I came back and edited this. The following was discovered before I read what is Item 4 in Brian Meisner answer. I wish I would have read it more thoroughly before I hunted and pecked to find it on my own. The rest of this answer does have followup questions and recommendations for the Notion product.
Here is what I did regarding the question I submitted above:
I did do a complete re install with the same exact outcome, no sound coming from any Stave with Aria assigned.
I kept plugging around and after exhausting everything I read I stumbled on to the last menu item under the TOOLS menu, "Open Plug In Manager". This is not the same screen for enabling a VST, this is for actually assigning Instruments to the Music Engine, in this case ARIA that powers the Garritan Personal Orchestra.
Garrison has 16 slots to assign an Instrument to. These are MIDI Channels.
If you create a Score from the GROUND UP, when you selected the GPO ARIA Engine, the ARIA interface opens up automatically and it kind of intuitively walks you through the need to assign an Instrument to the first of the 16 slots.
But if you have an existing SCORE and go into SCORE SETUP to change an instrument over to the GPO VST, there is NOTHING that tells you to OPEN up the ARIA ENGINE via the TOOLS>OPEN PLUG IN MANAGER menu item and set up an instrument. You only find this out through experimenting. There is no "GOOD" or even "LOUSY" documentation that tells you this. It was a hit and miss and not a pleasant experience. Took hours of fumbling around, so hopefully this will help others to shorten their efforts to get up and running.
If you change an Existing Score over to GPO, when you come out of SCORE SETUP, your Clefs will switch to the Treble Clef and if you were in any other Clef, all your notes will be adjusted. Do not attempt to TRANSPOSE the notes. Just select the appropriate Clef and click on the Stave and it will change all the notes accordingly.
Lastly, the 16 slots. The following is what would be IDEAL; to be able to set up an ENSEMBLE, save it, then when creating a new score, create STAVES based upon the ARIA GPO Engine, with independent STAVES being able to say which MIDI CHANNEL to operate on. If you have 16 STAVES you can select 1 of the 16 SLOTS in ARIA which represents a particular instrument. This allows you to use the ARIA MIXER and EFFECTS panel from one instance of ARIA.
As best as I can tell right now, EACH STAVE requires a separate ARIA configuration as each individual STAVE is handled independent and so only the FIRST SLOT in ARIA is used. This is a HUGE and CUMBERSOME experience. ARIA has its own MIXER and EFFECTS modules and with having ONLY ONE instance of ARIA supporting up to 16 STAVES/MIDI Channels, you can control and entire setup via the MIXER.
The way I see it now, is that I have to jump in and out and adjust a mix individually using MIXER channel one 16 different times. The is REALLY a pain. If someone can guide me to a better solution, I am all ears.
Notion 6 needs EXTENSIVE MIDI configuration support added to its platform so that it is ROBUST.
The huge ADVANTAGE I see with Notion is that it has great iPad support, although there are HUGE BUGS that need to be fixed, such as system crashes when you attempt to do TIES and SLURS in vermin instances. I have reported these in great detail. I want Notion to be a success.
There is a great foundational framework for Notion, yet there needs to be some heavy work done to quash some major issues. When will there be a MAJOR update to Notion to solve these existing issues and to provide a greater and more robust framework?
Last note: Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 is MIND BLOWING! Garrison was bought by MakeMusic, the creator of Finale, the leader in Notational Software (which lacks an iPad version, reason I went with Notion). I bought all the sound packs for Notion and was really disappointed in them. The fidelity just is not there. I use RealGuitar for my twelve string and acoustic needs and now GPO5 for my orchestral needs. GPO5 is awesome and I purchased it for $129. There is another sound pack out there that costs $3000 and GPO is like being in the same room with the Symphony. With the Notion sound packs I would turn the sound up loud and it was nothing but distortion. I crank up GPO all the way and it is AWESOME.
I want to stay on the Notion platform. I like being able to move from iPad, to iPhone to Mac. I do my rough work on the iPad and then when I am ready for GPO I move over to my Studio Macs. I guess I might get a Mac laptop so I can have GPO where ever I go.
