@Wallander : Let me start by saying I’m an idiot and the problem I’m about to describe was entirely self-inflicted. And I think there’s an opportunity for NotePerformer (or something) to be more helpful when I’m an idiot.
I use Dorico 5 + NotePerformer 4 + NPPE + BBCSO Core on Mac, and I’m super happy with all of them. Today I was able to create a score that played normally with NotePerformer and HALion, and showed the correct routing and connection and activity with NPPE (white box around the instrument, MIDI clearly being transmitted), but NPPE audio was silent, no matter what I did. Maddening.
Eventually I realized I had not connected the SSD that holds my BBCSO installation.
Again, totally my fault. And I wonder if NotePerformer could be made smart enough to detect that there’s no actual VST content where it should be, and present an error message accordingly. If not, I’ll just have to work on making myself smart enough.
Welcome to the forum, David. It might be worth sending this message directly to the support team at Wallander Instruments for their consideration, as I believe Arne himself is currently enjoying a well-earned summer holiday.
If you were using the BBCSO VST directly in Dorico, or Cubase, you would see some indication of the problem when you opened the plug-in window; but the host app wouldn’t flag an error saying “Spitfire samples missing”.
Noteperformer is passing commands to the BBCSO VST, but it’s unlikely that Spitfire have provided communication in the other direction about ‘an internal matter’.
I posted this here partly as a cautionary tale for other Dorico users who might do something similar, and tagged Wallander because I’ve seen Arne engage with folks here. I did look for a similar forum on the Wallander Instruments site, but had not found one as of the time I posted here. Of course, now that I’ve gone back there this morning, the contact form jumped out at me.
I’ll get right to work on the “make myself smart enough” plan. Wish me luck.
I’m actually a bit surprised that NP doesn’t automatically switch to native mode – this usually happens when NPPE fails for any reason. After all, your Dorico project is only set to use the NP playback configuration and has no idea it’s supposed to call up NPPE – that side is taken care of by NotePerformer itself.
Unfortunately, there’s no standardized way for a VST3 host to detect if the plug-in is functioning or not. The plug-in may or may not return an error when loading a preset, but more often than not, the plug-in won’t return an error even if the samples are missing. It may not even know that the samples are missing until background loading reaches the point of processing that sample.
I’ve considered ways of detecting problems with plug-ins by analyzing the output, but it’s kind of complicated. Of course, we want it to be as robust as possible.
I’m not in any hurry.