Steinberg Retrologue was one of the rare instruments that responded to Dorico’s VST tuning (Tonality Systems). It worked in Dorico 4 but when used in Dorico 5, Retrologue stays in 12edo. Here’s a test file in 24edo that Retrologue plays correctly in D4 but not in D5. (NotePerformer, Halion and Pianoteq continue to respond to Tonality Systems.)
retrologue microtuning test.dorico (498.2 KB)
Have you tried changing the new “tuning” parameter in the expression map ? Maybe it defaults to something Retrologue doesn’t handle well…
Which Expression map? I have never edited Expression maps so I’m not sure what to do. I opened them from the Library menu but I can’t find any item called Tuning.
We changed the way that microtonality works in v5 in order to support a wider range of devices. However, I think in this case the result is that you’ll need to explicitly tell the expression map what method of microtonal playback to use. I don’t have Retrologue here to test, but if you edit the “Default” expression map in your project and set “Microtonality playback” to “VST Note Expression” instead of “Auto”, does it then work?
Thank you, that worked. What microtuning methods do Auto and Detune refer to? There’s one for pitch bend; I thought that’s the only new tuning method in Dorico 5.
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As I understand it, Note Expression is part of VST3 and Detune is part of VST2 - otherwise they’re fairly similar for these purposes. “Auto” is the default setting, which (in Dorico 5) means using Note Expression for HALion, Detune for NotePerformer (as NotePerformer 3 is a VST2), and disabling microtonal playback for everything else. I will find out whether we can change the “Auto” setting to work with Retrologue, but I don’t know how straightforward that is.
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I also tested Steinberg’s Padshop. It doesn’t support Tonality Systems in Dorico 5 in any setting- Auto, Note Expression or Detune . It supported Tonality Systems in Dorico 4. These are standard Steinberg VSTis that were among the first to support Tonality Systems, and also with the best accuracy, so i hope you get this fixed.
For some reason Padshop now plays microtuned notes correctly. I might have made some mistake in the earlier test. The Microtonality Playback in the Expression map must be set to VST or Detune:: both work. Auto does not.