NotePerformer and NPPE had a lot of “intelligence” that you should not expect here. They would do additional shaping on top of what Dorico did. No regular expression map can do that until Dorico’s capabilities are expanded in this way.
The benefits of these are:
With most libraries, these maps are pretty comprehensive, mapping even techniques that cannot easily be represented in notation - you don’t necessarily get correct notation for all these, but at least you can use them easily (ex. swells, glissandi, pre-recorded runs, measured tremolo, pre-recorded phrases, effects gestures, etc.).
For unadorned notes, these have some basic auto functionality based on the note length (ex. triggering staccato or spiccato for shorter note values) which is something that NPPE did as well. Sometimes you might not want this and in those cases you can still override.
Most maps don’t include playing techniques and these do, which makes it easy to use any techniques that Dorico does not have built-in.
Aside from the smart handling of unadorned notes, you shouldn’t expect these to have a lot of intelligence. Instead they provide a ton of control by giving you playing techniques that let you access a lot of things. These techniques are often left out of other maps because most maps out there avoid creating playing techniques since they are hard to distribute to users, but Babylonwaves found a really nice way of doing that.
I look at it differently - for me it’s the quality of the maps which is paramount. I’m not in the least bothered spending more than 3 hours creating a map if works better for me and helps me understand the library better than one I got from elsewhere. Of course it’s far from certain that will be the case – maps created by experts ought to be better. But I need proof first of all – the sort of “demo” offered here is completely useless as there are just a tiny number of artics from some popular libraries. What is obviously needed is a full set for a specific library – as I said I’m perfectly willing to pay a small fee for a single library of my choice to see just how well things work. Or if the company would care to supply me with an audio file of a work and library of my choice, then that would also be acceptable (though probably they have no time for such a thing so I’d have to rely on a Dorician who owned the same library).
You’re not likely to get much better audio than with a different map just by opening up the file and hitting play (for the reasons described in my last post).
I think you might be talking about different things here.
For the main libraries I have, I know those maps left and right and often do my own tweaks to them. But I have something like 70 sample libraries in total. And sometimes for a particular passage, one library works better than all the rest, and it might be something I don’t normally use and now suddenly I have to make a map for it just to use it for 5 seconds in one part. I don’t want to have to stop composing and suddenly spend hours making a comprehensive map for that library that I never use. Now I can plug this in and add the notes and continue on.
This excuse is genuinely concerning. This is the same issue with the Dorico blog. It does not cost much to hire a single artist to make a single thumbnail that will be reused for the season. There is no reason why they couldn’t have paid $50 to commission an artist. We are in a CREATIVE business. This company should VALUE that. Steinberg should. Dorico should. Babylonwaves should. JFC, how am I in the minority here??
From what I’ve seen today, and as long as you haven’t updated opus (new versions have “out of tune” strings”), stick with the NPPE. These maps are great, but add no humanization that noteperfomer does.
fair enough – so work is still required! And of course you use far more libraries than I do so our situations are not at all comparable. Babylon Waves was originally designed for the DAW environment where many people freely mix and match articulations from different libraries – something which is a good deal more challenging in an instrument rather than track based software like Dorico (in common with other notation software), though with a purely track-based approach, then Expression maps aren’t actually needed so I guess this is a sort of halfway house. Anyway, you’re much more experienced in the area of mixing libraries than me (although I do do it to some extent) so naturally I read with interest your contributions.
Yes, the work is still required with these. The one bit of “intelligence” this has is for natural notes (unadorned with articulation marks or slurs or anything else), it will trigger short notes if the note is short enough in length. Aside from this one area, as @derAbgang says above, they “add no humanization” of the type that NotePerformer does. And this is mostly due to limitations of Dorico itself - once it can do more shaping, it will benefit all maps, including these.
What this gives you that most other maps do not is a bunch of playing techniques to trigger those techniques that are not built in to Dorico, so that with most libraries, you immediately have access to the full assortment of techniques. Or as I said above, it is more about control than it is about intelligence.
There’s potential for the future to get more intelligence here, but that’s going to depend on enhancements made to the Dorico playback engine.
@babylonwaves might need to clarify, but it is very likely that those libraries never received any specific updates for Opus by EastWest, in which case they would likely open and behave in the same way as they did in Play with the same keyswitches and CC’s doing the same things, and therefore the exact same maps would probably work.
Hollywood Orchestra did have a specific Opus version that was different, and so that has the play vs opus maps as separate items.
You can load EW symphonic (quantum leap) orchestra in Opus, no problems at all. Basically, you can load any EW library into Opus. But, if you load Hollywood into Play, they become Diamond
Perhaps I should have tried before posting. I was prevented from the folder names with the addition of “(Play)”, which suggest, that they will only work with Play.
I hope you (and Steinberg…) don’t mind a little customer support here, but is there documentation somewhere about the structure and scope of individual maps? In order to maybe customize them a little?
this suggests that the NoteLength for natural has only two entries. I usually use as many as possible, depending on what’s in the library but for instance with VSL, this can easily be up to four as their libraries usually have a wide variety of shorts.
At least for VSL libraries a key aspect is the use of different articulations i.e samples from very long to very short notes also in relation with the overall tempo. The EMs provided by VSL do a good job with this respect and are easy to tweak. They also put in some “tricks” to evoke the different legato types (e.g. Lyrical linked to vibrato in Dorico). If the Art Conductor maps also include such refinements that would excellent.
EMs for percussion in conjunction with the Percussion Maps are often a bit tricky. You can do a lot with Add on switches for beaters, snares or motor on and off etc. but for some reason my experience is that they do not always work when you have a lot of switching, It would be interesting to see how this is solved by Babylonwaves without looking at the PM entries linked to the particular EM switch.
the maps are indeed easy to tweak but unfortunately the Dorico note lengths are not. I’m hoping that finally in the next version we will be able to set our own divisions as unfortunately where I might want the articulation boundary is not necessarily at the timing point where Dorico has put it.
I suspect there would likely be performance issues with allowing for specific lengths in note length conditions (ex. based on recording lengths) and that led to them using the categories of “very short” “short” “medium” etc.
) don’t mind a little customer support here, but is there documentation somewhere about the structure and scope of individual maps? In order to maybe customize them a little?