I did a search on “Does the ARIA Player multi have problems with using the correct channel in a MIDI message” and the search assist in the DuckDuckGo browser tells me that issues have been reported “with the ARIA Player not responding correctly to MIDI channels, often defaulting to channel 1 regardless of the selected track.”
“A common workaround is to use the VST2 version of the ARIA Player instead of the VST3.”
The Steinberg link reports a problem with in 2022 with ARIA not playing anywhere but channel 1. It also is the source of the VST2 workaround.
I don’t know how useful the makemusic link is at it is from 7 years ago.
What’s interesting here is that I have never had problems on Dorico not playing on the channel selected for the endpoint. I only have a problem when an expression changes the channel number.
I guess I could see if it’s possible to get the VST version of the ARIA Player. MakeMusic was supposed to be continuing support for the Garritan libraries and the ARIA player. I will have to look into that as well.
velocity, not volume. You’ve set velocity as a volume controller in the expression map.
I do not, but if my MIDI monitor says they (notes) are transmitting on channel 3, they are on channel 3.
As mentioned a number of times above and in other threads, channel changes in expression maps for unpitched percussion are, um, unstable(?). But the MIDI monitor output for this snippet clearly has the correct channel so it isn’t Dorico’s fault at this point.
Also, from what I am seeing, the VST3 player only supports 1 channel, so the ARIA Player multi version I am using must be the VST2 version. The VST2 player comes with the Garritan orchestra and band libraries. I have both.
So that is an Apple Silicon chip then, so VST2 won’t work at all on that if Dorico is not running in Rosetta compatibility mode (which forces the CPU into Intel emulation which is slower).
That means you are almost certainly running the VST3 version, as to use the VST2 version you would need to both enable Rosetta and whitelist the VST2 version.
I wouldn’t suggest going to the VST2 version as a solution since there is no indication that the VST3 version doesn’t work with multiple MIDI channels. Instead I think it would be a better first step to update your Aria VST3 version to the latest one.
The version number of my ARIA player is 1.9.6.9. Oddly enough, there is an installer for version 2.026 on my desktop that I seem not to have installed. It says it is Apple Silicon Native–but it is a Universal Binary application and plug-in that can run natively on Apple Silicon Macs as well as on Intel Macs. It says it is also backwards compatible and will work with all files and products that install v1.959 and earlier.
Since there is no version 2.016 for Windows users, I am guessing that 2.026 is the version that allows the ARIA player to run native on Apple silicon. Hopefully it will install in parallel to the older version. I would hate to install it only to find out that I have the same or worse problems.
Unfortunately Garritan has stopped releasing updates for the Aria player, the latest updates have been coming from Plogue included with their Sforzando player.
Plogue also explained, there is not supposed to be a version 2.anything, someone at Garritan messed up and hit the wrong button when trying to bring in some previous changes that Plogue did. The version number should still be 1.9something but Garritan messed that up and accidentally incremented it. So now Plogue has newer updates that are on 1.9 versions, but are actually newer than the 2.x that Garritan released.
The ARIA Player I am using in Dorico says that it is 1.9.6.9. If I launch the ARIA player in my applications folder, it is 2.026. It seems to have access to all of my libraries. Now I just need to learn how to get Dorico to use it instead of the ARIA version I am using now.
From what I’ve found so far the Sforzando player only supports one channel. Not having much luck getting info on it. Would there be a mechanism equivalent to a channel change when running multiple instances of a VST? Do they each get their own channel. I’ve been running Finale so long using the ARIA multi that I don’t know. I do have Kontakt 7 and have used it with Finale.
Sometime somewhat recently the Aria player seems to have stopped working in VST3 for me with multiple channels, it is all going to channel 1. This used to work, I tried it previously last year I believe.
Yes, the Sforzando player only supports one channel, but installing the Sforzando player also installs the upgraded ARIA engine which essentially updates the ARIA player without updating the player version. You’ll see the engine version update in the bottom left after installing Sforzando.
Finale didn’t support VST3.
It is unfortunate that Garritan is causing so much confusion by having abandoned their products in this way.
It’s starting to look like moving forward with the ARIA player and Garritan Libraries is dicey.
Perhaps I should be looking to go in a different direction. Finding orchestral libraries that would fit my needs will probably not be hard. I do need percussion that would cover most of what is in the Garritan VST GM, GPO, Jazz and Blues, Brush Drums, and Ethnic though.
Another hiccup is that I used the ARIA player with Logic Pro when I put together the audio demos for my musical a couple of years ago. I will have to check what version of the ARIA player I am using with it. It is reasonably likely that I used the 2.026 version and that’s why it’s installed on my machine. My hope was that I could continue to use that ARIA setup in Logic Pro for revisions to songs and new/replacement songs as I go forward. It was a lot of work to learn how to set up Logic Pro using the ARIA player. Starting over with a new player would be a whole new adventure. Over the past three years or so I’ve already taught myself Logic Pro, Previs Pro (a three D storyboarding app), Final Cut Pro, and Dorico to keep composing and creating demos. I guess one more app would keep my brain busy.
Garritan is not best in class in anything, except the Garritan CFX piano if you like the CFX sound. Nothing else they make is really competitive with modern libraries/competitors.
Most professionals I know who do mockups etc have the CFX piano but don’t use any other Garritan libraries.
The problem is not only the multi-outs, Ben, it appears with newer Sforzando on Windows, even sending MIDI to channel 2 will be played by the instrument loaded on channel 1 instead. It is doing the same thing in Cubase.
Previously there was only the one stereo out but it was working with multiple MIDI channels, just they would all come out the single stereo out so it wasn’t possible to apply affects to them individually or solo/mute them.
I am using ARIA Player 2.026 with LogicPro. I just checked. Is that VST3? With LogicPro ARIA 2.026 is definitely playing on multiple channels. I exported the setups from ARIA in Finale and imported them to ARIA in LogicPro.
Is ARIA Player 2.026 using the VST3 engine? If I use ARIA Player 2.026 with Dorico, am I going to get the channel 1 problem?
Oh interesting, so I just tried loading up the VST3 version of Aria in PluginGuru Unify with two instruments loaded on channels 1 and 2 and was able to successfully play back the instrument on channel 2. But this appears to not work in Cubase and Dorico, and only MIDI channel 1 is accessible.
I should clarify this doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem with Cubase/Dorico as that is basically the “reference” for VST3. It is probably something the plugin isn’t doing quite right where it doesn’t work at all in some hosts but works in others.
I could bite the bullet and move to better libraries. My main question there is, which libraries have comprehensive expression maps for Dorico. I really don’t want to have to build a lot of expression maps on my own.
