For those not using it, $78 seems to be a pretty good price.
NotePerformer on sale for 40% off through April
Note that only Sibelius is fully supported. Though there are a large number of Finale and Dorico users, officially, NotePerformer is still in beta for those platforms.
I might jump on this.
appreciate the heads up, I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to spring for noteperformer. might just rip the bandaid off and go for it now.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks. I did buy the product from Avid this evening. This page summarizes the state of implementation on Dorico. Many features are supported, and many are not. But some of the playback features not supported in MP aren’t supported by Dorico directly.
If you try the demo, it tends to hang up, but I haven’t had any problems with the paid version. Please note that the paid version is a separate installation. You can install it on top of the demo. The demo doesn’t work with Dorico’s Export to Audio. Rather than just not working, it causes Dorico to hang and you have to blow away everything. The paid version seems to work fine.
Thanks for the heads-up. I’m not big on demos. If I think I might have a use for an app and the price fits into my budget, I jump in.
The demo does time out after a short while (can’t remember how long - 20 minutes?) which is documented behaviour.
Sometimes it used to hang Dorico when it timed out. I don’t know if that is supposed to have been fixed, or if it has actually been fixed (two different questions, of course).
Was “buying it from Avid” a typo? Even if they are reselling it (rather than buying direct from Wallander), why give them a share of the profit - they aren’t developing it!
It’s on a 40% discount from Avid at the moment, Rob. I can confirm that regardless of the marketing blurb on Avid’s site, it works happily with Dorico and Finale.
I saw a post about it on the Sibelius forum but since I already have NP I didn’t read the small print.
Of course, for software in general, a sudden cut price offer sometimes means the next paid upgrade is coming soon (where “soon” means “just after the free upgrade period has expired” of course).
What, me cynical? never!
Yeah, but every NotePerformer update so far has been free to all existing customers.
A question to NotePerformer Dorico users:
I’m interested specifically in ‘non-vibrato’ for Violin (which is not possible with HSO).
In the Articulation section of the NotePerformer pdf manual (Dorico section), they indicate ‘Vibrato’ controls as incomplete.
Does it mean ‘non-vib.’ is not possible in Dorico (at least currently)?
TIA,
IB
You can control CC 105 (in Noteperformer it’s vibrato intensity) and CC 106 (vibrato speed) by clicking it into Dorico’s tracks in Play mode.
NP does understand the predefined “non vib.” playback technique used on its own.
What “incomplete” means is that it may not interact properly with other playing techniques. That is a limitation in the current version of Dorico, not in NotePerformer. NP has partially worked round it by creating playback techniques for most common combinations, but there is a limit to how far that can go before the result is just an unmanageable mess with literally thousands of different entries in the expression map.
Looking at the expression map, non vib. should work with some other “basic” techniques like detaché, marcato, etc, but probably not with more complicated combinations.
If you want a particular combination of techniques that include non vib., you can add it yourself to the expression map, but it’s not practical for NP to provide every possible combination straight out of the box.
This is what the solo and section violins sound like, with and without vibrato. Note, the change in articulation for the shorter notes is NP’s artificial intelligence algorithm, not a playing technique marked in the score. The section non vib. has detuning between the individual players in the section, so it’s not a “pure” sound.
NP violin demo.zip (1.24 MB)
True, but it’s going to get very frustrating doing that on a large scale, with the current playback editor.
One limitation of the playback editor is that you can’t “draw” a step change in a midi controller value, only a gradual change. You can make a step change by adding a playing technique and a corresponding playback technique.
True, but cynics have one advantage over optimists: optimists tend to get bad surprises, but cynics tend to get good ones 
People see what they expect to see. So optimists tend to miss the bad surprises.
Gentlemen, thank you very much for elaborate explanations and the demo.
In fact, you can demand some credit from the developer for ‘luring’ another customer into purchasing the app 
IB
I don’t know, but I have had 3 times in the first 24 hours where I have had to blow Dorico away and actually reboot before I could resume using NP.
They are clear that the current support is beta level. When it works, it does sound good.
I think my workflow for now will be to normally work using the Halion sounds and only apply the NP template when I am ready to render an audio file. It is very easy to switch from Halion to NP, although you will lose mixer settings in the process.
For $70, I’m not at all unhappy with that, as I expect it will get better over time. It will be nice once all the articulations (scoops, falls, etc) are playing.
Last day, I pulled the trigger and descended to avid.com hell. Long story short, I had to switch to Safari but I was finally able to complete my purchase.
Now to try it out.
I didn’t have any problems (in spite of not having logged into my account in so long there was a mandatory password update! 
). At the moment I don’t even have a need for NP strictly speaking; I typically have the default template on “silent”. I purchased it anyway just to have when I need it and to get the deal while I could. I’ll spend some time this summer working on big hymn arrangements at which point I’m sure I’ll be glad I took the plunge.
I did too, and am glad I did so. It’s remarkable, especially at that price. 