sympathetic resonance is not good at the moment, yes, but I'm sure they'll get back to that. It makes sense to me that they are focused on addressing things that were preventing them from appealing to new customers, and this was more serious of an issue on their orchestral libraries side rather than the piano libraries front. We're seeing the movement, they aren't just sitting idly by - and the programmers are really really good and doing great work. It's just a matter of not enough hours in the day and they have to focus on what helps keep the company profitable.
And the people who do the recording and the editing of new libraries are not the programmers. Very different skill sets are needed. In most cases to make a new piano library the involvement of the programming team would be very limited. So they can't just tell random staff who are available to create sample libraries to do some programming instead, if they aren't developers. It's not the right people. So it's not an either-or situation. If they didn't have them making this piano library, they would have them sampling a different library that wasn't a piano library. This still wouldn't free up the developers time for sympathetic resonance.
