I am a church organist and orchestrator. I have been enjoying Dorico 5 Elements very much.
I hate bloated Avid Sibelius Ultimate, which I have used for many years. Their tech support is nearly non-existent!
Is there a way to run the Hauptwerk Pipe Organ in Dorico 5?
Does it possibly interface with Noteperformer 4?
I would gladly switch all of my files over to Dorico and dump Sibelius if I could score and playback realistic or digitally sampled pipe organs—at least three Manuals and Pedals are necessary!
Hi @Glenn_Tiedemann
It seems from the internet site explanation that it comes with a bridge plugin as VST, so it should very well be usable with Dorico (but since I don’t have this instrument, I am not sure if there are limitations in the usage):
An easy way to connect to your DAW host.
The Hauptwerk AU/VST plug-in link changes the way you can use a highly optimized virtual instrument with your host program. Traditional VSTi instruments are limited in the amount of performance they can achieve when running within a Digital Audio Workstation’s own platform. To remove this limitation Hauptwerk itself runs outside of your AU/VST host as a stand-alone application and instead connects through the ‘Hauptwerk AU/VST Link’ in your sequencer providing a bi-directional bridge for MIDI routing as well as audio routing.
I don’t think that at the moment can be interfaced with Note Performer Playback Engines (if this is what you mean). But you can surely combine it together with other libraries in your Playback Template so that you can use it for the organs sounds and any other VST library for other instruments (if those things are what you mean).
To export your files from Sibelius it is suggested to use the Dolet plugin instead of the built in XML export of Sibelius. It should bring better results. (and in DORICO [corrected: thank you @derrek] you have many preferences for XML import that you can activate/deactivate as needed, and if you deactivate most of that options, apart from “text items”, Dorico will recreate the visualisation with its magical algorithms.)
From the Dorico Edition Comparison page, it looks like Expression maps are supported on all versions.
An alternative to Hauptwerk is the Garritan Pipe Organs, using the ARIA Player VST.
It uses much less CPU and RAM than Hauptwerk, though it’s perhaps harder to configure and change stops. One good thing about its being lightweight is that you can run multiple instances of it and switch between them.
My question, Ben, was whether Elements would allow Glenn to configure custom Expression Maps to take advantage of Hauptwerk and change stops easily. (I admit I didn’t make that clear enough.)
Thanks for the shoutout. Truth is, I RARELY use Dorico’s playback functionality. While I am indeed a HW user, I make real recordings, and sync my videos to those. I haven’t had Dorico drive HW in well over a year, and even then, I did stop controls and recording directly in HW. I do know there are other users on the forum who have done expression maps, but I cannot recall now their names.
Garritan cannot hold a candle to HW in terms of sonic quality. To my ear at least, the Garritan organ is hardly better than a 1990’s Casio keyboard’s “church organ” sound (I’m not a fan of organteq either, although there are people who like it). HW recordings can be indistinguishable from recordings made on the real instrument.