The VSL ones have comprehensive maps, they are what I use.. They can be expensive though.
Thanks. I will check them out.
I loved my Garritan Personal Orchestra. All the instruments are brilliant. However, the multichannel version is not usable. And I donāt use VST2 anymore. So I just use midi channel 1 and make a few instances if I need more Garritan libraries. I donāt think theyāll even be around much longer. A real shame.
The main benefits of GPO were the overall lightness in terms of resources, how comprehensive it is, and the separate attack control that made it more agile, combined with the integration with notation software back then. And, the inexpensive cost.
But it always been weak in the sonic department, it sounds pretty bad compared to most libraries out there. Even 20 years ago this was the case. I remember going on the old Northern Sounds forum around 2006, a forum for discussing virtual instruments. Then Garritan started to sponsor the site, and after that, people were banned for saying anything negative about Garritan. So the banned escapees founded VI-control where they could speak truth about virtual instruments without repercussion, and Northern Sounds became a de facto Garritan fan club of sorts where the Garritan faithful would listen to peoples really bad sounding GPO mockups and rave about how realistic they sounded. It was a bit weird, I got a lot of āEmperorās New Clothesā vibes from that place. I didnāt hang around too much longer after that, and it only hobbled along for a few more years before shutting down.
Iām a retired aerospace engineer. After I retired I finally had time to finish the second half of a musical I started work on in in 1987 with a Mac II, a Roland D-10 synthesizer and Finale, which I purchased in 1987 at the Mac Music fest at Paramount studios, just over the hill from where I now live in Burbank. But in 1987 I had just moved into an apartment in North Hollywood. After the Mac II came the dead years with a PowerMac, with ever crushed hopes that a decent sound card would ever be made for it. Then came the little tangerine iBook, which could actually run Finale and Unity DS1 (software synthesizer) in conjunction. Then came an Intel Mac desktop and Garritan and Native Instruments and more responsibility and a house with less and less time for composing. Iām loving my time now being able to focus on the musical, despite all of the challenges that come with it.
Iām on holiday at the moment, using my iPad, but the ARIA Multi-output VST3 plug-in works fine for me, as far as I can tell,
Plogue are planning a new āSforzando 2.0ā, which hopefully will address many of the issues.
Iām happy enough with Noteperformer, though I still use ARIA for my own choir sounds, āBassiā instruments with octave doubling, most keyboard instruments (including things like Glockenspiels and Celesta).
Doing a little more research on ARIA plug-ins. I had stated in an earlier post that Logic Pro on my setup is using ARIA Player 2.026 and that it has no problem with using all of the channels. But Logic Pro does not support VST plugins. It uses AU plugins, and ARIA Player 2.026 does have an AU plugin so that has to be what I am using with it. So, perhaps the ARIA AU plugin doesnāt have the channel problem. Unfortunately, Dorico doesnāt support AU plugins, so I canāt test it on Dorico. I do not have the 2.026 plugin (which only comes as VST3) installed in my audio plugins folder. Iām leery of installing it and adding it to Dorico, but if it can support only one channel there is not much point in doing it anyway. Setting up my project for that would take as much work as moving to more future proof sound libraries and setting them up.
FYI, Dorico 6.2.30 is now out with a fix for the issue of not being able to select MIDI device/port/channel for an individual component of a percussion kit.
Thanks. I installed the update this morning but havenāt tried it yet.
I did finish transferring my musical from Finale to Dorico. Still a lot of work to do cleaning up mistakes and omissions.
It probably wont do anything for your strange map setup (the one you had been using because the correct way was not working) but now you can set up the maps the correct way and that should work.
Well, I couldnāt set up my endpoints for percussion because I had to keep reapplying my playback template after every import (because of a bug known to the Dorico engineers) and that destroyed my endpoints. Now that Iāve finished importing all of the Finale mxl files, I set up the percussion endpoints and they work. I still havenāt tried saving the current state of my endpoints in an endpoint configuration/playback template and then reapplying it to see if the fix also fixes that.
OK, but what I mean is (just to clarify in case you did not understand), with this fix you should no longer need any transpose values whatsoever in your custom expression map(s) for the the unpitched percussion instruments, and you also should not need any channel changes in said expression maps, and you also should not need the duplicates of the āNaturalā technique for the various instruments: I recall you had created like āNatural (Bongos)ā and āNatural (Toms)ā and you shouldnāt need any of those anymore, you should only need the regular āNaturalā and thatās it.
This means almost a complete overhaul of your expression and percussion maps from what you had previously in your earlier post in this thread.
The channel changes werenāt working consistently so I wasnāt using them. I had the percussion kits set up with the correct percussion playing techniques but they didnāt work correctly of course, routed to the wrong library. But with the techniques already set up, it wasnāt hard to reroute the percussion instruments that needed to get to different libraries for their techniques.
I just tested a percussion template with the endpoint configuration with percussion instruments individually routed. It did not work. It routed all instruments in the kit to the same instrument. So the new version allow percussion instruments in a kit to be selected and assigned to different endpoints, but it doesnāt preserve those assignments in the endpoint configuration in the playback template.
If I save, close, then open the version with the correct individual percussion instrument endpoint assignments, those assignments are preserved.
So, I would call the new version of Dorico a partial solution to the problem, but not a full solution. Itās not a full solution until a playback template preserves the individual percussion instrument endpoint assignments.
Iām out of town now so I canāt test. I normally load things manually so I donāt recall what the exact behaviour is.
There are two different ways of saving endpoints, one saves per-VST instance (this is the save button you get when you go into the VSTi), the other one saves the group of VSTiās that are loaded as a single endpoint. There might be a difference in behaviour there with unpitched percussion - I donāt recall exactly.
Because the only option to save multiple VSTis in a single endpoint is to use the global endpoint save option, and it will include all VSTis loaded in the file into this endpoint, usually people will make an āendpoint projectā that has only the instruments they actually want in the endpoint. For instance when setting up the strings sections of a full orchestra library, they will usually make a separate project just for the strings endpoint that doesnāt have the full orchestra loaded, and this is used to make changes to the strings endpoint without unintentionally including the rest of the orchestra.
I will have to try setting up different projects for each ARIA Player instance. I have the instruments on each instance organized rationally.