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Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

   I bought the Garritan Personal Orchestra five years ago, but true to my general experience that the more I pay for something, the less happy I am with it, I was never able to get it, the most expensive program that I ever bought, to work at all with Noteworthy.   I spent a couple of very frustrating weeks trying, then gave up.  A few weeks later, I did get into a discussion with a guy, Andrew Koenig, who seems to know a lot more about computer sound than I do, and was trying to help me, but I just got more and more bewildered with the strange things I was doing that didn't seem to be getting me any closer at all to what I had originally expected.  I had originally thought I could just "install" the program, then select instruments from the Noteworthy menu and have them play, but it turned out to be vastly more complicated than that, and too much for a technophobe like me.  I've just finished a piece for strings and will be submitting it to the scriptorium after I get it copyrighted, but the Microsoft wavetable synthetic strings I have are not very good, and sound even worse when transferred to CD.  The piano sound has always been fine on my computer(s), but it's the only instrument that is really acceptable.


Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #1 –
Do a search for Garritan in this forum.
You might find what you are looking for.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #2 –
GPO takes a great deal of work, no matter what notation program you're using. The payoff is stunning sound that's difficult to tell from a live performance.

The General MIDI sound banks that come with most sound cards are pretty rank. If you want something better than GM, but easier to use than Garritan, I suggest you invest in one of the Creative family of sound cards. You won't get Garritan quality, but you will probably be a lot happier with it than you are with the sound your computer came with - and for the Creative cards, it is mostly just a matter of changing the playback device on the MIDI tab in NWC's options dialog. (You may have to change a few patch numbers as well.)

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #3 –
I have a relatively inexpensive Creative Sound Blaster Audigy sound card installed and using downloaded sound fonts for organ stops I get very acceptable if not true Hi-Fi quality sound.
 I have also installed an alternative to the run-of-the-mill GM sounds which are again far better than the default ones.

Tony

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #4 –
   I just compared the sound of my old computer, which has a Creative SoundBlaster card
in it, with the new computer that only has a REALTEK onboard soundcard, and the Creative
is indeed better, though still not very good.   Given my extreme lack of patience and skill
for messing around with computers, I'm not willing to invest any more time in Garritan than
I did five years ago (which was way too much, IMO: it was an exercise in utter frustration,
which made me really unhappy and didn't reward me with any success at all).

   It's too bad for me that people apparently care a lot about video on their computers,
but not much about the sound on original music.  I don't think I've watched a movie for
at least a year, but I would like to have better sound.

   I guess I can't keep my new computer.  It's a Gateway 2800 series, which has a very
small case.  That's very nice, but the downside is that there are no slots to add anything,
except for two small ones (I think) that don't seem to have enough space to add a card
that has anything but printed circuits on it.  I bought that computer from Costco, so I
can return it.

   Thanks for your input!

   I was looking at reviews for sound cards on the web, and one that gets good reviews
seems to be ASUS.  Here's one model that Amazon has:
http://tinyurl.com/y9xbd72

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #5 –
   Re:  "alternative to the run-of-the-mill GM sounds"   It's a mystery to me
how to add sound banks.  There are so many things that are a mystery to me.
I guess I'll have to look into how to do it at some point.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #6 –
I am one of the oldest contributors to these dscussions as I shall be 87 in November. I tell people "If I can do it, You can do it!".
Installing sound fonts onto a Creative sound card is quite easy once you know how, but it can be a rustrating learning curve, like so much to do with computers, which have lots of logic but no common sense

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #7 –
G'day Arrowsmith,
if you are willing to have a go at a software solution that is easier than GPO, then perhaps this will help:
http://nwc-scriptorium.org/helpful/vstfdum.pdf
It is a guide I wrote a while ago as a learning exercise, and as a cheap solution to the lousy sound I was getting from a Vista notebook...

If you follow the steps exactly you shouldn't have any trouble.  Once you have the basic installation working you should have at least a rudimentary understanding of how it works and can experiment from there is you want.  It uses soundfonts.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #8 –
Quote
It's too bad for me that people apparently care a lot about video on their computers,
but not much about the sound on original music.  I don't think I've watched a movie for
at least a year, but I would like to have better sound.
The problem is that MIDI isn't "real" sound. It's generated from instructions your computer gives to your sound card, and it can't be any better than the sound banks (mostly electronically generated) that are in your specific computer. Video on a computer, OTOH, is actually a recording - the sound equivalent would be .wav files or .mp3s, which sound great on a computer.

There are a lot of things that affect a musical note besides its pitch, volume, and duration: things like swells and fades, and breathing, and subtle pitch bends and timbre changes, and different lipping and plucking and bowing techniques, and a whole host of others. If you blow a note on a flute and then slowly roll the mouthpiece away from your lips, for example, the tone will change. MIDI can't do this, which is why its flutes sound mechanical. Attempting to do it is why Garritan is so difficult to use. But it's also why a Garritan flute sounds like a flute.

Bill

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #9 –
Since you say you have a new computer I assume it runs Windows Vista or 7.  But if I am mistaken and it is running XP, do a Google search for "Yamaha softsynth S-YXG50".  This softsynth was discontinued by Yamaha some 7 years ago and is now found free on a number of sites with its registration key that transforms the trial version to a registered version.  Sound quality matches or betters hardware synths costing several hundred dollars, even though the price was $45 US.  IIRC, Lawrie has confirmed that this softsynth will not run on Vista or 7, but will run on Win 2000 or XP.  Just a thought.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #10 –
   I guess this thread is long dead, but I thought I should check in.  I've pretty much
given up on getting better sound.

