I’ve created a rudimentary and experimental Playback Template for the ARIA Player, which may be of interest to those with Garritan sample libraries, including the basic GIFF set that comes with Finale.
It doesn’t load the samples into the ARIA Player (yet), but it does create a VST Instrument for the ARIA plug-in, and apply that to each instrument (that it knows about)*. It also assigns a GPO expression map to the Strings. This does save a lot of time in unflipping all those discovery arrows and setting up Expression Maps: the only thing you need do for a new document is load the samples into ARIA’s slots, and these can be saved there. I’ve included the Steinberg-supplied Expression Maps for GPO.
****** Daniel and the team think it’s unlikely that samples can be loaded without some heavy magic, though I’m continuing to trawl through the Garritan/ARIA files to see what I can find.
******* The ‘known instruments’ are currently limited to: Trumpet in C, Oboes, Bassoon, Violins, Violas, Cellos, Sop, Alto, Tenor, Bass, Voice, and Organ. Primarily, this is to suit my own 18th-century needs , but also because by hooking up only a few instruments, it makes the files easier to understand, and easier to work on as development continues. More instruments/presets can be “rolled out” later once things are more certain. If there’s something you particularly need, it can be added to the xml files easily.
There’s no installer, so you’ll have to put them in manually: you can follow the same instructions that Daniel gave for the “Silence” template before 2.1.
(There’s also another folder for including expression maps, though.) If you’ve got NotePerformer, then these folders will already exist, so don’t over-write them.
It should also be mentioned that “Bad XML” may cause Dorico to: disable all the VST things; or abort launching altogether. If you do find odd things like that happening, then you should remove the files. Please note that I can’t provide much ‘support’, but will respond here as and when. This is intended as a temporary solution until a more complete and proper one is provided.
Note that unlike HALion, you need to use the MIDI sliders in Dorico’s mixer for each instrument.