GPO and Sibelius?

Somebody gave me a copy of Garritan Personal Orchestra today, but I'm struggling to integrate it with Sibelius effectively. So far, I've got Sibelius to recognise Garritan as another sound device, but this means that I have to manually tell it what each channel should sound as every time I open a new file. It also means I can only have eight different sounds at once. . . . defeating the point of having a personal orchestra.

Can anyone help? Is there a better way of doing this? Can I:

1) Load more than eight instruments?

2) Save my sound settings, without having to spend ages reassigning every time I open a new file?

Ok - I've sorted that problem using Garritan Studio, using multiple instances of the program and saving the sound setup. That's fine now. Now the problem is that nothing's the right volume, and that I have to click the 'mod' wheel several times to get things to go to the right level each time I load the system. Any workaround?

When I load my saved .studio file it restores the volume levels. I don't know what's different in your case.

I found that strings are set at ridiculously low volume. I think it is still lower than the other groups even when gain is at max.

Kind of off the subject, but does GPO sound much better than sibelius sound essentials (the sounds that come with sibelius 5)? Not that the sibelius sounds are bad, but is there that much of a difference?

Hey, sorry I didn't see this thread before because I actually had the exact same problem.

OK, the thing is GPO responds to the mod wheel as the volume control. So what you need to do is create new dynamics so that they effect the mod wheel.

Go to: File>Preferences>Word Menus.

Select: Expression Words>Edit>New

After the dynamic text (for example, mf, f, pp ), type "~C1,xxx" The "xxx" is a number between 0 and 127, the standard MIDI values. So if you wanted mf for example, you would type: ~C1,80 . I'll now include a list of what values correspond to what dynamic.

ppp = 24

pp = 37

p = 49

mp = 64

mf = 80

f = 97

ff = 112

fff= 127

Then input these dynamic markings into your score and that should fix volume issues. You might also want to google "Sibelius GPO crescendo plug in", as you can get a crescendo.diminuendo plugin specifically for use with GPO.

I hope this was of some help, let me know if you have more trouble - there might be some steps a bit out as I havn't used GPO in quite a while.

EDIT: qwerty: GPO is better than Sib sounds essentials, but the difference isn't too too great. Sib Sounds actually takes quite a few samples from GPO.

Fox.

Hey, just curious to know how you got Sibelius to recognize GPO in the first place. It's not happening for me. I think it might be because my PC only has 256MB RAM, but you would have thought it would have at least picked it up, right?

Cheers.

You have to install "Garritan Studio" which is downloadable for free at their website.

You have to install "Garritan Studio" which is downloadable for free at their website.

Thanks.

Anyone know how I can make an mp3 of the piece with the GPO sounds?

Doesn't Sibelius just export to .mp3 anyway!?! I thought they'd had mp3 export from sib 4 at least.

Nope, sibelius exports into .wav (I think), so you have to load it into another editing program (I use Audacity, its quite good and free!) and convert from there.

oooh yeah I remember. I'm thinking of IDD Sheetmusic which I used to use, that went straight to .mp3.