I know it’s important to present something in a way that won’t immediately generate a negative response, so I’ll try my best.
The Sonic SE interface allows us to duplicate the premade keyswitch and use a different library.
HOWEVER, Any chance you could allow us to import our own lossless individual sound files in the same way to replace the stock sound files.
My cat can make better sounds than your viola patch. And the combi violas isn’t much better. It’s just more cats howling and scratching. Seriously though, I think I could synthesize a better viola sound if I had to. It would sound synth, but it would be tolerable IMO by comparison.
Well, I probably failed with the last comment.
But is there really any issue to being able to do this? Other than it adds to you long list. I think you can add a disclaimer that any custom sound file is the responsibility of the user whether it works as intended. Thus no more work for you, except make it possible
You can do it already. If you don’t already have a VST instrument that will play .sfz files, get one (e.g. “sforzando” from Plogue) and set up your own viola instrument from scratch. If you are really old-school, you could even use an .sf2 player.
I agree there are plenty of deficiencies in the “free” Halion soundset which make it not much use for anything except audio proofreading IMO - missing orchestral instruments and only one “player” of each instrument, so you don’t get realistic playback of sections when there are unison intervals between two players.
But you can do audio proofreading just as well with the ancient built-in Windows synth (unchanged since at least Windows 98 and probably even earlier) that only uses 3Mb of samples for a full set of General Midi instruments!
…also, although my knowledge of programming is fairly limited, allowing a change of a sound file has got to be one of the simpler programming tasks among the many they are doing or attempting.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as “one step less”. I imagine only a full version of the new Halion engine would allow you to start from scratch — and still, even if the Synphonic Library shows its age, I’d say there’s more than it meets the eye. So that one step less really is a soundfont player or another VST. I think you’re underestimating the task, or conceptualizing it wrong.
You can always pull the raw MIDI from a track (as a MIDI instrument) and feed it to something else. I highly anticipated this feature (and I look forward to ReWire as well), as I often need to use custom samplers or to sync with additional sound sources.
IIRC, somebody from Steinberg posted here that you can’t edit the instrument definitions in the “free” player bundled with Dorico. Of course you can edit them if you buy the full version of Halion.
If you plan to add a “random” new sample without changing the rest of the VST programming around it, prepare to be disappointed with the result.
Even the cut down string instruments in Dorico are much more complex than “a sample”. Ignoring all the keyswitches for bowing techniques, trills, etc (OK, Dorico doesn’t use some of those yet, but I expect it will eventually) there are also samples for the air resonance and body resonance of the instrument, etc.
Playing a slow scale (2 seconds per note) on viola, with all the default settings, suggests there are about 7 different samples playing simultaneously, just to produce one sustained note. Replacing just one of them (even if you can guess which one!) isn’t likely to work well.
Give me a few days. I’ll build you a new viola that’ll work in Sonic SE 3. I’ll base it off some of the free sample sets and it won’t be anything fancy; however, I’ll try to give you enough controls and FX routings in the macro where you can breathe a little life into it. Meanwhile, there are some things already out there that’ll work in Sforzando.
To make custom instruments for Sonic SE, you’d need his big brother HALion 6.