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Garritan Personal Orchestra

Can anyone tell me if NWC2 integrates with Garritan Personal Orchestra sound fonts? I recently purchased NWC2 and when a friend of mine heard the instrument playback of some of the music I wrote, he suggested that I purchase the soundfonts that he owns from Garritan.  I do like the sound quality of his soundfonts and I would like to purchase them, but, before making such a purchase, I would like to know if they will be compatible with my existing notation software.   

Unfortunately, I don't know anything technical about any of this, so I hope I can get an answer here... Thanks

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #1 –
You might try: Using GPO with Noteworthy Composer
I do not have GPO and have not tested this.
Registered user since 1996

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #2 –
Be careful with the link provided by Rick In the previous post.

I believe that this is for the older version of Garritan GPO that used to come with GPO studio.

If you have the old version version of GPO that used Native Instruments GPO Studio  then this  tutorial is OK.

If you buy the latest version of Garritan, they no longer use Native instruments GPO Studio but they now use something called Aria.

NoteWorthy is not VST compatible and so does not directly support playing VST instruments but you can use something like MidiOX or Hubi's Loopback to make a connection between NoteWorthy and Aria and so get the instrument sounds from the Garritan library.

I have sucessfully used an old version of NoteWorthy with Garritan but haven't yet attempted the new version using Aria, and so hopefully, if there is anyone else that has used this configuration, perhaps they would post here and comment on it.
I hope to get round to trying it sometime in the future.

Rich.

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #3 –
The attached is a screen capture of the on-line manual for GPO version 4.

This confirms that GPO now works with Aria player rather than GPO studio.

Since NoteWorthy does not natively support VST plug-ins, to get this to work, you would need to have a virtual midi cable such as MidiYoke (from MidiOx) or Hubi's Loopback.  You can then use this virtual midi cable to link the output from NoteWorthy to the input to the Aria player.

So you should be able to get this to work (But I haven't tried it yet). This method did work for the later versions of GPO studio which also needed a virtual cable. I think the tutorial pointed to by Rick, is from a very early version of GPO Studio.

Rich.

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #4 –
The version noted by rick is actually version 2 of GPO, version 3 updated the kontact player to kp 2. This heralded the loss of garritan studio, for reasons best known to themselves, and prompted the need for virtual cables such as midi ox.

version 4 was the start of the aria player and in my experience the most stable and responsive of the products so far, again still can be used as a standalone with virtual cables, if anyone is still interested i would be happy to set it up on my own setup and give a step by step account of what i have done. 

They have made extensive updates to the brass sounds making them sound more realistic than ever.

Aria also allows you to put in a midi file to the actual program and assign the instruments to each line and play back within aria itself, making it quite useful for recording purposes.
 

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #6 –
I would just like to note that I use a pre 2.0 Noteworthy and have managed to get it to worth with GPO4 and the Aria player via MIDIox.  Basically MIDIox let's you setup something that NWC sees as additional sound cards.  So when you go to your options menu in NWC and setup your MIDI output you can add each MIDIox line.  Each of those lines has 16 channels.  You can open up multiple instances of Aria, 1 for each line.  This allows you to setup as many as 128 voices (8 lines x 16 channels) to play simultaneously.

I'm still new to all of this stuff.  I've been using NWC since the early 90s.  I got into soundfonts about 6 or 7 years ago.  I can't invest a lot of money into this stuff so my setup is very budget friendly.

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #7 –
In order to play soundfonts, use (qsynth.sourceforge.net) qSynth along with (midiox.com) midi yoke. Configure qSynth to load the soundfont you have and make it get input from 'midi yoke 1' (something like that, or any other value for that matter), and configure NWC to give output to the same 'yoke'. Or, you can use timidity++, but it's 'very' old. BTW, the Titanic soundfont is pretty good. If you want to check it out, go (instrumentsvirtuels.free.fr/freeware6.htm#titanic) here, halfway down the page. You only need part 1, I think. part 2-4 is the same thing, but is harder to extract for some reason.