   I downloaded the "Yamaha softsynth S-YXG50" that Milton suggested, but when I
unzipped it and ran the only executable file in it, there was no difference: noteworthy
had the same options it had before.  I don't think the installation worked, since I was
apparently supposed to see something in my add/remove programs list, but I didn't.

   Thanks to Lawrie Pardy's script too, but all it does for me is show me how little
understanding I have of this own subject.  I'm lost right in paragraph 1.  Shaping my
own sounds is not something I'm interested in anyway.  I'd just like to have reasonably
good sounds, so that Toci's Beethoven symphonies sound something like Beethoven
symphonies rather than deranged cats in a pots and pans factory.  I'm not interested
in making a career out of trying to get good sounds.

   I wish there were a sound card I could just buy that would have good sounds, but
the advertisements for them don't give me any indication of whether they do or not.

   I don't even know what people are talking about with downloaded sound fonts.  I don't
know how to get them into noteworthy even if I could find them.  I was wondering if
my soundblaster card has some sounds I don't know about, but there are essentially no
instructions that came with the card, so if there are, I haven't found them.  It seems
that other people know a lot of stuff about this subject but I'm clueless.  It's not something
that comes to me easily at all.  I'd have as much luck trying to work on my own car.  My
Soundblaster card has sound that's scarcely better than an onboard sound card.

    But thanks for the attempts to help me out.
------
    I caught a bad virus a few days ago, which I got rid of, supposedly, with "Microsoft
Security Essentials" from Microsoft's site.  My Avira antivirus didn't even see it, but it was
quite obvious I had a virus, and a bad one.  The first thing it did was shut down my machine,
presumably to set itself up.  After a while, it was telling me that anything I clicked on was
unrunnable because it was infected, though everything still ran fine in "safe" mode.  The
"Microsoft Security Essentials" program describes the danger from it as "extreme".  It kept
trying to dial the internet, but I have Zone Alarm so I could see it was trying to do that
and could stop it.  It looks like it was designed by professional thieves rather by than some
adolescent.  The virus is called "Trojan Downloader:BAT/Ftper.gen".  Apparently it's one of
a group of bad viruses that are going around.  Here's part of the Description from
"Microsoft Security Essentials".  
  Category: Trojan Downloader
  Description: This program is dangerous and downloads other programs.
  Recommendation: Remove this software immediately.
  Microsoft Security Essentials detected programs that may compromise your privacy or damage
            your computer...

   Although the virus is supposed to be gone, my XP machine is slower than ever now, such that
I can't make WAV files without glitches even by turning off all the internet functions temporarily
with StartupCop, and rebooting.  Also, programs that have no business dialing the internet are
supposedly trying to dial the internet now, which they never did before - those requests when I
had the virus were just the virus in disguise trying to get access.  Something's still fishy,
though the Microsoft program says that the virus is gone.  At least it's not shutting down my
computer anymore to install its own stuff.


Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #11 –
G'day arrowsmith,
firstly, you really need to get that PC properly cleaned up.  Clearly the m$ product has not finished the job.  Malwarebytes is a good tool to help.

WRT the Yamaha, you need to make sure you get the right version for XP.  It should install as a device and request a reboot during the install.

As for your soundblaster, can you tell us which model it is?  Most of them are capable of using soundfonts and this is an easy way out to improved sound.  Please note that the sounds that you are dissatisfied with are probably a result of the m$ softsynth.  A change of sound card will make no difference unless it allows access to an alternative synth.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #12 –
arrowsmith, first, my sympathies on the computer/virus woes.  My desktop got a nasty virus a year ago (courtesy of someone who used a flash drive they didn't know was infected on it) that took even McAfee a day and a half and many reboots to clear.  I would advise you to disconnect your computer from the internet while cleaning it to prevent malware from connecting with its host.  Get a friend to download and burn to a CD these two programs:

1. AdAware from www*lavasoft*com .  (Substitute "." for "*", my account doesn't permit links)The free version will find pretty much everything that's out there and remove it entirely.  Updates are also free (Absolutely vital to keep any anti-virus software updated constantly!) and the full paid version with full real-time protection (the free version has limited real-time protection) is about $40 US.  Of course, the full versions of McAfee or Norton Anti-Virus are also about the same price IIRC.

2. Glary Utilities from www*glarysoft*com .  Be sure to skip the large brightly colored ads for non-free software and find the smaller links for Glary Utilities free version.  Also free updates for this software.  Run the 1-Click Maintenance and then run it once a week or so forevermore to speed up your computer to near-new performance.  Also go to Modules-Optimize and Improve and open the Memory Optimizer.  Leave it running constantly to optimize RAM automatically.  Best of all, in both the Memory Optimizer-Settings and Glary main window Settings, check the box to load each automatically on Windows startup.

