Dorico and MIDI

I am stuck for space on my SSD. Question is “can I unload the Halion Sounds and use MIDI instead”. Help please…

Yes, you can add MIDI Instruments to Dorico’s Play mode, so if you’ve got hardware that makes noises, that should work. (I’ve used it to control software MIDI instruments external to Dorico, but the principle should be the same.)
However, it’s always best to fit the hardware to your data, not the other way round. Can you swap the SSD for a larger one, or put some stuff on an external? You can get super slim USB thumb drives for laptops which are barely noticeable. (If you’ve got ports for it.)

I’m pretty sure I uninstalled the Halion Sounds some time ago for the same reasons (low HDD space) and have had no issues, I’m using mostly Noteperformer instead. It may ask you where they are when you start up Dorico again but I believe you can suppress that message as well.

I would like to forget about Halion sounds and just play back using General MIDI on my Macbook Pro, with no special external hardware. I asked the question a couple of years ago and got this reply: https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=103643&p=648304#p648304

Although some people said it was possible at the time, it never worked for me. Since Daniel said it couldn’t be done back in 2016, I gave up and used Halion sounds. I still do.

If someone could now give me step-by-step instructions to replace my Halion sounds with MIDI playback, allowing me to uninstall a big sound library that I don’t really need, I’d be extremely grateful!

No: you can’t use Apple’s built-in General MIDI samples directly, because they are only accessible through Apple’s own Audio Units, rather than VST, which is what Dorico uses.

There is a nice app on the Mac App Store called DLS-MIDI-Synth, which routes MIDI data to Apple’s GM samples. It’s possible that turning on MacOS’s IAC Driver in Audio-MIDI Setup, you can then set the IAC Bus as the MIDI Instrument ‘out’ in Dorico, and then use IAC Bus as the input on DLS-MIDI-Synth.

However, as said, if you’ve been short of disk storage for two years, then really that’s a hardware problem. You can get replacement SSDs for MacBook Pros: either standard SATA ones to replace mechanical drives; or for newer ones that come with SSDs, there are third-party modules by Transcend or OWC. I picked up a secondhand 512 GB Apple part on eBay for my 2014 MBP. Alternatively, there are ‘low-profile’ thumb drives and SD cards.

On my MBP, with sample libraries from Dorico, Finale and Logic, my User folder is still more than twice the size of all the System and apps and samples. If you must remove something, is there any chance you could remove some user files? There’s an excellent free app called OmniDiskSweeper, which lists your disk’s folders by size, showing you what’s taking up the most room.

in my case, I’m not short of disk space. (But your tips might be of value to the OP.)

Well, you were 2 year ago, and you’re now wanting to claw back 10 Gb! :wink:

Nah. Even 2 years ago, I wasn’t so short of space. It just irritated me to give up a large amount of space on my hard disk to something I don’t need. Maybe I’m just a neat freak.