The latest versions of Opus and Play typically come from a link or setup process you get for the EastWest “Installation Center” while purchasing an instrument or joining Composer cloud, or they can subsequently come from here:
Here are some links to Play 5:
Windows:
Play 5.0.1 Link is: http://software.soundsonline.com/Products/PLAY/Play_5.0.1_Win.zip
Play 5.0.6 Link is: http://software.soundsonline.com/Products/PLAY/Play_5.0.6_Win.zip
Mac:
Play 5.0.1 Link is: http://software.soundsonline.com/Products/PLAY/Play_5.0.1_Mac.zip
Play 5.0.6 Link is: http://software.soundsonline.com/Products/PLAY/Play_5.0.6_Mac.zip
Play and Opus are the hosting User Interface apps, or ‘sound engines’ for East West instruments. They either run as a stand alone program on their own, or as a ‘plugin’ inside a DAW. All plugin libraries are based on some UI and sound-engine. I.E. Garritan uses something called “ARIA Player”, Native Instruments uses something called “Kontakt”. Steinberg uses “HALion”, etc.
In the context of this thread we are trying to run them inside Dorico as a ‘plugin’.
Play has been around for a long time, and the majority of the East West instruments were designed specifically for this sound engine.
Opus is a very new engine that is meant to be backwards compatible with most of the older East West series of instruments, while adding a lot of enhancements to the newer libraries. Some of the newest instruments are designed specifically for it and take advantage of its many new features. Some of the newest East West instruments are NOT backwards compatible with the older Play sound engine. Since it is ‘brand new’, there may well be some older East West instruments that do not fully work with it yet (either the instruments need updates, or Opus has to have backwards compatibility coded in).
When you purchase an EW Library, or join their subscription cloud, you download an installer and unless you go out of your way to find something older, it will most likely provide the latest versions of Play 6 and Opus.
Play 6 and Opus doesn’t seem to be working well directly in Dorico for reasons unknown to me. At least not instruments that use the wordbuilder (I haven’t really tried others at this point).
VST is a protocol patented by Steinberg for building and implementing plugins for a host application to be ‘extended’ by running and communicating with new process threads. It defines how to update visual elements on a computer screen, and how to have a host communicate with a plugin.
VST2 is an older implementation of the protocol.
VST3 is the current standard.
Because many people are still using hosts that do not yet support VST3, most sound library producers try to continue providing a VST2 version of their plugins for solid legacy support.
VST3 is pretty bleeding edge. While most of the leading DAWs that support VST plugins are trying to keep up with this ‘bleeding edge’, it is much more difficult for ‘scoring apps’ like Dorico, Sibelius, and Finale to keep up. The overhead for developing the ‘scoring’ side of the software is so intense that updates to the ‘play engine’ aspect of such software can take a year or more to ‘catch up’ to what ‘tracking DAWs’ provide in terms of ‘play engine development’. So…several scoring apps don’t do VST3 at all yet, and Dorico is a bit behind the Cubase flagship product on supporting it.
In this context, by ‘bridge’ I mean using some other dll or vst3 plugin (software) to serve as an intermediary between Dorico and other plugins. Think of it as a host inside a host.
I.E. Dorico hosts an instance of Bidule. Inside bidule, I launch Play and/or Opus.
The hosts, or ‘bridges’ I mention here are third party software.
Bidule is a host and sound design tool. It’s popular for music software diagnostics, expanding MIDI controller features, complicated effect arrays, sound design, plugin chaining (expand insert capabilities when one runs out of inserts in a DAW’s native mixer), and serving instruments to multiple apps or computers at the same time. It’s more or less a miniture DAW that can be run in stand alone for serving or live performing, as a plugin inside other hosts, or connected to a Master or Slave host via ReWire. It can also be used as a remote sound server kind of like VEP with extra software for the networking side of things.
VEP (Vienna Pro Ensemble) also provides a ‘host inside a host’ sort of plugin bridge. It goes a step further in that plugins can be set up in a ‘server’ configuration that can actually run on a different computer and send the sound back to the host via networking protocols. This software is popular for offloading resource demands to secondary systems, serving instruments to multi-workstation studios, and for the convenience of being able to easily port a similar or identical sound stage across multiple DAWs on the local system.
VIP is software that ships with a number of AKAI MIDI controllers, and can also be purchased independently of owning an Akai controller. The concept behind this software is simply to make it easy to manage and use instruments directly from a single MIDI Controller using the buttons/dials/wheels and displays on the controller. Like Bidule and VEP, it can be loaded into a Host like Dorico, and then other plugins can be loaded into VIP from there. In short, in a single plugin space of something like Dorico, one can load multiple plugins and effects into a sub-mix, of which the controls can be driven remotely via MIDI and/or VST controller lanes.
In the case of jBridge: It was primarily designed to run 32 bit plugins in 64bit hosts, or vice verse. It’s also kind of like a ‘host inside a host’. It provides a number of flag options for how memory is managed, and for forcing different behaviors and/or interpretations over the years on how the VST protocol should be implemented. I think it can also ‘bridge’ plugins with the same memory bit width. It sets up unique memory space for the plugin it’s hosting.
There are several threads here on the forums discussing the use of East West instruments with Dorico. You might even find where people are sharing expression maps and such. Forum searches are the best way to hunt them down.
As for the bridges, I share that information mainly for people who might have this software or similar at hand and would like to try it as an ‘option’ against rolling back East West Play to version 5.
It would seem the ‘easiest’ solution at this time for Dorico is to install Play 5 (can be downloaded from the East West Support Area on the web). If you have other DAWs that might better support Opus, such as Cubase, or would like to use it in stand alone mode, go ahead and install Opus as well.
Bridging isn’t necessary unless you also want to try out some newer instruments that were built exclusively for Opus.