Finale’s Garritan instruments

[pfmusician]

Is there an easy way to use Finale’s Garritan instruments in Dorico? I’m not happy with the Dorico sounds. I’d like to just start a project and hear the Finale sounds automatically without doing workarounds. Thanks in advance.

[Eggsalad]

Aria Player works with Dorico. To use it, or any VST, you either load it manually or apply a Playback Template which includes it. Playback Templates are easy to apply to projects but not easy to create.

Here’s info on loading VSTs manually:

Loading VST/MIDI instruments manually

Here’s info on Playback Templates:

Playback templates

@benwiggy created GPO Expression Maps, Playback Templates, and other helpful Garritan-Dorico things (not sure if these are the most recent versions):

Dorico Expression Maps for GPO5

Here are my Expression Maps for using GPO5 with Dorico. The package includes: documentation of what I’ve done, so that you can understand it and adapt it to your needs; a spreadsheet of what switches and CCs various instrument groups use, and which Brass instruments use which maps. There’s also a general-purpose Garritan Ex map, which should work (to some degree) for other Garritan libraries, such as the bundled Finale instruments. Let me know how you get on, and if there are any egregious pro…

Hope this helps!

EDIT
This topic was recently discussed here:

Setting ARIA Player as default

You’ll need to create a playback template, and then set that playback template to be the default for new projects on the Play page of Preferences. That sounds simple, but there’s quite a bit to it. The first question: which sounds do you want to use? The Garittan Instruments For Finale? GPO5? Something else? You’ll then need to create a project that contains the instruments whose sounds you want to change, manually assign the ARIA Player and load the appropriate sounds for each one, then speci…