Garritan and Aria in Cantabile?

[TiUser]

I fancy with Aria based Garritan libraries. They seem to sound well and are not too expensive.

Any experiences with Garritan's Aria player in Cantabile?

How long does loading samples need with a current mainstream machine, lets say dual core 2 GHz with 2GB ram.

How playable are Garritan instruments from a keyboard? Demos often fool you by clever midi programming and when you play the stuff right away from a simple keyboard it sounds boring...

Anything else to mention?

Thanks in advance!

[lallis]

I have been using the Garritan Authorized Steinway piano, which is their first product using the Aria Player. The player has been a superior product, with almost no early bugs; it has worked perfectly from the first day for everybody that I know of.

The Steinway is a huge sample, but its load time is a very few seconds. Aria (and the patch programming) do some sort of magic that way. The piano (after programming updates) now is quite excellent, and the Player GUI more than adequate. Nice smooth player.

Load Meter usage is very low in Cantabile (around 20% at a good playable buffer setting), and all goes smoothly. I understand Aria is flexible, and can easily look very different for different products.


Edit: I got curious and timed the loading of the Garritan Authorized Steinway. It ran 9 seconds. This is excellent for a big piano sample. Some of the slow ones take more than a minute to load in Kontakt.

[tman2k (Meathook Audio)]

How playable are Garritan instruments from a keyboard? Demos often fool you by clever midi programming and when you play the stuff right away from a simple keyboard it sounds boring...

Anything else to mention?

Thanks in advance!

Hi there!

I own GPO4 (which uses the Aria engine) and load times are super, super fast...in the order of a couple of seconds!

One thing you have to watch out for...GPO4 (and I believe JABB as well) use the mod wheel for volume! That means that you cannot have a spring loaded mod wheel (that always goes back to zero position). Edirol keyboards, for one, have this. I have an m-audio Oxygen, and the mod wheel is not spring loaded, so it stays where you set it! If it does have a spring loaded mod wheel, then you will have to program a knob on your keyboard to send mod wheel messages.

The key velocity controls the attack of the samples. It actually works very, very, well!

Hope this helps!

[lallis]

...GPO4 (and I believe JABB as well) use the mod wheel for volume!

Yes, it's true for Jazz and Big Band as well, for many instruments. There are no sample layers. They use mod wheel plus velocity to filter a single sample and manipulate its loudness and timbre together. With some practice, realistic live play of strings and horns is possible for a regular user.



One of the best things about an Aria library is the freedom of registration. Once you've purchased it, you download a PNG image looking like a credit card, with your name and software data. To register, you simply drag this "card" anywhere onto the GUI of the Aria sampler. The job is finished instantly.

The registration card can be stored. Should you lose it anyway and need another, you can download a replacement at any time. This is apparently an effective copy protection, and it makes life easy for legitimate owners.

They ask that you limit yourself to four simultaneous installations of the Authorized Steinway, on four different machines. Other libraries are likely similar. That's plenty of scope for deployment.

[TiUser]

Thanks a lot so far for all comments.

I've read a bit in the JABB 3 manual. It looks like there is a lot of control for sequencing but just basic control when playing - mod wheel, sustain. Aftertouch seems to be supported too for vibrato. Don't know how difficult it is to use key switches together with all that...

Isn't there some kind of articulation automation when playing?

Other than that - yes, licensing seems to be simple and hassle free like a serial number.

What about JABB 3 sounds quality? I've read some bad things about single reed instruments like saxes and clarinets...

[OhmygoshJosh]

One thing you have to watch out for...GPO4 (and I believe JABB as well) use the mod wheel for volume! That means that you cannot have a spring loaded mod wheel (that always goes back to zero position).

Yes, I own GPO4 as well and I absolutely love it! The modwheel expression control is definitely a clever and effective way to allow you to crescendo and decrescendo independently of attack, which is measured by velocity on the keys. But because of this modwheel controller assignment you may get less than desirable results when stacking Garritan plugins on top of other VST plugins within the same rack. Nearly all other plugins and general midi instruments use the modwheel to control modulation/vibrato/warble (whatever you want to call it). As you crescendo your Garritan instrument, you also get a nice "wabba-wabba-wabba" on your other instrument! Fine if you like that effect, but most of the time you will not.

One workaround is to buy an expression pedal if your keyboard has a port for it, and assign Garritan's expression control to the pedal rather than the modwheel.

========

On another note, Garritan also offers plenty of "Keyswitched" instruments, especially the nice brass from Project SAM. These are excellent for soloing! But, these "KS" instruments should be avoided when stacking with other plugins and GPO instruments because inadvertently striking a key in the keyswitch area will change your instrument's attributes in some way during a live performance. Black keys in the keyswitch area sometimes even silence your instrument! It's a shame that all the Project SAM brass instruments come only as KS.

Josh

[lallis]

TiUser:

I suppose you have already found the Garritan user forums at Northern Sounds. If not, they are here:

http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/for ... y.php?f=39

You will find a heavy concentration of users there, and presumably some good advice fropm those who use these libraries seriously.

[TiUser]

Thanks for the link, I'll look into that.

What I am interested in is not what you can do when you sequence these sounds but when you play these from a keyboard. Not just solos but also sections.

With JABB there seems to be most "realistic" monophonic brass instruments but how to play chords... and if, how do the light sample versions perform then... I guess it really needs some kind of midi section processing playing brass sections from a keyboard with some twist... like Rolands ARX-03 brass extension board does. Clearly JABB has similar sounds (also the effects stuff like falls, doits, etc.) but I fear it's much more controller work to get these and not really "intuitive" from a keyboard players standpoint.

Let's leave the "realistic" argument aside, brass played from a keyboard is never "realistic"... I prefer calling it "convincing"...

I liked Wallanders Wivi Demo a lot but it's too expensive for me - nearly 1000 bucks when you want the whole lot. All the Wallander Instruments have great dynamic and expression - Wallander uses the modwheel for dynamics too - just when playing them from a keyboard. But especially the saxes are not so to my taste, they have a sound component in them like you blow through a comb wrapped by a thin sheet of paper - something I've discovered with most modeled sax instruments... or do I simply have a wrong imagination of a sax sound?