Hi,
I am experiencing issues with Dorico 3.5 and conTimbre (https://www.contimbre.com/). I’ve contacted the conTimbre developer as well because I’m not sure whether the issue is a problem with conTimbre or Dorico; however, conTimbre seems to work fine with Cubase 10.5.
The issue I am running into with Dorico and conTimbre is that, if I save my Dorico file and close and reopen Dorico, the ePlayer is back to factory defaults in all instances, which means everything plays with French Horn in F ordinario again and I have to reload all patches. Thankfully there is the ability in conTimbre to save the entire “orchestra” (patch settings) for each VST instance to a .cePlayerOrc file, and so if I save all eight instances of conTimbre ePlayer to eight separate orchestra files and manually reopen the eight orchestra files in each instance after reopening the Dorico project, then everything is back to the way it should be. However in Cubase 10.5 I don’t need to do this - all instances of the conTimbre ePlayer correctly remember their settings upon reload without me having to save these orchestra files manually.
Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks!
This has been discussed here before (you should find it if you search). I’ve put conTimbre’s developer in touch with our expert, Yvan, to try to determine why conTimbre doesn’t save its setup. I’m not sure what the status of their discussions is, so I’ll ask Yvan if he has any news.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks - I found the older thread. I see that person worked around it by loading conTimbre into VE Pro instead, I would prefer to keep it loaded directly however. conTimbre does correctly save all settings properly in Cubase 10.5 as I said, but not Dorico. I found this a little odd since they share the same audio engine so I would have expected the VST hosting code (and code to save the settings) to also be shared with Cubase. Thomas at conTimbre says it is a bug in Dorico that it doesn’t save third party plugin settings, but I tested this by manually loading a Kontakt instance with a few random instruments not linked to staves, and Dorico reopened that just fine. So I reported back to Thomas that the settings for Kontakt get saved properly in Dorico. It seems this issue is so specific that it affects only conTimbre within Dorico, and not other VST plugins in Dorico and not conTimbre loaded in other VSTi hosts.
So I’ve been doing more testing and I have a very interesting update. At the moment I have eight conTimbre instances, as shown in the image below.
ePlayer 02-05, the first four, do NOT save the settings, I have to reload the instruments after loading the patch
ePlayer 06-09, the last four, DO save the settings, if I save, they reload perfectly fine
Does that make any sense?
EDIT: After thinking about it, to me it almost seems like this might be some kind of timing issue. Assuming the instances load in order (ePlayer02 through 09), perhaps when the first four load up, something has not initialized yet and so the preset fails to load, but for the last four since they load a bit later, whatever that is has initialized and so now they restore the settings correctly. I may be off-base there but those are just my initial thoughts.
As a further test, I tried saving the project as a new project with TEMP at the end of the name, removing the eight conTimbre instances, then loading four Kontakt instances (with random Library instruments added) followed by eight conTimbre instances like before. Upon save and reload of the project, the four Kontakt instances reloaded properly, but none of the eight conTimbre instances loaded. Then I reloaded the original project without TEMP at the end and the first four conTimbre instances did not load properly whereas the last four did, like before.