Thanks Daniel, it’s indeed in the right spot and I did adjusted the whitelist as Brian suggested. What other reason could there be that the Aria player doesn’t sohw up in Dorico?
I would suggest quitting Dorico, opening a Terminal window, and executing (carefully) the following commands by pasting them in:
rm -fr ~/Library/Preferences/VSTAudioEngine
rm -fr ~/Library/Caches/Dorico
Then restart Dorico and hopefully you’ll be in business.
Right Click on the folder that has the whitelist file in it and select “Get Info”. On the bottom, unlock the padlock. Then on the bottom of the “Name” list" click the + sign and add yourself and/or Admin. On the right of your name or admin, select the arrows for “Privilege” and select “Read & Write”. Not sure but you may also have to do the same on the whitelist file as well.
Nope, unfortunately still nothing (see screenshot). There was a quick sound engine search while starting Dorico, but it didn’t find the Aria player.
As an aside…
Be aware that getting Garritan Strings (Especially the new GPO5 stuff) to sound good in any of the leading scoring packages can be pretty involved. You’ll need to spend a good bit of time learning all the deep controls and switches available for each instrument (some of them are not all that obvious either…such as the well hidden CC119 gold mine of a parameter). You’ll spend tons of time tweaking things to get them sounding great in score A at tempo X, only learn it’s garbage in score B at tempo Y. You might end up even needing to tweak the SFZ file themselves deep inside the libraries to fix bugs or smooth things out more to your liking. In my experience, it’s not the sort of thing someone can learn in a few afternoon sessions.
With all that in mind, I’d like to know more about what you don’t like about Dorico’s included Halion Symphonic Orchestra (HSO) and Sonic SE General MIDI sounds.
While I don’t want to discourage anyone from starting the process of building up a personal set of expression maps for things like Garritan libraries, I think it’s important not to frustrate yourself too much with the instruments to the point it distracts a novice synth/sampler programmer from composing, and enjoying that process.
If you simply find HSO too dry/strident, then I’d encourage you to experiment with adding reverb to the mix, and curving the frequency responses via EQ settings in Dorico’s Mixer more to your liking. Also try opening Halion and experimenting with some of the basic controls for things like ‘body’ and ‘air’. Finally, take note that there are also tutti variants of instruments in HSO that you can replace the solo variants with directly from inside Halion Sonic SE if getting ‘full section sounds’ is the issue.
When it comes to building expression maps for something like GPO5, I’d recommend focusing on things not included in HSO (lots of nice harps), and the new GPO5 Garritan Orchestral Solo Strings first, as that’s the weakest area of HSO in my opinion (HSO Solo strings can be nice for Baroque and Classical stuff, or small chamber scores such as a string quintet…but not quite up to snuff for modern principal solo parts in a full symphony due to lack of range, and somewhat weak sawing-like attacks). Perhaps I’ll make a nice Dorico expression map for the new GPO5 solo strings and share them here pretty soon. Been working on that for some months now with Sibelius, and it’s been a slow and tedious process of tweak, play, tweak, try a different score, compromise, etc…
If you’d like to discuss more on how to make HSO sound better, start a new thread and see what turns up 
Halion 6 has finally crossed some major summits that might well lead to some great new instruments for SE users (Commercial as well as free libraries). Hopefully we’ll start seeing more libraries for SE soon.
Well, I guess that is a personal taste. I am sure the playback sounds I like will be not someone else preferences. In my ears HSO sounds like the early orchestra in a box, metallic and synthy and unrealistic. Maybe it’s because I am used to so many other libraries by now. But as comparison, here is for example a short fragment of a score I am working on bounced with HSO and NotePerformer in Sibelius.
NotePerformer:
HSO:
I know NP is not going to be available (if ever) in Dorico, but I think GPO comes closer to a real orchestral sound than HSO does. Again, just a personal opinion 
I see what you mean. I’m not sure the sample library alone is the problem though. Dorico doesn’t yet have as evolved playback engine (groove interpretation engines and such like Sibelius), or super robust expression maps (assuming NP is a plugin). I bet the Sibelius ‘soundset’ for Note Performer is a beast, with some YEARS development gone into it. If it bypasses Sibelius’ sequencer, and just translates the scores all on its own…well that’s even more dev time for sure.
