I recently purchased the BBCSO, and have installed it on an external hard drive. I tried importing the playback template that dorico has on their website regarding the expression maps and what have you, but when I try to playback some of the scores I’ve written, the audio is completely missing. Notably, the Violins I still play back, but it is the only one that does. Does anyone have any ideas what the issue is?
Does Play menu > Playback template show BBCSO?
I do not have BBCSO but it is the first thing to check, otherwise someone else will help you.
1 Like
Welcome to the forum @Michael_McClellan .
And very good advice from @arco.
Just installing the BBCSO templates is not good enough, you need to apply them to your Dorico project. You do that with the dialog that you invoke via the menu item Play > Playback Template. So is BBCSO listed there? And if you double click on it, will the BBCSO plug-in instances start to load? You need to be quite patient. BBCSO is huge and takes a bit of time to load all the sample data.
If still in trouble, load one of your projects and then do from the menu Help > Create Diagnostic Report and post here the corresponding zip file.
Yeah I’ve double checked it a few times, it’s not that it doesn’t load the template, it’s that the template doesn’t playback any sound from the vsts.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.5 MB)
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.3 MB)
do you have the BBC SO Core or Pro? If the former, perhaps you could attach an example project to see if it works here as I have that library.
Just a thought – if only violin1 plays back, the most common issue is that all the instruments are set to to different channels but only the one on channel 1 - the first violin – will play back. That’s because the BBC libraries are not multi-timbral – there is a separate instance for each instrument so they would all use the initial channel . However, if you’ve applied the BBC template, that should sort everything out for you automatically so it would be useful to see the exact set up.
All of them are on channel 1. I had some difficulties downloading the vst, so I do technically have the core and the other samples, but I assumed the core is just the program it runs through. After checking the violins no longer are working.
Does Dorico maybe gets confused with the VST2 and VST3 version of the Spitfire plug-in.
If a plug-in is available in VST3 format, then it shall be used by any means.
So in the VST2 section of the Dorico Preferences, take out BBCSO from the whitelist.
I’d even uninstall the VST2 version of BBCSO, but that is your decision.
Is there any way to tell where Dorico needs to locate VST3 plugins? It only has a directory for VST2 from what I can find.
the location for vst3’s is fixed by the operating system. In Windows it’s C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 – with Mac I believe it is Library/Audio/Plug-ins/VST3. So there’s no need to tell Dorico where the plug-ins are – only for vst2. I checked the diagnostics and the BBC vst3 seemed to load correctly.
So my guess would be that the library is not installed correctly (you said you had some difficulties with the download) as the plug in and template seem OK-- unless you’ve tried it in a different app. where it works fine in which case we would need to look elsewhere. Does the Spitfire app show the library is correctly installed?
1 Like
Had work late last night, just getting around to this. Spitfire didn’t highlight any errors, but I went ahead and tried repairing the files since it wasn’t working in other apps. It still hasn’t resolved the issue, but you may have narrowed the issue down. What would be the best next step, should I just uninstall and reinstall the files?
Did you use the specific Repair option available in the Spitfire Audio app. for the BBC SO? If not, I’d certainly try that first Otherwise, I’d check with Spitfire exactly what files should have been downloaded for the library so you may be able to determine where the problem lies. Alternatively, if it’s not too much problem, you might just redo the download (the Core library is not too large, I guess, depending on your broadband speed).
Depending on how you got the samples to the external drive, Spitfire may not realize you did that or how to find them. When you have the screen up ready to repair, you may want to click on the little gear and change it to the “locate” function instead. Before you run locate, check the directory displayed above the locate button.
Btw core isn’t the software, core is a smaller subset of samples. You might have different templates for core versus pro. Though Pro should work with core - not sure the other way around .
Do you have an error indication in the window that pops up when you hit the Edit Instrument e in Play mode? It will look like this:
If so, when you click it, what error message do you get?
yes, just after I wrote my last post, it occurred to me that the library might have had problems finding the samples. However, this would seem pretty strange if violin 1 had been working at one stage as it would seem rather unlikely that one instrument would have been installed to a different path. Even so, it might be worth checking the path with the locate function as @gdball suggested. I’m sure we’ll get there in the end!
Trying to respond to everyone at the same time. So there is no error when I open to instrument editor, I did repair it through spitfire. I haven’t checked the locate thing, however in my DAW I swapped to the core library in the instrument editor and then the sound came back on, then I swapped it back to pro and it worked. Now I’m having issues with Dorico not being able to load the instrument for me to edit it or the audio engine crashing. Brand new issue since trying to import the orchestra, so I’ll try to figure out what the problem is on that one.
Update: The little workaround works when loading the vst by itself. However, when importing the playback techniques, the plug-in no longer has playback. When trying to reload the vst it doesn’t seem to work either. When I use a different playback template using the correct expression map it works, although the playback seems a little odd, although it could be a lack of playing techniques I included in the score. How does the playback template work exactly, maybe how it loads the vsts influence it in a way that messes up the playback? At this point it doesn’t seem to be the biggest issue, importing the vsts by hand individually isn’t the worst thing in the world, and I can still load the proper expression maps as well.
The Playback Template clears out all sounds, then reloads the Endpoints that were included in the Playback Template when it was created. Endpoints include the state of VSTs and associated Expression Maps (There is a preference that might affect whether an expression map has been updated or not)
could it be an issue regarding the endpoints?