I know there has been a lot said about Dorico and East West WordBuilder products, so I hope I’m not wrong to try to create a new thread. When I read that Dorico 4 had corrected the issues regarding co-existing with East West choral products I was excited. On faith I went out and got a year’s subscription to all the East West VSTs. Sure enough Dorico and Hollywood Choirs seemed to play well together for a while. Then, bam, a serious error came up when I closed Dorico. Then, Dorico wouldn’t open again without a restart. I sent it in for support and all they could say was “reinstall Opus, that’s what caused the error.” Haven’t done that yet because I don’t expect it to help. I’m going to try to find out what I’m doing in Hollywood Choirs that Dorico doesn’t like (sometimes I get the error, sometimes I don’t) then I can hopefully get some help from one side or the other.
In the meantime, since they sort of work together I have another problem that I hope this forum can help me with. I have a major work almost an hour long with full orchestra, eight part choir, soloists and organ. So far it has all been done with Noteperformer, but I want to move the vocals to East West plug-ins. I have not been able to figure out a good way to leave all but the vocals with Noteperformer while moving all the vocals to other plug-ins. Any help would be greatly appreciated. All I’ve thought of so far is to start with a new project, mock up all the parts, save the playback template and then apply it to the existing project. It seems like it shouldn’t be that hard though to just reassign instruments.
I have no doubt this is a great idea. However, I must plead further ignorance. Sad, but because NotePerformer works so seamlessly with Dorico I have not become fluent with Playback Templates. Currently there is no Opus (East West) available in the Edit Playback Template dialog box. So, I guess I have to make that? Sorry for my ignorance, and thanks for your response. I know I’m at least on the right track now. I’m still trying to wrap my head around Dorico’s way of dealing with plugins. Been playing with it some more before I sent this. No clue how to get Opus to show up in the Edit Playback Template dialog.
After some more work I have been able to create a custom endpoint configuration for an 8-part choir. But now, it is a manual entry and won’t allow family overrides. Still stuck, but farther along I guess.
Well, I continue to talk to myself, but really I just don’t want anyone else wasting time on this as I figure it out myself. I realized that I probably don’t need the family overrides as the vocals are the only things available in my custom endpoint configuration anyway. Now my only problem is Dorico confusing the section singers with the soloists. I think I’m pretty close though.
Hi @ghilton , I can’t help you with the template setup, but I can help if you get the serious error.
I had another customer who had something similar. It turned out that when he closes a project and the Wordbuilder window is still open, then that serious error comes up. Is that maybe the same case with you? The workaround is to close all Wordbuilder windows before closing the project.
I was in contact with EastWest on this, and although they could reproduce the error (as it was a crash in Opus) they said there is nothing they could do about it. They claimed it to be a one-of with just that one customer. If you have the same problem, then I can put the pressure up on them, since it not only affects one customer.
Did you recently have that error? If so, please do in Dorico ‘Help > Create Diagnostics Report’ and post the corresponding zip file. It shall contain crash dumps that give further hints. Thanks
I am the other customer with the error and was also told to reinstall Opus. As I’d already done so about 8 times for various different reasons I did so once more, knowing that it would make no difference and of course it didn’t. Two things to say here:
the workaround Ulf mentions does appear to work though I didn’t test that thoroughly.
Play 6 works better with Hollywood Choirs anyway. I strongly suggest trying both and seeing if you don’t agree. . Opus seems to have considerably more problems interpreting a text in English at any rate. From time to time there are dropouts or a mysteriously low dynamic which most often can be fixed by respelling the word, or changing the syllable division. However, Play simply works without tinkering more of the time. If you want to try this, please PM me (or continue on the forum) with your findings as I’d like to have something more concrete to go to EWQL with
On the other point of templates, there’s no real point in my view to create a PB template for Hollywood Choirs as it only takes really seconds to set up SATB from scratch in Opus or Play so just use the NP template and add choirs manually. Still, if you’re nearly there anyway you can always give it a bit more time, I suppose.
