ARIA Player Playback Template

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 :smiley:, 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.

I haven’t looked at your files yet, but one comment: is it really worth including “organ” here, since the GPO organ patches are in a world of their own, so far as controlling the registration is concerned.

Maybe if you just want one (fairly bland) organ patch for continuo playing, it might be useful, I suppose…

Indeed I do! :smiley: The Flutey organ that comes with Garritan Instruments for Finale is ideal for a fairly bland continuo, and one of my main reasons for wanting to keep using these samples. I’ve not found anything half as decent in the HALion stuff.

The inclusion of ‘organ’ means that when you select “Organ” as an instrument in Dorico, it sends to the ARIA player. What samples you choose to put in it are up to you. If you’ve got the Garritan Organ library, then you can use Expression Maps and Playing Techniques and CCs to pull your stops.

I just had a browse through your GitHub files and realized that’s what you had done for organ. I have GPO5 so I never bothered with the “GIFF” subset in Finale - it’s not just a subset of the instruments, it’s also a subset of the samples for each instrument, and the resulting difference in quality can be quite audible.

In GPO5 there is an “instrument” called “Custom organ console” that fits into one Aria player slot. It gives you about 70 preset registrations, from which you can assign 12 to the equivalent of “combination pistons”, which you can switch on and off with CC commands - except that unlike real organ pistons, you can have more than one activated at the same time, and they have individual volume controls. Trying to map that onto Dorico’s idea of a “sound map” wouldn’t work very well, I suspect (it needs 36 different CCs to control all of it!) - and having done it, it’s still a lot less flexible than “real” organ registration. Because it’s a two-level system (assign registrations to the 12 pistons, and then control the pistons) I don’t see how you could link it to a Dorico score except by “generic” techniques like “add piston 1” rather than real stop names like “add Flute 4”, unless you restricted yourself to one fixed subset of 12 registrations.

This template is designed to automatically do the following, which otherwise would be tedious manual work:

  1. Create one or more VST Instruments for ARIA Player.
  2. Assign that VST to each Player/Section’s Instrument.
  3. Assign the desired Expression Maps to particular instruments.

Things you still have to do:

  1. Load the samples into ARIA (-- which can be anything you have or like).
  2. Anything else.