A really quick run…I don’t have many instruments downloaded yet (Just Symphonic Choir and a Solo Violin), and haven’t read the Symphonic Choir manual to see what tricks and options are hiding from obvious view, so this is about all I can try thus far. I won’t keep spamming the thread after this until I get more to work with and can push some limits…just a quick post to say I’m encouraged to experiment more with ‘bridging options’ rather than rolling back if I can.
The good news that straight away on my Windows rig, Dorico 3.5 Pro found Play 6, I can load and manipulate instruments, and it doesn’t crash…
The bad news is that while the word builder seems to function when I’m entering things and playing it with the keyboard through an active stave it’s bouncing the phonic entries as to be expected, but when I play a score it doesn’t bounce and notes eventually start getting stuck.
Good news again. If I host Play inside a VST Bidule instance that is hosted in Dorico, the same passage from a stave seems to bounce the phonics as expected.
I say ‘seems’…I’ll need to build a quick hymn or something and put this through some paces to be sure, but as of now I am encouraged that ‘bridging’ Play 6 might well be a quick and reliable option for some people.
Bidule isn’t ‘cheap’, but I’ve found it to be quite the swiss army knife for fudging in extra features or working around problems in several of my DAWs. It’s something of a ‘sound builder’ in its own right. It’s a little different from VEP, but the concept of host within a host is similar. I.E. I was using it to ‘channel bounce’ for plugins way back with Dorico 1 before it could do that internally via expression maps. Even used it to fudge in an AU plugin that I needed once that didn’t come in VST.
jbridge isn’t expensive at all, but it just bridges a single plugin…doesn’t have the tool box of something like bidule, VEP, VIP, etc. I’ll look into that as well.
Oh, I just remembered that I also have the Akai VIP host too. Haven’t used it much, but it’s a Host in host thing that ships with some of their controllers. It kind of has a VEP look and feel to it on the surface, but it’s just the basics to get a lot of instruments at one’s fingertips in live playing scenarios (host several instruments, configure where MIDI gets routed, mix down the audio of all the loaded plugins, etc.).
OK, I’m rambling now, but if these turn out to be solid ‘options’ for Dorico and EW users, it might be helpful to some people.