Finale refugee here, maybe 20 working hours on Dorico Pro 5 so far on macOS 15. Dorico has never made any sound, except clicking on notes if I change the popup in *Routing from 02 - HALion Sonic to 01 - Dorico Beep. Since I only want playback to check my work, and since it seems like 913 MB should be sufficient for that purpose, I have downloaded only the first sound library, HALion Sonic 7.1.0 – Instrument.
From watching this old video, I think the problem is that there is no instrument in Slot 1 of my HALion window (see yellow rectangle in bottom screenshot).
I’ve tried changing my player’s instrument from Voice to Piano, but that did not help.
Somewhat confusingly, the word “Instrument” next to HALion is used to describe the VST Player, not the instruments it uses.
So, in a parallel with Finale, it’s like you installed the ARIA Player, but not the Garritan Instruments for Finale.
You need to download the HALion “Content” as well. That will provide you with comprehensive but minimal sounds; and you will need to use the “HALion Sonic Selection” Playback template. (Set this in Preferences > Play to be your default.)
Thank you, @benwiggy. After installing HALion Sonic Selection - Content and relaunching Dorico, I still got no sound. So I visited main menu > Play > Playback Template, did not change anything, hit the Apply and Close button, and for some reason this inserted “Choir Aahs” into that slot, and it plays audio now. Good enough for my purposes.
