IntervaLive (iL)
In real music, an interval is when a note is played followed by another note. If the notes are long and sustained rather than short and staccato, there is an audible "chunk" of sound in between these notes. Being able to simulate this "chunk" makes the interval itself sound very real and musical.

Let's use an example of a French Horn section playing a middle C (source note), and then smoothly playing the G (destination note) a fifth above.
Between the C and the G, if you listen closely, you'll hear other audible parts that are neither the C nor the G. In this case, this "chunk" of sound is most audible at the lower and upper end of the interval itself, not in the middle. So, you'd hear mostly the D just above the C (launch) and the F just below the G (approach). Alternately, if you were to create a portamento where equal amounts of sound between the C and G could be heard, that "chunk" would not sound believable.

There will be new added styles of "chunks" for intervaLive in the near future. IntervaLive is completely polyphonic and requires that you raise or lower the pitch wheel depending on which direction you want the interval to go.

Human Pitch Correction (hp or hpc)

The biggest problem with string samples has been that they immediately sound "sterile" and lifeless. This begs the question, "How can I instantly feel as if there is a bunch of real string players at my fingertips when I play the keyboard, rather than having to do a bunch of after-the-fact tweaking?". The answer is to have each sampled note express itself as if it were a real performed note within a musical phrase rather than setting it up separately in the sampling session. Though this seems fairly obvious, it is difficult to address in the sampling world. Suffice to say that we have managed to capture this to an impressive degree. Preliminary reviews are quite favorable so far!

Unexpected Benefits
After the first programming stages, not only did we find that the expressiveness brought a wonderful "old world" sound to the table, but we also found that playing all kinds of runs and moving phrases were immediately much more believable than expected. For instance, if we wanted a quick run, but not as fast as a glissando, all we had to do was to choose a detache instrument, and the thing really worked. Legato for slower, and more "vivo" or "marcato" for faster. The point is that all of the "movement", note to note, was much more realistic than we had expected.

How does it work?
When you select a string section instrument that uses this human pitch correction, what you'll hear is the first part of the note play with quite a bit of "wildness". Then, after a reasonable amount of time, the note "settles down" into a more blended pitch and tone. note: In the Kontakt version, you can change this correction time and amount in real time. This "settling down" of the note cures an old problem that used to exist with other sampled strings that used a lot of vibrato. This problem was that when you held a chord with these heavy vibrato samples, the chord would sound good at first, but then never really "tune up" as you'd expect to happen with real strings. It would always sound too "wild" and could even get in the way on some mixes. So it's nice to have the benefit of a rich and musical sound as you're playing moving phrases, and then have it all tune up and blend as expected.

Round Robin
Unless otherwise specified, all or Ruby's Virtuoso Series Pro instruments use Round Robin. This means that you'll never get the same note played twice in a row. It greatly reduces the robotic "machine gun" effect you would get when playing repeated notes WITHOUT the Round Robin feature.

Keyswitch Maps
Please note that when you load an instrument, usually you will see a keyswitch map directory right there in the load directory.