Have your friend burn the .exe files to a CD and install from the CD on your computer.  Many trojans and malware prevent you from visiting anti-virus sites or downloading their programs or installing them.  Get around them this way.  Reboot your computer and press F8 once a second or so as it boots.  When you get a black screen with white text listing startup options for Windows, choose Safe Mode, then choose (usually only choice available here) your operating system, your version of XP.  At least one of the User Names that presents will be Administrator.  Click Administrator.  If it has not been password-protected it will log in as Administrator, and in Safe Mode most malware cannot operate.  Load the CD, install and run the 2 programs I described above.  Remove (not just quarantine) any malware.  Reboot normally and repeat the whole process in your User Name and any other User Names that exist on your computer.  Malware likes to install itself either only on one user name to hide from the Administrator or on all user names to reinstall itself on a reboot.

Once the mess is cleaned, as Lawrie said, the Yamaha softsynth should install correctly.  If you prefer an affordable hardware solution and don't mind spending about $200 US, try one of the Yamaha portable keyboards that has a USB port.  Install the drivers from the included CD, connect with the USB cable, choose the kbd/USB device in NWC Avaliable playback devices and let the keyboard's synth play your MIDI/NWC files with no latency and great sound.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #13 –
arrowsmith, BTW, priceless line:

Quote
I'd just like to have reasonably
good sounds, so that Toci's Beethoven symphonies sound something like Beethoven
symphonies rather than deranged cats in a pots and pans factory.

LOL!!!  Even with correct sound setup, make sure no melodic parts end up on MIDI channel 10, which offers only percussion sounds, which could account for the pots and pans.  Now the deranged cats are another matter...

Reminds me of (can't remember who) an opinion of Wagner's music in Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, which was very like the following:

Quote
Actually, I like Wagner's music.  But the music I far prefer is that made by a cat suspended by its tail outside a window, trying desparately to hang onto the glass by its claws.
  (And I love cats BTW, and have had several dear ones over the years.)

Hope you get the virus and sound setup ironed out!

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #14 –
  Hi Milton, this is a reply to your latest post, though the lack of threading in this
forum makes it hard to follow stuff.  There is apparently a noteworthy "newsgroup"
(also known as "usenet") named "ntworthy.nwc", which would be better organized
since it is threaded, but there's never been anything in it that I've seen.

   Supposedly it was Mark Twain (though it might well have been someone else,
since Mark Twain, like Oscar Wilde, gets a lot of false attributions), who said
that "Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds."  That's my favourite quotation
ever about Wagner.  I don't deny he was a genius.  There are a couple of
things I love, such as the orchestral "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey" from
Goetterdammerung, and the "Evening star" aria from Tannhaueser but only
(so far) when sung by Roman Trekel (I'm not an opera fan).  The Siegfried Idyll
goes on too long for my money, and the Venusburg music just sounds to me
like complete junk.

   I have seen the quotation you gave about Wagner before.  I also have a cat,
my third and probably my last since he's 4 now and I'm 65, so he'll probably
outlive me.  There's a great picture of "The Wagnerites" by Beardsley, which
really captures the spirit.  It's easy to find on "google images".

   Toci's Beethoven sounds enough like Beethoven to be sure that it's not
picking up just sound effects.  It's just that on my system the orchestral
synthetic sound is so bad that it's really not listenable at all.  I'm going to get
a new computer with a 8G of RAM rather than the 512K I have now, which
will cut out the system-interrupt jitters when I try to make WAV files, but
won't do anything for the quality of the computer sound, I don't think.  I guess
some people get good sound, but it seems like one has to be a techno-wiz
with a lot of patience, neither of which characteristics I possess, especially
not the latter.

   I don't get those system-interrupt jitters on a computer I've been trying out
but will probably return, which has 4G of RAM, and also is new, so the registry
isn't all screwed up yet.   There's no room in it for any cards though, which is
my main reason for returning it.  I like the tiny case, but not the lack of any
expansion slots, since I will want at least a sound card which, no matter how
deficient, will still be better than an onboard card.  I have a Soundblaster card
on my old system right now.  It's a little bit better than nothing.








Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #15 –
First, my sympathies re the virus. I've had a few over the years that have kept me busy for several days cleaning up after them. I've had the best luck using a combination of Avira (which you are already using) and Malwarebytes. What one misses the other seems to catch. And once you have the virus captured, be sure to (a) delete it from your machine (most antimalware programs simply quarantine the bad guys, but they'll give you an option to delete from quarantine) and (b) do a restore to a point before you picked up the bloody thing, so your registry is completely clean.

Second, re sound cards: you don't need a card slot. There are several USB soundcards on the market, including at least one by Creative. Just buy one and plug it in.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #16 –
Quote from: William Ashworth –
... re sound cards: you don't need a card slot. There are several USB soundcards on the market, including at least one by Creative. Just buy one and plug it in.

But do not expect that USB plug in sound cards will support sound fonts. I don't belive any do. (Anyone know any different ?)
Rich.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #17 –
Arrowsmith said:
Quote
  I don't even know what people are talking about with downloaded sound fonts.  I don't
know how to get them into noteworthy even if I could find them.  I was wondering if
my soundblaster card has some sounds I don't know about, but there are essentially no
instructions that came with the card, so if there are, I haven't found them.  It seems
that other people know a lot of stuff about this subject but I'm clueless.  It's not something
that comes to me easily at all.  I'd have as much luck trying to work on my own car.  My
Soundblaster card has sound that's scarcely better than an onboard sound card.

You didn't answer Lawrie when he asked what sort of Soundblaster card you have.
If we knew we might be able to help.
Many people complain about the sound from Creative Soundblaster cards because they have never bothered to use a soundfont other than the one that loads by default - and it's not that good.

