I recently purchased BBC Symphony Orchestra Pro (BBCSOP) and the corresponding playback engine in NotePerformer (NP). When I use NP’s native sounds in Dorico, playback works fine; however, when I use NP’s playback engine with BBCSOP, there is no sound.
I have troubleshooted all the usual ways from Dorico’s videos and the forums with no success. Here are the steps I followed, and I’ve also attached a diagnostic report:
I opened the NP playback engines, loaded the BBCSOP sounds, and kept it running in the background.
I confirmed that Dorico’s edit instrument the NP dialogue box shows a white border around the instruments, indicating the NP playback engine is being used.
It seems to me my Cinematic Studio Solo Strings, while present, have faded in volume to almost nothing since their original purchase. At first they were well balanced with the rest of NP, but now they are barely audible, and I am mystified what happened or how to correct it. Even pumping up the NP faders does not compensate.
Some things - when I put Rev-rence in a slot it killed the sound of NP and NPPE. Also, I need to check the save function of either Dorico or NPPE. I could swear the EQ function reverted to its neutral position even after I thought I had saved it.
Neither of these issues stopped me from getting the right sound, but I manually checked to make sure the EQ volume was where I wanted, and for the moment I discontinued trying to use Rev.
I’m getting no sound at all from Noteperformer 4’s playback engine using BBCSO Pro plugins. Nothing. I can’t get it to work with the new playback engine.
even the BBC Core orchestra takes forever to load so if you’re trying it out in less than a few minutes, that might be the reason. Unlike some other NPPE plug-ins, the BBC are very far from being fully loaded when the final splash screen is displayed – you need to watch the RAM counter
Having said this, I doubt very much if you’ll get very far with BBC Pro and 32Gb RAM. NPPE demands about twice as much RAM unfortunately as using the library natively and even that’s pretty hard on the processor (I’d never be able to run Pro with my under-specced processor). Still, if you change the swapfile to allow more virtual memory, that can certainly help. A CSS full orchestra will take about 50Gb RAM. I recently upgraded to 48Gb and with boosted virtual memory, it’s now fairly comfortable. BBC Core will be fine with the RAM - it needs a bit over 20Gb typically.
Is your computer set up adequately for BBCSO? You need at least 64g of ram and a better than 3-something processor speed for BBCSO. I have core, but do to the limits of my machine I can only use a quartet/quintet of instruments- if I tweak my asio driver. Any more instruments and the rest of them don’t play.
Thank you, everyone! It sounds like I should get a more powerful system before committing to Notesperformer 4’s playback engine. That said, when I used it with BBCSO Core, it worked really well. Anyway, thanks for the advice!
I don’t think it’s your computer specs that are causing this issue. Sure, it might not run smoothly, but you should get SOME audio.
I have a new macbook pro M3 Max with 128GB ram and am experiencing the exact same issue that you have described here, but with HOOPUS sounds. Definitely can’t blame the machine in this situation!
Start with opening the plugin UI from NPPE > Slot Settings > Advanced and see if pressing keys in the manufacturer’s UI produces sound.
Ensure the library is on a fast SSD Drive in the range of 500 Megabytes/second. You may need to test the hard drive speed since it can be affected by the cable choice, computer port choice, and other circumstances beyond the drive’s specs.
I’m also not always hearing all the instruments I’m loading into NPPE.
I’m on a 2022 Mac Studio (M1 Max, w/ 64GB).
I’m not sure I understand what is happening when I load instruments from the BBCSO library into NPPE.
I have BBCSO Professional, and have an NPPE license for “BBC Symphony Orchestra Professional”.
When I load section strings I’m not hearing all of the instruments. Same with bones.
I did a test where I loaded only 1 instrument (BBC SO Pro Bassoon, Mix 1), and followed the instructions to open the plugin UI, where the UI is greyed out, and it shows an error (red exclamation mark in the upper left corner of the UI) that seems to be related to the fact that it’s loading the “Core” mode, not “Pro”.
You must download BBC Core, too. It’s included with BBCSO Professional.
Our “Mix 1” presets always use BBCSO Core because it loads three times faster and uses three times less RAM despite sounding the same for that microphone perspective.
If you use “Mix 2”, or “Tree”, the engine will load the Professional preset.
Hi, just chiming in here because I had the exact same issue, and have resolved it, thanks to the above post suggesting opening up the plug-in UI to check what’s going on.
Turns out that, probably because I saved my Spitfire sample library on an external SSD, that the NPPE was looking in the wrong place for the samples and not able to find them. Once I directed it to the correct folder, it has linked the properly now, and we’re away!
