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TerraSin
I'm on the fence. It has less control than Friedlander violin and around the same quality but a really nice emotional sound.
The thing that really bothers me is the expansions. It seems like a cheap way to ship an unfinished product and continue development over time rather than waiting and shipping all at once while making more money off late adopters. We'll see.
There is a great thread on
Friedlander vs the just released Spitfire Sacconi Strings, vol1 at vic... you should take a look... Friedlander is no cup of tea and you better know what ur doing!...
However, as to Bohemian...
I take issue with your comments... all expansions are FREE...unlike Sacconi, where the 2nd-4th section players are gonna cost, knowing Spitfire. Vir's efforts are a huge, innovative project that has never been contemplated before and is only possible due to the evolution of Falcon and the willingness of Lucia to be emerged into the evolving AI environment. I find the participation and dedication of Virharmonic to be uniquely deep and exciting... you should thoroughly digest
the rapidly exploding threat at VIC. These words of Virharmonic, from the thread, underpin my level of excitement:
The articulations or better said bow styles (more info in the overview video) are in the current version force able by force keys and added script or rerouting externally would be required to use CCs for that behaviour. You can assign your force keys though however you want, so you do not have to use the default ones. On the other hand we are going to discuss this with our customers in one of our upcoming blogs beginning of January on composer input section of our site and see what other controls would you guys like based on playing the performer for a bit, because as ED said it is all about relatively simple scripts (well much simpler then the performer itself :D), so if people desire different ways of controls to force certain behavior we will definitely investigate how to best implement it and create desired patches for Expansions. Expansion one is very close - we expect the delivery to be in 2 to 3 month from release of today's version and it will contain a lot of material. As the release version is done now and we are just finishing the manual 
we are confident that Expansion 1 will come out with Cello or shortly after.As we said we want the composer community to really get involved with us on this project and tell us how to evolve this with each of the expansions. We might not be able to fit everything into expansion one, but we have 2 more to come and with enough effort we can together make this into something even more special.Also Thank you for all the kind words and Merry Christmas to you all. The delivery of the library will begin tomorrow or the day after. Personally, I'm lovin' these guys...for a hundred bucks I'm participating in the next wave of AI assisted virtual violining, based on the most amazing human to ever pick up a bow (in my humble opinion), Lucia Micarelli... Regarding Friedlander, you might want to consider Sacconi... From the VIC thread above, (from Joe D at VIC):
Jake said:
↑I'm looking for some input from those who have already explored this new Spitfire library as to how it compares to Embertone's Friedlander Violin.
I am asking from the standpoint of someone who is just learning to play music with virtual instruments and coming from very little previous musical background. This is just a hobby for me....
It would appear to me that Friedlander would be more of an overall tool whereas Sacconi Vol 1 would be geared to the chamber music sound...
My desire at this time is simply to dabble in many styles of music with the intent of just having a good time in the exploration. I also like to work with video and will eventually be putting some background music to my own videos.....
Click to expand...
Joe:
I have both. Since you state that you have little musical background, I think that you will have a much easier time getting a good sound from Sacconi. The beautiful tone and baked-in nuances of the world-class player, the appropriateness of the vibrato and attacks, and the sound of the hall all add up to getting a pretty nice sound just by playing a musical line while moving one or two controllers for expression. Sacconi will do well at classical-style chamber music, as Spitfire has stated, but will also do well in quasi-classical settings like traditionalist underscore, accompaniment for a ballad, obligato lines and the like.Friedlander takes a lot of work to get an expressive performance from, and that work implies knowledge of how good players use the bow (bow speed and pressure, as well as bow position between the bridge and fingerboard), when to slur (group notes smoothly while continuing to move the bow in the same direction) and when to change bows (go from up to down and vice-versa, which adds an articulating sound at the transition between the notes), how and when to add vibrato, what speed and depth of vibrato to use, when to make clean shifts between notes and when to allow a little bit of tasteful portamento to be heard (it's way, way, too easy to overuse portamento with virtual instruments!), and the like. In other words, if you have a lot of the conceptual skills that a good string player has, you can get very expressive results from Friedlander. If you don't have those conceptual skills, you will have a hard time getting expressive and at least remotely believable performances from it, IMHO. And you have to place Friedlander in a virtual space, of course, which requires some other skills and software.On the other hand, you could start to build those skills by doing mockups with Friedlander in which you would try to match the nuances of specific real recorded performances; that might be a good way to start to train your ear and your brain to understand how to think like an expressive string performer (and mix engineer). And, Friedlander is much more versatile; it could do bluegrass, a horror score, and many things in between if you know how to use it. Sacconi will have a harder time doing some types of music.To sum it up: if you want less fuss and a very nice sound, get Sacconi; if you want to work on your skills and learn to think like a string performer, you might get a wider range of results from Friedlander. Sound-wise, I prefer Sacconi.
Later on, Joe thought of the question that popped into my brain and said:It occurs to me that you might also consider the upcoming Virharmonic Bohemian Violin. It is designed to bake as much as possible of the performance decisions into the very advanced scripting; the script is in charge of much of the decision making, not the composer. That might be what you are looking for. (It's not what I'm looking for, though I might pick it up just to support innovative development and to check it out for myself.)It's not out yet, so of course I haven't used it. Based on the demos, it seems promising, but I personally clearly prefer the pure sound of the Spirfire offering at this point. But I have only the demos of Virharmonic to go by. All just FYI.... You might want to look into Sacconi... preorder ends 12/25... big threat over at VIC...