Hello wise folks… I’m sure that with the switch from Finale to Dorico this information will hopefully help out a lot of folks. I’ve actually been using Dorico for quite some time, but I’ve recently fallen back in love with the Finale sounds after logging back in to check out some of my old projects after hearing the news. I’m pretty set on getting these sounds working within Dorico now, but honestly although I’d like to say I’m pretty technically savvy I am having some serious trouble with getting these to work properly.
First… I can’t even get the Aria player to make any noise when I load in instruments. Not sure what the problem there is… but I feel like I’m probably just not setting it up correctly?
Second, of course expression maps need to be made for all of the instruments, and I’ve tried REALLY hard to dive into that process a few times and have never been able to fully figure it out.
For those of us that are new to the process (and especially for those of you who might be new to Dorico in general), it would be super helpful to have a sort of mega-tutorial on how to get this all working properly (and, to be honest, if anybody happened to have playback templates/expression maps already made and was willing to share them that would be great, lol… but I’ll also need a tutorial on how to install those )
Thanks so much in advance, and I hope that if you’re new to these processes and want to get the sounds working within dorico this can be helpful for you as well as me!
You’ll find Expression Maps for GPO5, along with a Playback Template that works on Mac here:
There’s also extensive documentation about how to work with Garritan and ARIA in Dorico.
If you only have GIFF, then you only need the ‘basic’ GPO Default map for sustaining instruments; and you can use the Dorico built-in Default map for Percussion.
Hey, so I actually did download that file that you had in there, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get the .doricolib file in. I was hoping that would solve my problem, and in your documentation you said I would just have to drag it to the hub but I couldn’t get it to work. Is there a step I’m missing there? And if I were to drag that in, would that give me a playback template that would theoretically just work with the GIFF instruments or would I still have to create that playback template myself?
You can import the Expression Maps in the Expression Map editor; and the Playback Template can be imported in the Playback template dialog.
No, for the GIFF instruments, you would still have to setup the ARIA Player for each instrument. Once that’s done, you can save it as one or more endpoints.
Okay, that at least sounds like it will save me a few steps, haha!
Side question… if I were to set up each instrument would I want to use the “aria multi” or “aria” player and in that case, would I want to set up each instrument as its own separate aria player or should it be set up as one aria player that has a bunch of instruments in it?
I think it depends. If you are only going to be using one patch per instrument, go the multi route and stick 16 instruments in a single ARIA multi instance. Whereas if you are wanting to use multiple patches for a single instrument, I’d probably use one ARIA instance for each instrument.
When you apply a Playback template, you are loading in whatever you saved.
So if you saved one Multi-output VST with 16 instruments, and you create a new document with only one Violin, Dorico will still load the VST with the 16 instruments together.
That’s why saving each Dorico instrument as a separate ARIA Player is more efficient, unless it’s something that you’re likely to always use together.
Multiple VSTs use more CPU, but not significantly more memory. (Garritan samples are quite light, by today’s standards anyway.)