1. If it is Awe32, Awe64, Live!, Audigy or X-Fi it will load soundfonts.
 They are NOT difficult to install.

2. The Yamaha Softsynth is a good solution if your card is not soundfont capable.
 If you are running XP the Yamaha SYXG program is about 15Mb - if the file you loaded is less than that it won't work on XP.

3. Does your Garritan Personal Orchestra come with the Kontact player?
 All you need to get it working with NWC is a virtual MIDI cable like MIDIYoke.
 I can use Garritan Jazz and Big Band samples with NWC and the Aria player so I guess it's not much different.
 The problem is that NWC is limited to specific controllers and cannot implement many of the features.

I can help with any of the above and I'm prepared to guide you through it.
But I need some positive response from you first.
Expensive hardware and huge RAM is only useful if you intend to use large sample libraries - 2 Gb should be ample.
If you stick with MIDI it will work on a very modest system and you can get great results.

Here is an example of a small soundfont on a Xi-Fi soundcard.
Not your sort of music I know - but it is mine.

http://tinyurl.com/2rq3rh/Fallout.mp3

Barry Graham
Melbourne, Australia

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #18 –
Quote from: Barry Graham –
1. If it is Awe32, Awe64, Live!, Audigy or X-Fi it will load soundfonts.
True, but you can pretty much scratch Awe32 from the list.
  • It is an ISA card
  • The XP drivers won't load sound fonts
  • Soundfont size is limited to on-board memory (24MB at most)
I share your frustration about folks wanting tech help on unspecified hardware and operating systems.
Registered user since 1996
 

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #19 –
To: William Ashforth

   Further adventures with the virus.  As I noted "Microsoft Security Essentials" from Microsoft's
site did take care of the worm that Avira didn't catch.  However, my system seemed much slower
after I installed the "Essentials".   That meant that I couldn't convert my latest composition to
WAV anymore, because the playback was full of glitches from system interruptions.  (I have a
seven-year old PC with only 512K RAM: I know I need something new and will be getting a new
computer, one with expansion slots unlike the one I've been trying out.)   When I looked at
Task Manager, I saw there was something called MSMPENG.EXE that was taking up huge chunks
of RAM intermittently, up to 90K.  I suspected this came in with the "essentials" but didn't know
that for sure, and everything I ran into on the web seemed to assume that MSMPENG.EXE came
from something called "Windows Defender", which I don't have.  I finally uninstalled the "Essentials"
and now MSMPENG.EXE isn't popping up in the task list anymore.  Also, my music is playing with
fewer interruptions, so I'm hoping that when I temporarily turn off the internet, my AVIRA antivirus,
and ZONE ALARM (using StartupCop) and reboot, I'll be able to get a clean play so that I can make
a WAV file, and then I can start again trying to make the resulting WAV file sound decent by
jacking the high frequencies up and the low frequencies down.  Despinte going through fifteen or
twenty trial CDs I haven't been able to get decent sound on my bigger non-computer speakers,
though as I mentioned, the piece sounds fine on my computer with its smaller speakers.  I assume
that's just because I can't hear the undertones on my computer speakers.  The piece also doesn't
sound bad on CD if I turn the bass all the way down and the treble all the way up, but for some
reason I haven't yet been able to do the same thing by messing around with the frequency
response using GOLDWAVE.

  Anyhow, I am impressed with Microsoft Security Essentials, but I guess I'm going to have to
uninstall it whenever I want to make a WAV file, then reinstall it later, if I want to keep it on my
system.  I'm probably don't want to keep it installed all the time, since I think it slows
everything down, but I do want to have it, so that I can reinstall it if I get another worm.

   There is a file called "MSMPENG.EXE" in the "essentials" folder.  I didn't see it at first since I
usually use an alternative to "windows explorer" ("Total Commander) that doesn't see some system
files.  Commander does keep two lists side by side at all times, which makes it easy to move files
from one directory to another, and it also doesn't have windows explorer's crazy half-alpha,
half-numeric sort sequence that I find difficult to negotiate.

   Richard Woodruffe expressed skepticism about USB soundcards, and I have that too.  I have a
USB auxilliary drive called "MyBook" which is great for backup, but very slow - so slow that if it's
representative of USB response, I can't see it as being adequately fast for sounds.






Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #20 –
To: Barry Graham

   I'm sorry I didn't say what soundcard I had, I thought I did.  It's "SoundBlaster Live 24-bit,
version 7.1".  It's not an expensive card, I bought it after Garritan (apparently) blew out my
sound card while I was going through the enormous and ultimately fruitless horror of trying
to understand what this stuff was all about.  It was so frustrating my mind may have closed
off understanding now in self-defense - I know I feel extreme aversion now.

