You can still get Play 5. Their tech support is quite good and would provide links for rolling back. Plus these older links still work (just no longer seem to be referenced on the support page, not sure why. Hurray for the WayBack Machine!).
Thank you for the links - I have downloaded the Play 5.0.6 as a zip file, but due to my computerās very limited RAM (4 Gb at present, soon to be increased to 16G) I will just keep it as a zip file, and will unzip it later - I do not wish to crash my whole system !
Can I now download EWSC ? Is that also in a zip file, or will I have to wait until Play 5.0.6 is up and running ? Sorry, but I am still asking questions !
If you purchase a library you own permanent rights to use the software and instruments. Installation procedures for a given library might vary. Iām not sure if theyād send you the same Installation Center linked to some sort of account that Cloud users use, or if theyād just give you a key of some sort and a dedicated download for your product.
If you join their Composer Cloud, you have access to pretty much ALL of their libraries based on a monthly or yearly subscription fee. Cloud members use a main EW Installer where Opus, the latest version of Play, and full libraries can be downloaded. Cloud members can also use Opus or Play 6 to download individual instruments on an as need basis.
They offer different levels of libraries, and Composer Cloud Subscriptions. Gold level stuff tends to be 16bit samples, and comes with 1 or 2 mic positions (I.E. Close and Mid). Platinum and Diamond might offer higher bit rates for samples, and will usually include more mic positions and staging options for instruments (and sometimes other features as well). Composer Cloud X gets you all Gold Level libraries in the least. Composer Cloud Plus opens the door to every mic position and feature in every library.
If they have demo downloads for EWSC, Iām not sure where to get them. One might enquire through the āleave a messageā pop up on their website, or perhaps through their Facebook Page.
One could also subscribe for just one month at a time, on an as need basis, and have access to everything EW. Take the instruments you like for a trial run that way, and later buy the ones you want outright.
They are currently running a special on subscriptions, but to get the discount one has to commit to a full year.
I think we need to get some input from someone like Paul or someone from the audio development side of the team despite the heroic efforts from @Brian_Roland in particular to shed light on all of this. I decided to revisit this whole business of PLAY 6 and remain puzzled.
Basically, how Wordbuilder works is that it automatically allocates channels for different sounds in the text in a way which is completely transparent to the user. Provided just a single channel is selected in WBāirrelevant which but under no circumstances omni, multi or the like ā everything works fine with Play 5 as long as you have one instance per voice as is made clear in the instructions.
However, this channel distribution simply doesnāt seem to work natively with Play 6 in Dorico. It does however, work fine in Sibelius which begs the question what is it in the audio engine which interacts differently in Dorico? The only significant difference conceded by EWQL support is the different behaviour of MIDI off. With Play 6, it is imperative to have a specific MIDI off generated which will not happen with repeated notes at 100% duration. In Dorico it should be a trivial fix by ensuring the default note length is under 100 which it usually is anyway. But Dorico simply doesnāt play back the WB text at all or in my case, produces a sort of wailing drone.
Ideally, Dorico and EWQL teams should knock heads together to try and work out whatās going on. After all, these Symphonic and Hollywood Choirs are the only choirs software on the market which allows free text input and are thus in widespread use. As it appears that the behaviour in Wordbuilder with the new player OPUS is broadly similar to Play 6 and that Play will in due course inevitably be discontinued, I think a lot of Dorico users would be very grateful to get to the bottom this once and for all.
Just checking - before you guys spend any more time - have you brought that lib up in the Opus player itself? Which, though I no longer use EWQL and canāt test, I have brought up much of the older stuff in Opus. It is meant to replace Play completely I believe and would expect it to have the latest of any fixes.
weāre talking specifically about Wordbuilder here ā most other EWQL products should work OK in both Play and Opus to the best of my knowledge in Dorico. However, to be clear, I would be perfectly happy if Symphonic choirs in Dorico works with Opus but not Play 6. Weāre all agreed that Opus is the way forward.
Naturally, as things stand, you must buy a new product (or subscribe) to get Opus but Iāve no objections to adding the Hollywood choirs to my collection while the sale is on at any rate. Those who have tested both Play 6 and Opus conclude that they appear to have similar issues. Neither have been demonstrated to work.
Thank you to dko22 for reopening this thread and summing up so accurately what many of us are experiencing. I did just buy the Hollywood Choirs, specifically to get the Opus player in the hopes that it would work successfully in Dorico, but alas, as mentioned above, it is the same as with PLAY v.6. Specifically, once you have assigned an instance of OPUS choirs with WordBuilder to a stave you can play the text back on your keyboard, but once you put some notes onto the stave and hit play, nothing happens. You can see the notes from Dorico being depressed on the OPUS GUI keyboard, but there is no sound. There is something about the way Dorico sends the midi back out which is different to when you are playing midi in. I tested the same scenario in Logic Pro and it works fine, however the track midi assignment in Logic is set to Omni, something that you cannot do with Dorico and I suspect that this is part of the problem. This does not however explain why some versions of PLAY v.5 workā¦for me on a Mac, V.5.01 works.
Finding a solution would make many of us very happy, so many thanks to Ulf for investigating. We will await his findings and then hope that a solution can be implemented.
I will mention that the OPUS player seems to be a much better piece of software than PLAY ever was - The choir load times are certainly much quicker, particularly from an SSD and there is even a āstream directly from the diskā option which reminded me of Gigasampler all those years ago! However, not making OPUS readily available to past customers without buying a new library or signing up for the Composer Cloud is unfortunate.
Sorry guys, I need a bit of help.
I have now a Composer Cloud license, installed Play and downloaded the Hollywood Choir Gold library, and I do get some sound out.
So that at least is good but obviously not enough. What is with this Wordbuilder, where do I get that from or how does it work? I see in the Play UI the button for Wordbuilder, but nothing happens when I click on it.
And does someone maybe have a demo project (or can create one) that shows the problematic behaviour?
I donāt have Hollywood Choirs so canāt really help there. Probably @Grainger2001 or others will be in a better position to assist. If you also have Symphonic Choirs and Vienna Ensemble Pro, then let me know and I can post a Dorico project and .vesp64 configuration file. That will show how Wordbuilder is used.
Thanks @dko22 . In the meantime I figured out that I have to load a Wordbuilder patch and then that button becomes active and I get the UI where I can type in text. The choir is singing beautifully, but it does not sound like what I typed in thereā¦
I guess youāll need to be a bit more specific. Is it actually singing some text from what youāve written but not in the right place? If thatās the case thatās probably just a question of Wordbuilder beginning at the beginning after each stop and weāre a lot further forward. If itās not singing actual text at all but only vowels or something then perhaps weāre not.
in that case, I suspect you have loaded a normal patch instead of a Wordbuilder one! The Wordbuilder patches are suffixed by WB after the section name and are found in the āmultisā section if itās the same as Symphonic Choirs
I do have the āMEN WB Multiā loaded, otherwise the Wordbuilder button wonāt even do anything. Then I get the default text āu nO bE gin ingā but the choir sings something else that I canāt even recognize.
apologies ā you did say that and I completely forgot when writing the reply! It was a case of reacting without thinking. At the moment, it might be better to see if someone else picks up the thread who actually owns the Hollywood Choirs and PLAY 6 for a better point of comparison
To be fair, from what I understand it takes quite a lot of massaging to really get it to sound good.
Ulf, perhaps you could try some of the stock latin phrases to see if they respond any better, since they are coded by the developers. If youāre still getting weird responses to those phrases, then you can pinpoint it to some communication failure between EW and Dorico, since those phrases cycle nicely with most DAWs.
