I don't agree that S1 has "best in market" articulation management. its a nice improvement from what they had before...it still cannot handle everything that LogicPro, Cubase and Cakewalk Sonar can do, to be frank; in terms of output capability.
What it
DOES do better then anything else so far is provide a capability for plugins to report back to the DAW an articulation map directly from the plugin automatically, while other daws require plugin makers to actually provide an expression map file, or articulation set file, etc.. though to date, very few plugins ever actually did that much.
And so far only VSL has provided any support for that in
SOME Of their Synchron player instruments. But this is really very simplistic. Simplistic users will enjoy the seamlessness of that, they can just insert the plugin, choose a preset and then the articulations appear by name in S1 to choose. However many instruments have complex arrangements of features that require each users to determine on their own how they want to set things up, in which case those simplistic articulation maps provided by the Plugin (if provided at all) won't even make sense to use. It looks spiffy in the demos though because it looks easy...no need to to program any articulation map! For simplistic scenarios anyway... and only for plugins that actually add that capability to their plugins, yet to be seen.
I think you see lots of reaction from users because it looks "easy" and people seem to want "easy", and I like easy too, but only if it can actually handle all the articulation management issues that come up with some libraries...which S1 still does not do as well or as thoroughly as the DAW's I mentioned already.
- No support for channelizing events on a per-articulation basis. They say they are working on that, but I will bet money that they will overlook the need to propogate expression events across channels properly while following notes that are being channelized. By the way, LogicPro and Cubase do channelize, but also do not propagate. Only Cakewalk Sonar does as of now. Though LogicPro can be programmed by the user to do so with Scripter.
- No support for articulation latency adjust. To be fair, none of the DAW's yet do that. But at least with LogicPro it can be done in Scripter.
- As far as I can see, no support for having articulation groups, something Cubase provides (and possibly Cakewalk, I'm not sure). it can also be done in LogicPro using Scripter and automation parameters.
- Nobody provides zoning situations so that articulation switches can be selected based not only on a primary ID, but also within velocity or pitch ranges, or based on the range of another CC controller, etc. Cakewalk Sonar can probably do that, I'm not sure. Cubase can do some of that with its sound slot approach. LogicPro doesn't do it built in, but can do it with Scripter support. S1 cannot.
- Its not clear to me yet whether S1 can handle poly-articulation scenarios in chords where all the notes start on the same timestamp, where two notes in a chord are using different articulations. This can be done by LogicPro and Cubase for sure..not sure about Cakewalk Sonar.