   I didn't even know my soundblaster had "soundfont bank" capability until today, because
there's no mention of it at all in the tiny manual.  I discovered it by accident when I was
"removing" Microsoft Security Essentials, and noticed something called "Soundfont Bank
Manager" in the add/remove programs list.  I investigated, and insofar as I can understand
anything, the card has the capablity of importing soundcard banks though I haven't seen
any way of actually doing that even from SoundBlaster's side, much less getting Noteworthy
to recognize them.  There don't appear to be any actual soundbanks included, which seems
odd to me.  You're supposed to get them from elsewhere.  I mentioned earlier that I did find
the Yamaha set on the web and ran the only executable program in the ZIP file, but that
didn't seem to do anything.  There are no instructions at all about how to actually get a
sound bank into SoundBlaster.  When I load up the "soundfont Bank Manager" (sfbm.exe),
I get a picture of a keyboard and some stuff that's pretty unintelligible to me, and the
"help" doesn't help.  I get the feeling I'm supposed to load instruments in one-by-one if I
could figure out how to do it at all, which seems an excessive task.  I know other people
can do this, and I'm supposed to have a high IQ, but I really feel all this is beyond me.  I
wish I could just buy a sound card with good instrument sounds, plug it in, and have
Noteworthy recognize the sounds without all this messing around.

   Garritan does come with Kontakt, assuming by "Kontakt" you mean software of that
name and not hardware.  I have a really powerful aversion to the Garritan now, though,
because it drove me nuts for a couple of weeks and I never got to first base with it.

   I'm not going to get a "midi" cable and try to get that to work, because I know from
experience I'll never be able to get that to work, even if other people can do it easily.
And I also don't want any "stuff" on my computer that I can't avoid, it's nothing but
trouble.  I don't see why I would need a cable anyway unless "Kontakt" is hardware,
which the "Kontakt" that comes with my Garritan is not.

  Thanks for your help, but you may conclude, and I may conclude, that all this stuff will
have to get a whole lot easier before there's any hope of my doing it.  It makes my head
hurt just to think about it.  I look into the stuff on the web about soundfonts and am
immediately bewildered.



Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #21 –

  P.S., to Barry Graham again

   That very small sample does sound nice.  I'd like to get that kind of sound.
One thing very odd about what I find when looking for stuff about sound, is
that there seems to be enormous interest in creating various kinds of "libraries". 
I can't imagine why anybody would bother so much about that, but the most
annoying thing about it is that it takes a while before I realize (and can really
believe) that that's all they're talking about.

   My CD's are organized into bookcases of Romantic, 20th Century, Classical,
Baroque (except Bach), Bach&Jazz&non-European, and Renaisssance&Pop&
Miscellaneous.  What's so hard about that?




Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #22 –
To Rick G.

   As noted to Barry, I'm sorry I didn't identify my sound card, I thought I had.
I may still not have identified my current OS, which is Windows XP though I'll
be getting a new computer which will bring me, kicking and screaming, up to
Windows 7.

   Even with the missing information supplied, I can sympathize with how
frustrating I must be.  I just don't "get" this stuff, and I'm really reluctant to
spend a lot of time just trying to get good sound - I want to concentrate on
the notes, not on the sound.  I almost don't care about the sound, as long as
it's listenable, but unfortunately the default midi sounds are for the most part
not listenable, if you put them all together as in a symphony orchestra.

   Again, my apologies, and sympathies.














Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #23 –
arrowsmith, I think many, if not all, of the registry problems and other system issues that have slowed down your computer would be cleaned up by downloading (it sounds like your computer is virus-free enough to do it) and installing Glary Utilities (see my earlier comment) opening the Memory Optimizer and running 1-Click Maintenance followed by a reboot.  Do set Glary main window and the Memory Optimizer separately to load automatically on Windows startup before the reboot.  Try that before anything else and then let us know if you see any improvement.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #24 –
Well, if you're running USB1, it won't be fast enough. But USB2 has enough speed to run a soundcard without hitches. My daughter has a Soundblaster Live! USB stand-alone USB soundcard (different card than the internal card with the same name) that works extremely well with her laptop. Can't ask her right now if it uses sound fonts, 'cause she's running the Geneva Marathon this weekend (!)

Bill

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #25 –

To Milton:

    Hi, I already have Glary Utilities.  I haven't run the optimizer, but I will when
I get back.  (I want to get outside for a while first, since it's already 1:30PM
and it's a beautiful day in beautiful San Francisco.)  My first name is "Geoff"
by the way (actually "Geoffrey" but I never use the last three letters).  I guess
I'm signed up here as "Arrowsmith", since everybody has been using that.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #26 –
Hi Geoff - Simply click on "PROFILE", and then on "Account Related Settings".  You can change your name from your userid (which it defaulted to) to your real name.  It took me quite a while before I figured out how to do that.  :-)

Randy "purdue" Williams

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #27 –

To: Randy Williams

   Hi Randy, thanks for the tip.  I just changed it (I hope).

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #28 –
G'day Geoff,
your SB Live soundcard should be able to give you satisfactory results.  You don't need to load sound fonts instrument by instrument, rather you can load the entire bank in one go.  However, with your limited RAM I would look at smaller soundfonts only - probably nothing bigger than, say, 32 MB or so as the soundfont is loaded into memory "stolen" from the computers operating system.

WRT the new PC you are looking at - to make use of anything over 4 GB you need a 64 bit operating system.  This in turn may cause compatibility problems with old hardware (no drivers available) and older software (won't run in a 64 bit environment).  NWC2 is OK.  If you have an old printer you want to keep or some older hardware (like you SB card) nthat you want to keep then make sure that you can get drivers for the 64 bit OS you choose.  Some of these problems also exist for the 32 bit versions of Win7.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Loading a Soundfont - for Geoff

Reply #29 –
G'day Geoff,

This file gives some instructions on how to set up a a soundfont on your card.
It uses images for the X-Fi card but yours should be similar.
(You said that you get an image of a keyboard in the Soundfont Bank Manager so I'm guessing your setup is similar to the Audigy).