It might be a lot to download, but it's free and well worth it!

-Static

EDIT: Sorry, you'll have to copy-paste the links. I can't use working ones because I have to upgrade :(

EDIT2: Direct links here.
qSynth windows binary - sourceforge.net/projects/qsynth/files/qsynth%20(stable)/0.3.5/qsynth-0.3.5.tar.gz/download
MIDI Yoke download page with instructions - midiox.com/myoke.htm#Download
Titanic sf2 - instrumentsvirtuels.free.fr/part1.rar

ENJOY♫‼

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #8 –
Quote from: genomeman –
The version noted by rick is actually version 2 of GPO, version 3 updated the kontact player to kp 2. This heralded the loss of garritan studio, for reasons best known to themselves, and prompted the need for virtual cables such as midi ox.

version 4 was the start of the aria player and in my experience the most stable and responsive of the products so far, again still can be used as a standalone with virtual cables, if anyone is still interested i would be happy to set it up on my own setup and give a step by step account of what i have done. 

They have made extensive updates to the brass sounds making them sound more realistic than ever.

Aria also allows you to put in a midi file to the actual program and assign the instruments to each line and play back within aria itself, making it quite useful for recording purposes.

Hi genomeman, hi to everyone. I'm interested about your own setup. Recently, from Windows XP, I have installed NWC2 and GPO on a Windows Vista environment; GPO Support told me to update to GPO KP2 but I have seen GPO Studio doesn't work (as you all mentioned).
Please, if you can, tell me the details of new configuration to sound GPO KP2 VST with NWC2, ARia and the virtual midi cable.

Thanks a lot
Fabio (fsromait)

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #9 –
I have created a support case with Garritan. Maybe that will help.
If Garritan comes up with a good solution, I will post it.

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #10 –
Problem solved, many thanks to Barry Graham.

For some reason, MidiYoke failed to install. But there are other ways of having a virtual cable. And I quote:

"Download and install Loopbe1 (Win 7 version at the bottom of the page in this link).

http://www.nerds.de/en/download.html

Provides 1 virtual MIDI port (16channels)

Install and reboot.

Open NWC and set Loopbe Internal MIDI as your Playback device.
Open a score and set Loopbe as the Playback device for each staff.

With NWC open - Open Aria Player (wait for it to start)
Under Tools>Preferences set Loopbe as the Input MIDI Device.

On each CHANNEL in Aria Player select a GPO instrument to match the channels set in the NWC score.

Playback from NWC - you should hear the GPO voices.

NWC=>Output (Playback)=>Loopbe=>Input MIDI Device=>Aria Player"

If anyone else would want further clarification, I think I can now supply some.

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #11 –
Quote from: Rob den Heijer –
Open a score and set Loopbe as the Playback device for each staff.
NoteWorthy may lead you to believe that it supports setting a staff to a device, but it does not.

Instead, NoteWorthy assigns a Port (or buss) number to a staff. By default, NWC assigns a staff to Port zero.
In nwctxt, this appears as:
Quote
|StaffProperties|Device:n
In NWC generated MIDI files, it will appear as:
Quote
FF 21 01 pp
For more details, see: http://home.roadrunner.com/~jgglatt/tech/midifile/obsolete.htm

In NWC, what you hear will depend on the order of the Devices used by play back in the Midi Options Dialog Tab.
In NoteWorthy's Viewer (as of 2.5.5) you will only hear staves that have been assigned to the default device. See: About Single MIDI Device Playback
MIDI file playback will depend on the app used for playback.
Registered user since 1996

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #12 –
Thanks Rick.
I simply compared an old .nwctxt file to a new one (where I had changed the properties in the Midi tab) and indeed: the difference was no more than Device:0 versus Device:1.

The most important thing (for me) is that Garritan now works. Me is a happy bunny.

Re: Garritan Personal Orchestra

Reply #13 –
And what is more: it may be very important that you told me how Noteworthy works in this respect.
I think I can now help a friend who struggles with Finale and Garritan.
(to be continued)