I just bought it (sale+voucher…) I’ll try and build up an UACC expression map (as for the Spitfire strings quartet) and will post when done.
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I am finding that NP’s harp is a tiny bit too… “hard”? it has a very strong attack, it’s difficult to give it that lovely soft velvety sound that harp can have.
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Ok… Work done, but clearly this library is not suited to work with Dorico, too many articulations are missing. For instance, if you have a long note that starts with a marcato (which makes absolute musical sense), you’ll need to blend the marcato note (which is short in this library) with a long (either long or legato). Otherwise, the legato performance is quite interesting. I see the value of it when working in a DAW. I probably should not have bought it. 
I think it needs quite a lot of massaging with the CCs, and others are better suited to that.
I’ve noticed that Spitfire Solo Strings UACC expression map doesn’t have legato baked into it, I had to add it. Found this strange… Ok, I see it works with normal long notes, that’s why.
I’m desperately trying not to buy any more sound libraries. TBH, all of them are disappointing in some way**, and the desire for more and more is just like collecting fonts or developing a crack habit.
** Noteperformer is the least disappointing (damning with faint praise), because the humanity of its phrasing makes up for any deficiencies. Even BBCSO through NP isn’t as good, because some of the sounds still ‘stick out’, ruining the better ‘realism’ of the samples themselves.
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The reason for that (and I agree 100%) is certainly because those libraries are meant to be used in DAWs, which is not what I’m doing now. So it’s logical that the only library that kinda works for us is the one designed to be used in notation software!
Well, yes. If Arne could team up with Spitfire or someone to create a sample library specifically designed to work with NP, that would be the dream.
But who knows what other technology might be round the corner that might change the game in some profound way…
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In the original release materials for NP4, Arne admitted that accents could be overaggressive. I wonder whether this has been fixed, as I have heard nothing about it, or when Arne will be able to address it once he returns (IIRC) from a well deserved vacation.
Yeah, I also wish they could be turned down (quite) a bit.
Yes, even if you set the EM playback overrides to no dynamic increase for accents, there still is in many cases an over-pronounced one – Arne has commented on this and is aware. Often, I simply override the dynamic in the key editor to balance out but this is one of a few things I hope he’ll look into after his holidays.
In the meantime, I just finished the first symphony written directly with NPPE (Cinematic Studio + BBC Core percussion) and it was really quite refreshing to, for the most part, just be able to focus on writing the music as the engine took care of the rest.
I’ve noticed in BBSCO Core with NPPE that string accents sound like they are doubled with a pizzicato. I tried adjusting the accent intensity in Dorico’s playback options, but I don’t hear any change.
Has anyone else encountered this pizzicato accent sound?
I notice accents in Opus +NP are really stronger than in Dorico samples. I will have to listen closer to see if I can hear pizzicato.
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I have to imagine that AI is being trained by someone on the immense corpus of readily available recordings, so it can analyze how humans interpret various contexts, and that said AI will generate a mysteriously complex algorithm which interpolates appropriate responses for new contexts.
I figure they will try it loading it with actual written compositions, but maybe they let Ai analyze the mass of waveforms instead and get better results. Or maybe both?
Absolutely, it sounds very unnatural. The library may not contain any other articulations suitable for an overlay, but still … (BBCSO core does contain sampled longs with marcato attack, but they probably don’t fit the NPPE scheme of doing things…?)
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Hopefully they’re leaving this sort of thing out 
Portsmouth Sinfonia : “Also sprach Zarathustra” - YouTube
It still makes me smile after all these years.
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I hear you, my friend,
Pretty much on the same wavelength.
I have so many libraries, all of them sounding fantastic on demos and playthroughs, you buy them and then you find out that they don’t sound that great, actually, and to get them to do anything resembling a realistic orchestra, you have to become a professor in quantum physics…
I think my biggest disappointment was the East-West Woodwinds ensample, very difficult to get any actual realism, super hard to program and the samples are slightly out of tune…
We should all do a universal call for a demo period AND full transparency on demos - downloadable session files and to know EXACTLY how they got to sound the way they do on their YouTube videos, etc,
I suspect real instruments doubling, a VERY expensive mixing studio being used, and hugely knowledgeable producers and engineers working on the so-called “Demos”.
No trial, no original demo session files, no sale.
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I used to really like NotePerformer.
Now I like it,.
I mean, it’s great, but man do those strings, err, resemble a trumpet player playing high C at fff, if you get my meaning…
In fairness, the market for these libraries is mostly for people using them in DAWs like Cubase, Logic and ProTools, where they are free to double up as many instrument layers as they like, adjust the start times of the notes; and where they are creating a score of effects rather than notes.
(Is it just me, or are people making more film scores than there are films to put them in?)
Anyway, as I said above, hopefully, someone will make a sample library explicitly for notation apps, rather than DAWs.
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For a lot of folks, it’s a hobby. There are some really skilled orchestrators/mock-up artists out there doing excellent work that seem perfectly content to have their music never be “performed.”
IMO this is hamstrung fundamentally by the VST protocol. Notation playback is not live… I suspect if libraries had access to, say, as little as 1 second of look ahead (which isn’t possible for a VST, as I understand it), libraries could do a lot of heavy lifting - things like automatically triggering staccato articulations, trills, or sampled crescendos - automatically.