If you get confused my Email address is in the document.
Let me know if you need help.

http://tinyurl.com/2rq3rh/SOUNDFONT.doc

Barry Graham
Melbourne, Australia

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #30 –
To Milton: re registry problems

   My computer completely recovered from the virus, it seems, but the path to that was odd and, as usual with me, incomprehensible.   I went to Black Viper's (majorgeeks.com) "services" recommendations, using "services.msc" as viper recommends, instead of "msconfig", and set my values to viper's recommendations.  When I rebooted, my computer was far slower, appallingly slow, so I restored my computer to the state it had been in that morning before I used "services.msc" (which one can do with XP though I don't know if Windows 7 has anything similar).  After I did that and rebooted, suddenly all the apparently residual problems from the virus were gone.  That's even though I'd repeatedly used that "restore" function since I'd gotten the virus, and each of those "restores" should in theory have done the same thing that the "restore" operation after I had twiddled with the "services" recommendations did.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #31 –
To: Lawrie Pardy

   I took my "new" computer back, with regrets, since I really liked the small size.  The fact that it didn't come with a monitor, so that I was using an old fourteen-inch-diagonal monitor with it, might have been a factor why after a while I wasn't even turning it on, but trying to figure stuff out with the added complication of a new operating system was the major factor I suppose.  It's probably a very nice computer for somebody who doesn't need any slots to add anything to it, but my experience with "MyBook" leads me to believe that a USB connection might not be adequate for a soundcard.  "MyBook" admittedly did work a little better with Windows 7 in the new computer than with Windows XP in the old one, though.  I don't have a new computer yet, I'm suffering from techno-exhaustion at the moment.  The new computer that I took back had 6G of Ram, which perhaps could be increased.  I think I want no less than 8G, though I don't know how much that will really help, or if the Windows 7 operating system will just eat it up for its own secret priestly purposes.  I don't know how I'm ever going to keep a clean registry.  I'd like to have two drives with Windows 7 on both of them, and keep one almost pristine so that I can always run stuff on it.  Microsoft might make it very awkward to do that though, for its own licensing motives, much as after I updated Windows XP on my current computer a couple of times, the reinstallation disk wouldn't work anymore - wouldn't even recognize that I had a hard disk at all on my system.






Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #32 –
G'day Geoff,
probably where you really need to start before the next PC purchase is to define what you want to use it for and what applications you want to run.

FWIW the flavour of the month is enormous amounts of RAM and a 64 bit OS.  The reality is that this is fine if you are using all new hardware and software, but if you want to use any legacy stuff at all you really need to stay with 32 bit, in which case anything more than 4GB is wasted as the 32 bit OS cannot access it.

There will come a time where 64 bit is all that's available, but I think there will be at least one, or maybe two more versions of Windows before that happens.

If you don't need 64 bit apps, then I would stick with a 32 bit version for now if you have older hardware you want to continue using.  On the other hand, if you are happy to buy new hardware (printer, monitor, soundcard etc.) then there's no reason not to go 64 bit.  Just make sure you understand why you are making your choices.

WRT keeping the registry clean, good luck.  There are tools available that purport to look after the registry, with varying degrees of success.  I believe that the "Glary utilities" http://www.glaryutilities.com/ are OK.

As far as having 2 drives with Win 7 on them, you do have the right to back up your system.  I would consider a second drive and using a Ghost style utility to keep a few copies on a second drive that are known to be good as backup points.  This drive should not normally be running in the machine to avoid it being attacked by malware.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #33 –
To: Barry Graham

   G'day Barry!

   Thanks for your WORD document.  The picture in it of the sound bank manager looks almost exactly like mine and has the same essential parts in the same order.  I was going through it and keeping an exhaustive running commentary, but about a half hour, I would guess, into it, but I somehow managed to close firefox and lose everything I'd typed, while I was looking for something analogous to a "Chaos 8m Soundfont in your folder", which incident has fired up my techno-fatigue again, after it taking me pretty much a week to get over the previous bout of techno-fatigue.  Up to that point, everything had gone swimmingly, but I hit a brick wall when you wrote "Browse to the Chaos8M Soundfont in your folder And OPEN", since I don't know what that is and I don't see anything like it.  I have no idea where there would be such a folder.  I don't seem to have anything like it.  I lost Firefox when I clicked on something called "SFBM.EXE.MANIFEST" which certainly didn't look promising but it was almost the only thing in the "Creative" folder that contains "Soundblaster" as one of its subfolders that wasn't recognizably something familiar that probably wasn't a soundfont, such as DLLs and INIs and the exectutable file SFBM.EXE that's the "Sound Font Bank Manager" executable that we're running itself.  The only other file I would have checked out was called "sfbm_skn.rtx", which looks like a "skin" file.  I think I know what "skin" files are and that they're just annoying fluff that I want nothing to do with, but I would have checked it out anyway if I hadn't blown everything by trying to see if there was any hope for "SFBM.EXE.MANIFEST".

   I don't appear to have a "sound bank" such as you were aiming at when you wrote "Browse to the Chaos8M Soundfont in your folder And OPEN".  If I did, perhaps it would have been come already installed on my soundblaster card anyway.  I'm maybe going to have to get a new soundcard with a new 64-bit computer anyway.  I sure wish Microsoft would stop throwing everything to the winds every few years and forcing technophobes like me into a whole new round of very unpleasant and ungratifying operating system shenanigans. 

