I have been using NotePerformer 4 + Spitfire BBCSO on a friend’s computer. I did several projects with that setup and I was absolutely happy with the workflow.
I decided to purchase NotePerformer for my own computer, and today I bought NotePerformer 5. I didn’t know I wouldn’t be able to use the Playback Engines anymore.
I wrote to NP support and they told me that I could downgrade to NP 4.5.1, but that if I never purchased the Playback Engines when they were available, I won’t be able to use them now. At the moment I can only run them in trial mode.
I would massively appreciate any help. How could I fix this? This is really important for me, since this was the best workflow I’ve ever tried and now I have lots of urgent commissions.
Sadly Janus is right. There’s no way round this that I know of. There are also no competing products that do the same thing.
You can use BBCSO directly with Dorico, but you lose out on the Noteperformer goodness.
The best solution is probably to write the music on your computer, use BBCSO directly with Dorico, and ask your friend if he can do the rendering on his computer.
I also have them. It is sad as Richard said-especially since Spitfire and Vienna stated clearly in the forum during the playback engine kerfuffle about NP 5.0 that they were perfectly fine with using their libraries with NP and Dorico
this for me is also the annoying thing. I can understand that if one company had threatened a lawsuit then support for that company could be quietly dropped but when big names like VSL and Spitfire have stated explicitly that they are happy with NPPE, then the only reason I can think of for dropping support is that it doesn’t pay. Which also makes no sense to me as most of us would accept paying for the engines (in 4.5.1. format for the sake of argument), even without technical support for them. I obviously don’t have the figures for how many NP users also use one or more playback engines but I’d be surprised if it’s really the minority of serious users that the company claim.
At least for me, unlike with the BBCSO Core where I continue to use NPPE, I’ve managed with the Spitfire Symphony Orchestra to get results which overall are probably better with my own maps than NPPE (in trial mode) – partly because of the way the microphones are dealt with in the latter which don’t allow the sound to blossom in quite the same way. The BBC Core only uses one mic position anyway.