No, there isn’t a soundset for NP in Sibelius, it’s a matter of installing NP and playing the score, but I am sure there has been done a lot of programming to get it like this. That is why I would love to see NP to be ported to Dorico and use something like GPO in the mean time. I know that they are talking about this already so hopefully it’s just a matter of time.
There is actually a 4674 lines long Sibelius soundset for NotePerformer. I imagine/hope/expect it should be possible for Arne Wallander to translate it into an Expression Map for Dorico, once Expression Map playback is fully supported by Dorico.
No problem, I’ll be happy to continue sharing what I can in helping you get a decent ARIA experience in Dorico. I’ve just begun myself. If you’re familiar with Sibelius soundsets, here’s what I’ve done for GPO5 on that front so far. Having a peek in an XML editor will yield some of the controller settings, key-switches, etc. which might come in handy when making Dorico expression maps (I needed several sources to find all the info, here it’s all in one place).
http://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/helpcenter/chat/chat.pl?com=thread&start=708913&groupid=3&words=Garritan&name=Credo
I didn’t even know that, thanks for pointing this out. It’s actually nice to see that NP comes included with a sound set and that it’s not necessary to install that separately from another company as with most sound sets. I wrote some sound sets in the past, trying to get Kirk Hunters library to work in Sibelius.
Which program are you using to create the soundset? I used the program that can be downloaded on the Sibelius website, (I forgot the name right now) but I believe that this seems to be not really that good.
Thanks, I will use Sibelius in the meantime, my clients always ask for a quick bounce of the music I engrave and practically spoken, Sibelius with NP gives me the best results. Which program are you using to create the soundset? I used the program that can be downloaded on the Sibelius website, (I forgot the name right now) but I believe that this seems to be not really that good.
Could you please post the content of your whitelist?
And also, there is the folder /Users//Library/Preferences/VSTAudioEngine . Please zip that up and also post here.
Hi,
this is the content of the whitelist:
Kontakt 5 16out
5653544E694F376B6F6E74616B742035
ARIA Player VST
565354474152416172696120706C6179
ARIA Player VST Multi
565354474152616172696120706C6179
I attached the zipfile.
Thanks!
VSTAudioEngine.zip (1.17 MB)
I just use an XML editor. XMLPad is my favorite at present.
Thanks, Andre. The whitelist looks fine, but your ARIA gets blacklisted.
Now, what does that mean? During startup Dorico, resp. the audio engine is running a scanner over all plug-ins it finds. The scanning is about identifying plug-ins that may cause problems to the stability of the hosting program.
We frequently had these problems in the past. Badly programmed 3rd party plug-ins bring down Cubase and then people complaining it is Steinberg’s fault. For that reason we introduced this new “plug-in sentinel”. The scanner loads each plug-in and applies some simple standard tests the plug-in has to pass, otherwise it will get blacklisted.
As to why your ARIA gets blacklisted, I don’t know. Which version of it do you have, is it up to the latest? Since we know of people that do have it running, it can’t be a general problem.
You could also try to delete the file /Users//Library/Preferences/VSTAudioEngine/Vst2xPlugin Blacklist VSTAudioEngine.xml and then start Dorico again; a new scan of the VST2 plug-ins will happen. But to be honest, I don’t expect any better result. I really assume that it is about an old version that you might have.
Thanks, Ulf. Yesterday, I downloaded and installed the latest version of the Aria player before I tried to get it to work in Dorico, so it must be the latest version. I don’t understand therefor what else I could try. Btw, the Aria player does show up in Sibelius.
“You could also try to delete the file /Users//Library/Preferences/VSTAudioEngine/Vst2xPlugin Blacklist VSTAudioEngine.xml and then start Dorico again; a new scan of the VST2 plug-ins will happen. But to be honest, I don’t expect any better result. I really assume that it is about an old version that you might have.”
And that did the trick! Thanks, Ulf.
Since you’ve just updated to the latest ARIA version, in that case it is definitely worth deleting the blacklist and thus forcing a rescan.
Sibelius loads Aria, sure, it doesn’t have such sentinel as we do. And as the blacklist clearly shows, also Dorico finds Aria and can load it, but it finds an issue with and so refuses it.