   I take it the sound card that you have did actually come with the soundfont that you're discussing installed.  I've been looking at the ASUS sound card, which seems to have some connection with CHAOS,
and I wonder if that one comes with a sound bank that can be installed as per your instructions, or far better gets automatically installed when you install the soundcard so that one doesn't have to go through all this bizarre stuff?  I know myself, and I'd rather compute taxes for everybody on my block than have to hunt up sound fonts on the web and then try to figure out what to do with them. 

   Unfortunately, I can't tell from the descriptions of any of these sound cards whether they will do what I want, which is just to produce sounds that are vaguely like the instruments they're named after.  It doesn't have to be exact, but a "cello" shouldn't sound more like a flute than a cello IMV, as it does on my current system.  And a "string orchestra", as opposed to the synthetic strings which are the only things other than piano that sound OK on my system, shouldn't sound more like a bunch of juvenile delinquents pulling cats' tails than a real string orchestra.

   Anyhow, I'm definitely techno-fatigued-out, but thanks very much for your post, and particularly for your WORD file which got me much further than I've ever gotten before, and which I've saved in the hope that when I get a new system, I'll be able to use it.  And please do tell me, if you can, though this subject seems so arcane that I'm not sure that anybody can predict what anybody else's experience will be, what your sound card is if you can carry the instructions you provided to completion, or even better if a decent soundfont gets loaded as part of the installation of the card.  I don't check my email very often, so this forum might be better to post in.  It probably will be a few days before I recover from my current techno-fatigue, though.






Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #34 –
To: Lawrie Pardy

   Re, new system

   I am planning to get no less than 8G of RAM with my next computer, which will have to be WINDOWS 7 I suppose, and I suppose I'll have to get new hardware.  The only peripheral hardware I have, other than the IBOOK which I already know will work with Windows 7 is the sound card though.  I am ready for a new sound card since I'm really tired of my experience trying unsuccessfully to get good sound with the one I have, though that may not be so much the fault of the card as it is of the bizarre (to me) nature of dealing with sound fonts, which I'm not at all sure will be any clearer (to me) with the next generation of sound cards as it is with the current one.

   Actually, I do have other peripherals - a laser printer and a scanner.  It never occurred to me they might not work with Windows 7 and with a 64-bit system.  I know my MyBook works, but I never tried
hooking the printer and scanner up.  There's no way around it though, Microsoft is going to force me to give up XP, since I've finally gotten uncomfortable with it, which is a completely unacceptable state of affairs in Microsoft's eyes.  I just checked Microsoft's compatibility, and my printer is compatible with
Windows 7.  My scanner is old and isn't listed, but later versions of the same scanner are OK.

   As I casually mentioned elsewhere, I'd really like to get an extra disk and put the operating system
on that too, though just use it as a secondary disk for the most part.  But then I'd always have a disk
available with a relatively pristine registry on it, if I wanted to boot from that one.  I don't know if Microsoft has put up roadblocks that will keep me from doing that though.


Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #35 –

Find your soundfont folder.
From the Start Menu START then SEARCH and search for *.sf2  (all sf2 soundfonts).
NOTE the folder where the existing soundfonts are located.

I gave you the link to the soundfont.
Download Chaos 8Mb Soundfont
 http://tinyurl.com/2rq3rh/Chaos8.zip

Open the downloaded Zip file.
Extract the files to your soundfont folder (that you found in the Search above).
The soundfont file is CHAOS8M.SF2

Continue with the instructions I sent.

You must persevere.
My address is btgraham@tpg.com.au if you need further help.
I WILL get you through this.

Good luck

Barry Graham

Re: Garritan Personal Orch - has anybody gotten it to work?

Reply #36 –
Hi Barry

   I found two *.SF2 files in the c:\windows\system32 folder.
Those are:
                CT4MGM.SF2 (which is the one that's already installed)
                CT2MGM.SF2 (which isn't installed)

I don't have a "sythA".  The only option in the "soundfont device"
box is "creative sound font synth" so I perforce selected that.
There are no options at all for the "select midi in" box, so I had
to leave that blank.  I was able to choose "CC0(GS) in the "Bank
index display mode" box.

  I downloaded and unzipped the chaos zip, and put the two files in
it into the windows/system32 folder where the MTM.sf2 files are. 
There two CHAOS files are Chaos8M.sf2 and chaos8m.txt. 

   The chaos didn't a ppear in the "soundfont device" box after I
did that, so I closed out the bank manager and restarted it.  No
luck, I had the same thing as before, which are the CT4... in slots
0-9, 16, and 127, and no mention of any other slots.  I checked
the chaos8m.txt file but it has just a list of instruments and
their "patch" number, useful for some things, but not for this.
The "soundfont device" box only has the one option for "creative
sound font synth, the same as before I loaded the CHAOS files into
the system32 folder.

   In the System32 folder, there are three short files:

            DEFAULT.SFM    
which contains RSFM3   SFMSLIST'   INFOinit        À        CT2MGM.SF2
            DEFAULT4.SFM   
which contains RSFM3   SFMSLIST'   INFOinit        À        CT4MGM.SF2
            DEFAULT8.SFM
which contains RSFM3   SFMSLIST'   INFOinit        À        CT8MGM.SF2

Since Default 4 contains the only stuff I see in my bank manager,
I made a copy of it and changed the text "CT4MGM.SF2" text in the
original to "CHAOS8M.SF2", but that didn't make any difference. I
still had only "CT4MGM.SF2" available when I restarted the bank
manager.

