Questions & Answers

GPO5 Garritan not working with Notion

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1,675 views
asked Oct 18, 2017 in Notion by kimokeomokana (480 points)
Since MakeMusic owns Garrison, is Notion fully supporting GPO5?

I cannot get GPO5 to work in Notion.

I have read everything I can find on setting up VST's. I get some of my other VST's to work, like Addictive Drums and Addictive Keys, but I cannot get GPO5 to work at all.

Please provide specific information related to getting GPO5 to work in Notion. What I found from other users requesting the same thing was that they were being pointed to a general support link about setting up VSTs. I have read that. It does nothing to resolve the issue.

Thanks

3 Answers

0 votes
answered Oct 19, 2017 by kimokeomokana (480 points)
 
Best answer
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.
0 votes
answered Oct 18, 2017 by TechSupport77 (195,970 points)
Hello,

The majority of times that I have seen problems with GPO, re-installing ARIA or updating to the latest version of ARIA resolves the problem.  Unfortunately, there is not enough information in this post to pin-point the exact problem.  Without any information, here is what you will want to try:

1.  Uninstall and re-install Aria on your system.  Make sure that you download the latest version.

2.  Make sure that you have enabled ARIA in the plug-in manager inside of Notion.  

3.  If you receive an error when trying to enable ARIA, you will want to make sure that you have installed the same bit-version of Notion that you have installed for ARIA.  64 vs. 32-bit.  If you are on a Windows machine, you can try right-clicking Notion and choosing "Run as administrator" when opening the program.

4.  Once you have enabled GPO, you will want to add your instruments from the GPO family in Score Setup.  You may need to exit Score Setup, click on one of your GPO staves and open the plug-in interface for that staff.  (ctrl + i on Windows, command + i on Mac).  With the plug-in interface open, you can manually load the instrument that you are working with.  Some versions of ARIA will manually load the instruments, some require that you manually load them.  I think with GPO 5, you will need to manually load them.

If you have any problems, you will want to submit a support ticket from within your my.presonus.com account.  Just click the "Support" tab.
0 votes
answered Nov 19, 2022 by nathanielwalker2 (400 points)
There is no way to get it to work properly, unless you manually port over all of the templates for GPO4 to GPO5, as GPO5 has updated some instruments and the instrument IDs for many instruments may differ from GPO4.

The way these libraries are supported by Notion is that Notion will often load one instance of Aria with up to 16 articulations per instance.  All of the settings for the aria instances are saved with the template file (Panning, levels, etc.).  All slots are set to output to the same audio output for this instance.  That way, Notion can use channel switching to send certain articulations to the correct channel, and they are pre-balanced/mixed and sent out from the same audio output for that instrument instance.

If you go to the Notion Application folder and open the templates directly, you will see that this is how it happens.

Once a library is updates, tons of things start to break.  This is why the EWQLSO Platinum does not work in Notion 6 unless you use the "Lite" presets (which load Keyswitched instruments, not all the articulations).

So, these replies aren't going to fix your issue.  The only way to "fix" it is for PreSonus (good luck) or Garritan (more good luck needed) puts in the work to fix them - or you fix them yourself.

Right now, unless you already own legacy software that works out of the box with Notion 6, or have EWQLSO Platinum and are okay with using only the Keyswitched Patches (called "Lite" in Notion 6), there really isn't an easy way to work with these libraries.  And, frankly, I'm not sure it's even worth the trouble to get them to work.

I've certainly moved on.
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