A month later

It's been a month, I should post something

I bought Garritan Personal Orchestra a few months ago. It was a dicey buy, because none of the local music stores had a copy for me to demo, and it was recommended for WinXP/2000 only - I'm on WinME. Also wants a faster PC - 1Ghz to my 833mhz.

Got it anyhow - but it wouldn't install right. 2 months later, with continual back-and-forth between me and the Native Instruments (they're the US distributors) rep, I finally got a Garritan rep who knew what was up - it's a dynamic install that gets lost midstream under WME. He gave me the workaround, I got it going...

...but it's really demanding on my system. I can run it in standalone mode, but can't use it inside Acid or Cubase without crashing - can't even use it as an Encore output without forcing a reboot.

Still, great sounds. Piano is excellent, so is the pipe organ. One of the violin patches has an articulation control on some of the out-of-range keys - big fun to improvise orchestrally.

There's a choice between wet and dry instruments: referring, of course, to the amount of reverb. There's a separate reverb control, but if I understand correctly, the wet instruments were recorded in a reverberent space. So is the reverb control a separate piece of processing, or just a mix between wet and dry versions? I suspect the former, but am not sure.

There are "multi" sounds, too - combinations of sounds - but I haven't had a chance to evaluate them yet.

I'm trying to figure out a way to add GPO in to one of my sequencing environments so I can swap the piano sound in on some of my completed pieces. The freebie mdaPiano VST Instrument that I use is okay, but GPO's piano is so much better! It would prevent me from playing back in real time, and greatly increase rendering time, but that's fine for finished works. At this point, though, the sequencers blow up when I first load GPO up with the piano. Sigh...

Might be new puter time!