   I'll reboot the computer now, and see if that helps.

   OK, rebooted, which didn't help, except that now the sound bank
that's in charge is identified as CT2MGM.SF2 and all the options are
that one too.  Noteworthy sounds about the same despite the bank change.
Tomorrow I'll change all three of those *.SFM files to "CHAOS8M.SF2"
and reboot, but I've had it for tonight.  I went to a local bar earlier
and shot pool, and had one vodka. (I can't handle my liquor: if I have
two drinks, I'm drunk).  I played pool for a while and was a lot more
successful than I've been with the sound manager so far, eventually
giving the table to the last guy I beat because I wanted to go home.
But it's 1:00AM my time now, and time for bed.  Oh, NEWS FLASH!  I
noticed the "load" button underneath the "Bank Stack" box, and clicked
on it, and thereby was able to load the CHAOS *.SFM file as a second
entry in the box, in addition to the "CT4MGM.SF2".  All the numbered
options on the left were changed to "CHAOS" thereby, but I'll bet I
can change that by dragging "CTM2..." into some of them. But it's time
for bed now.  I just renamed the CHAOS trial default file to
DEFAULTCHAOS.SFM and restored the copy of the CT4...SFM file to its
original name.  Maybe I'm getting somewhere!  but now it's time for bed.

   You must be a saint to put up with this.  I'm a complete moron
about this stuff.  I'm much better at pool, though probably not as good
as Mozart because it was said that nobody could beat him.  Thank you so
much for your help.  Things are still as mysterious to me as ever, but
at least I can get around a little now.  We'll see how things go tomorrow.

   It's "tomorrow" now. Things look good.  The synthetic strings I use
on my "In Romantic Style" sound about the same with the CHAOS sounds,
but Tina's opening movement of the Beethoven fourth which I had looked
at before to try to see how Beethoven handled the orchestra in it,
which was unlistenable before, is now, though distinctly electronic,
is quite listenable.  But now I'm confused again.  I thought it was
unlistenable before, so I just changed from the CHAOS to CT4... and it
sounds the same. Now I don't know if I've just become more tolerant
than before, or if it really was as bad as I remembered before.  I'll
have to reboot with the "CT4..." in place, and see if there's any
difference.

   There's a mysterious message on the Soundbank Font Manager: "You can
configure your midi banks here.  Multiple Sound Font files can be applied
to a single MIDI bank.  Banks are selected by using MIDI controller 0".
I have no idea what "MIDI controller 0" is, or how one would assign two
sound banks to any of the "select bank" items numbered 0 to 127.  I don't
see how to "drag": using the usual method of dragging doesn't work.  The
only way I could get "CT4..." back into those numbered slots was to
"Remove" the Chaos from the "Bank Stack", and then they all flipped to
MTM4.  I can't load the "CHAOS" back after deleting it, unless I "remove"
the MTM4 first, because the message says I have not enough memory.  I
recall that it origially said I had 9.8 something available of which I
was using 2.2 of the same something before.  I just tried to have the
CHAOS and the CT4... in "Bank Stack" at the same time, but though I had
both of them visible before, I don't now seem to be able to have more
than one and have to remove it before I choose another *.SF2 file.

   Anyhow, I have the CT4... bank stack item visible now, and I'll
reboot and see how the Beethoven sounds with that in all the "select
bank" slots after rebooting.  I'm not able to drag anything from
"bank stack" into "select bank", but if I start by going to "select
bank" and pick an empty number, the entry in "bank stack" disappears.

  Well I just rebooted, and it seems that no matter what "bank stack"
item is in the "select bank" slots, Chaos or a CT... item, everything
sounds exactly the same.  Maybe the Beethoven always sounded like that
and I've just become more tolerant of the electronic sounds.  I did
discover that I can get the CT2 stack item, but not the CT4 item, into
the "bank stack" box at the same time, but it doesn't make any
difference because all the items in the "select bank" box will be the
stack box item I most recently loaded, there doesn't seem to be any
way that I've discovered to change that, and it doesn't make any
difference to the actual sound what stack item I choose anyway.  This
is weird stuff, man.  I can't believe my soundblaster card came without
any instructions about it at all, not even so much as mentioning the
existence of the "soundfont bank manager" application.

   I made breakfast and coffee while the computer was rebooting, so
I'll eat it now, and then look at the remainder of your WORD document.

   OK, I looked a bit further down, and saw that I next have to go
to "Sounds and audio devices" in the Control Panel.  I did that, but
I don't see anything like "SB X-FI Synth A [D000]" in it.  The only
two options I have are:
                 Creative Sound Font Synth
                 Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth
It was set to the first one of those.  I could set it to the second,
but I didn't do that, since it doesn't look like it has anything to
do with the CHAOS wavetable.

   I think I'm done for today.  This stuff hurts my head.  Maybe I'll
try the Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth later and see if that makes
any difference.

   Do you have any idea why I might not be seeing anything like the
"SB X FI Synth A" in my control panel sound settings?

   Thanks awfully for your help. This stuff seems so weird to me.