As I have been out of the loop with sample libraries and such for almost a decade, I want to go forward with Dorico as my chosen scoring package. Is this offer from East West (Hollwood Sounds) significantly better than what comes out of the box with Dorico (I think it’s Halion 5…though probably a cut-down version). Will I be able to access Hollywood Orchestra from Dorico in the future? This offer apparently ends today, the last day of Namm. Any advice gratefully received. (I did tag this question on to a separate thread but thought it worth starting a new thread)
Al
Technically you can use it now, however you’ll need to build expression maps for each articulation of each instrument. And right now, some of those triggers are not working. It is my desire to do this very thing, although with the whole Spitfire Audio collection and other sample libraries I have, though I do have the Hollywood strings and brass. I think it is perfectly safe to say you will get very basic limited use now, but with each update they will be addressing issues and adding new tools to make Dorico the best notation program for working with samples.
Also one thing to mention, I don’t know if Play works in Dorico - I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but I haven’t tested it personally. Even if it doesn’t (maybe its’ not VST3 or something, I don’t know), you would be able to load it through a VST host such as Vienna Ensemble Pro (that’s how I do it).
Just know that for anyone planning to use 3rd party samples, setting up your sounds for your score will always be manual… it will never be automatic like their integration of Halion is shaping up to be.
Thanks for the reply Bach…
I’d not heard of the ‘Spitfire’ library but just went and watched this:
I’ve never used Logic but it would be great if Dorico’s ‘Play’ section matured enough to be able to operate simple solo / mutes / record, draw in expression / volume data, edit note data…much in the same way as Oliver shows in the demo.
It’s not cheap though is it…£1499. Is that the starting price?
Cheers,
Al
It is certainly the plan that Play mode will in due course give much more control over playback: timing and position of notes, levels of dynamics, drawing of tempo and controller curves, etc.
That sounds about right, in it’s current iteration. The price has gone down over the years, overall… and it all used to be sold as individual instruments - a little less so with the strings, but still in several volumes. It’s all been recently repackaged and updated.
The EW Hollywood Libraries are a bit older than the majority of the spitfire orchestra, but still sound fantastic. Many will argue the Hollywood strings are still the best, and in some respects I agree. (these days most everything is excellent, and it comes down to which tone/timbre you prefer). I don’t reach for the Hollywood libraries much anymore because it’s RAM footprint is larger than Kontakt based libraries. Play, when I last looked at it, had fewer options for loading less of each sample into RAM before it starts streaming from your drive. (SSD in this case with Kontakt lets you reduce the RAM buffer considerably more). That said, HW Strings have an incredible feature to choose what position the players play on the neck - which means that compared to other libraries, if you desire the brightness and ring of some open strings coming through (for a hoedown or maybe some irish music), you can get it. (Assuming you write it in the proper key!)
Play 5.0.1 works in Dorico. The general problem with the Hollywood scheme is that (mostly) each articulation needs its own Midi Channel, an approach that is not accommodated in the current incarnation of Dorico’s Expression Map system…
Just been watching the Spitfire Symphonic Strings walkthrough here:
WOW! I can see why the library is so expensive. There must be thousands of man hours involved to make a library like that. I think I’ll hold fire on the Hollywood offer until I understand more about the implications of ‘Play’…this is a sample player like ‘Kontakt’ that holds your libraries, no?.. and how Dorico will develop to accomodate these.
Yes, Play is a sample player, comparable to the free Kontakt Player (while the full Kontakt is of course a lot more). Currently Dorico is designed to handle articulation (playing technique) switching using key switches (or controller codes) on a SINGLE Midi channel, whereas the Hollywood approach does not use this scheme, instead requiring that each articulation sits on its own Midi Channel. For instance arco on channel 1, legato on channel 2, pizzicato on channel 3. etc. Since each instance of Play can accomodate a max of 16 channels, you can easily end up with needing a single Play instance for a single instrument. in Dorico’s Expression map system you cannot currently route individual articulations to its own midi channel. I’m sure this will be possible at some point. It looks like routing each voice to its own channel will be implemented first, but that’s not really a practical solution for articulation switching…
Not strictly true: Dorico is designed so that playing techniques for a single voice or instrument may be routed to any channel. We designed it so that you can mix and match your preferred sounds for each instrument: they don’t even need to be provided by the same plugin. So you can use legato sounds from one plugin and pizz from another, if you so wish.
However, there’s still a lot of UI work we need to do on this to make it all accessible (along with the ability to route voices independently). The low levels of the application are written to handle it though.
I’m certainly aware that this is work in progress, that’s why I wrote «currently»…
however, switching voices to switch articulations is not a solution…
I didn’t say that switching voices is the solution. I said that we aim to support independent routing of each playing technique per voice.
Oh, that’s great. Can’t wait!
Thanks for all the replies, it’s certainly helped. If I went ahead with the Spitfire collection as mentioned above, how useful would the collection currently be as Dorico stands now? Would it probably be the case that to get the best out of it now, I’d be better getting the latest version of Cubase and running it in that (which I haven’t run since the Atari days…).
Cheers,
Al
