Latest Spotlight Strings from Kirk Hunter Studios

Unfortunately haven't been able to test it much. Like the standard thoroughfare of Kirk Hunter Strings this offers you Divisi live, vibrato control, and much in the way you'd expect from Kirk Hunter's products. Which is what makes them so great, the amount of customizable options. That being said, however, they are only fair sounding out of the box. Though designed for ease of use for you to pick up and play (live via keyboard) you will have to tinker the options to get a more appropriate sound. In fact Miroslav Philharmonik 2's solo strings seem to sound more natural out-of-the-box.

Kirk has done it again with another solid product. Various customization options, add solo players, remove solo players, remove ensemble, vibrato control, divisi-live. It's got about everything you could want and with these you can bet it'll fit with any other library if you spend time going through the options. However for the best mileage you WILL need to fiddle around with the parameters.

Update: After playing with the library more it became apparent why owning multiple libraries are important. Spotlight Strings 4D came in clutch in providing the "right" tone I needed for a staccato passage (divisi.) BBC Symphonic Orchestra was too messy, at default round robins it sounds like the string players can't keep up (240bpm) and they almost sound out of sync. Playing with the round robins tightened the sound but wasn't quite there, apparently these performed "too realistic", not Don't have the iLok to use East West Products and Miroslav Philharmonik was overall a bust (actually usable but read more...) and tied with Siedlaczek's Advanced Orchestra.

What made it work is the tight staccato. Though from what I can tell the chamber ensemble/backups doesn't actually seem to support divisi (it's the soloists) and the result wasn't particularly realistic, however it didn't matter since it produced the best results on the track compared to other string libraries on hand. The versatility of Kirk Hunter's Strings are why they're good to keep on hand.