Will Garritan (GPO) be default working in Dorico update?

Dorico
1

I would like to do more of my orchestral scores in Dorico, but one of the things that is holding me back of switching from Sibelius to Dorico are the playback sounds. The included sounds in Dorico are in my ears too harsh and unrealistic to work with for longer period of times. Because NotePerformer isn’t ported yet to Dorico, will Garritan (GPO) be usable by default in the coming Dorico update? I read the posts about how users are trying to get it to work and I tried to follow this discussion, but it’s just too complicated for me to grasp.

2

Yes, it would be good to see the Aria player added. I remember a post some time ago where Daniel said that the process for adding other external instruments would be simplified.

3

Yes, I use the Garritan / ARIA samples in Dorico. The process for getting ARIA Player to appear in Dorico is documented here somewhere: it basically involves copying a long number and pasting it somewhere… :confused:

4

I think it was finding the long number that I had problems with, but will look again at the various threads if the upcoming update doesn’t change anything.

5

I’ve successfully set up Aria with GPO in Dorico but the sound output is not as good as it is in Finale. I imported the GPO expression maps but i’m not getting the great sound that I got in Finale.

6

Apparently, making Aria work in Dorico is as simple as adding two lines of text to the file ‘Vst2whitelist.txt’, trashing the file ‘Defaults.xml’ (inside the VSTAudioEngine_64 folder) and restarting Dorico. The magical number is no longer required, and can be replaced by 32 zeros.

There are at least 3 factors to the issue “working by default”:

  1. The VST must be acknowledged (whitelisted)
  2. autoloading of patches: There must be a mechanism associating Staff Names (instruments) with the corresponding audio patches (samples) (Typically called a Soundmap)
  3. There must a set of approprate Expressions Maps available to handle articulation switching for all instruments.

At this time only the Halion stuff that comes bundled with Dorico meet all three requirements. Given GPO’s popularity I would say that it’s likely that a future version of Dorico will come with the Aria player already whitelisted. The Aria player alreadys works fine with Dorico, but patches must be loaded manually and Expression maps must be created from scratch (or modified from existing sources) I would think it far less likely that Steinberg will provide solutions for 2) and 3) above and thus make it possible to completely replace Halion with a competing product. At least at this stage of development. However, it’s not rocket science, and anyone with an appetite for writing a few thousand lines of xml code could propably achieve it right now … :slight_smile:

7

That’s due to the fact that Finale’s Human Playback system are able to utilize “hidden” features. (Hidden as in not very obvious and poorly documented.) If you study the Human Playback preferences, you should be able to replicate most of it in Dorico by making your own Expression maps though…

8

Thanks, I’ll check into it.