I am using qtractor to create a MIDI version of a string quartet that I wrote nearly half a century ago. I also have a string quintet to keep me occupied once the quartet is finished with.
I am quite pleased with the results so far - obviously there is a lot of tweaking of note lengths and "velocities" needed, not to mention subtleties of tempo etc., so this will keep me occupied for quite some time.
I have a problem, though, with the actual instrumental sounds. Although there seem to be quite a lot of good sounds available for wind and percussion instruments as well as orchestral string sections, the samples I have tried for solo strings are poor. At the moment I am using the solo string samples from VPO, but even after considerable rewriting of the sfz files, I find them very unsatisfactory. In particular, the timbre often varies hugely from one pitch sample to the next within a single instrument. This is clear when listening to the component .wav files.
I downloaded the Philharmonia Orchestra samples. On the face of it these should be good, but they are too short: even a file like violin_long.sfz produces notes of a second or less duration, and when I have tried to make loops with the .wav files, then not surprisingly I hear a very audible "pulse" in the note from the rapid repetitions.
I'd be very grateful if somebody can point me to some better solo string quartet sounds. Ideally, there need to be 2 different violins, as well as viola and cello. And in a perfect world, as well as "normal" bowed sounds and pizzicato, there would be open string sounds, natural and artificial harmonics, and tremolando too for all of the instruments, although I can probably fake some of those.
David