My feeling is that extreme dynamics are being triggered for some reason which is why you can barely hear some of the notes. Also there is no polyphonic legato with this library so in a passage starting bar 45, for instance, the divided first violins cannot play properly as there is no patch for the seconds to use to separate the legato and short notes. Defaulting to sustain as in John’s map instead of legato will make certain passages sound unnecessarily blurred. Otherwise, it’s not really a world away from the results out of the box with my version of John’s map, as you can hear here https://app.box.com/s/haienb7k1dg4enwgfzz6r20pscq9jbql Given about an hour’s work, something reasonably musical could be made out of it, I think.
From the examples as presented, NotePerformer is the best, not because it the instrumental realism is particularly good – it isn’t – but because it effortlessly manages to deal with things like the mixed legato/staccato writing quite effortlessly whereas both VSL and BBC require manual adjustments to work. I don’t know the source of the original. xml but most of it does seem correctly written for “real” musicians --perhaps Fred can maybe confirm. I find the VSL from around the 1 minute muddies the violins because the official VSL EM hasn’t programmed the NoteLength feature very well, completely leaving out the shortest articulations from the automation.
FredGUnn has certainly done us a service here by showing us what happens when you try things out of the tin. For those who really hate working on mockups, NotePerformer can be a wise choice!