Playback Settings

I have recently installed Dorico Pro on my Windows 10 computer and am following the “First Steps” tutorial.

  • in Preferences/Play I selected the ASIO driver Steinberg built-in instead of the Generic Low Latency driver.
  • Applying a playback template p 73 I found a list of alternative templates which did not match that shown in the tutorial.


Dorico3

Can you explain this and suggest what I should do. The playback can be heard and sounds fine but I want to understand the significance of the templates offered.
John McWilliam

Hi @John_McWilliam ,
first of all, your choice of ASIO driver is right. It’s the newer and better driver.
Regarding the templates:
The HALion Sonic Selection is the most basic one. With this one all instruments will pick sound patches from the HALion Sonic Selection sound library. This library covers any instrument but not in the most pristine quality. E.g. the choir sound are not so good. That’s where the other templates kick in. The Olympus library has decent sounding choir samples, so if you choose the ‘HALion Sonic Selection, Olympus’ template, Dorico will load sound from the Olympus library for choir sounds and the rest from HALion Sonic. Same goes on with the other templates. Iconica Sketch is a better choice for classical orchestra instruments. So if you don’t care about sonic quality, choose the first template, if you care a lot then choose the second last one. Only drawback is, it will take longer to load all the sound files.
With the Silence template no sounds will get loaded at all. That is for user who don’t need or want playback .
Is my explanation good enough?

Thanks, very useful. One last question concerning Iconica Sketch - what is the significance of GASE?
john

Groove Agent SE.

Thank you for the explanation. A final question – when should the GASE alternative be chosen?

John

When you want to work with really big drum kits and a wide variety of drum sounds.