Hollywood Choirs w/Finale

[FossMaNo1]

Does anyone have experience using EastWest Sounds' Hollywood Choirs with Finale? EW says it's compatible with Finale, but I'd like to know how well Finale's lyrics interface with the Word Builder 2 engine.

For context, I would really like to make practice tracks for my choir and Hollywood Choirs sounds like it might work.

[ebiggs1]

Interesting, I had never heard about them. It says to contact their support so that is what I would do.

[blueshift]

From the documentation:

(2) Notation programs work with Opus, but do not support the full feature set of some EastWest Libraries,
such as those that use WordBuilder. Please contact support for details.

You would need a DAW and after bringing in any instrument tracks from Finale, use a keyboard to key in your phonetically prepared word-builder lyrics real time.

[BuonTempi]

It works well enough with Dorico, so it might work with Finale.

You have to type the syllables into the VST itself (and it has its own phoneme system). Then it just sounds each syllable to whatever MIDI notes come in. So playback always has to start from the beginning.

[blueshift]

I think I will give this a shot as choirs are the only thing I need to improve in my Finale output - the Garritan instruments I use (and polishing in a Cubase) give me exceptionally realistic results already. I output my tracks coast to coast anyway. And if it doesn't work - I can keyboard it in (which is what I was planning to do anyway based on that footnote). Thanks.

EDIT Aug. 1 (earlier edit removed): I can confirm WordBuilder works in Finale using their Opus plugin, though I would have to re-configure all the racks in my template as I have almost all available slots already in use, and WB consumes quite a few. The keyboard with touch sensitive keys on selected tracks will be easier in my case. (What we really need is text to speech at this point. Where is that?)

[blueshift]

I should follow up my last post. I made five - five! - very nice audio tracks straight out of Finale, surprising even me for the realism. (To be sure, I was blown away.) But on one of my more complicated arrangements, I am encountering problems that are best solved by laying out my parts in Finale, but outputting MIDI and running EWSC in a DAW. (I'm using a DAW that will map a tempo track to an audio track from my detailed Finale time-dilation methods. Once the MIDI is in, which takes another minute or two, the process is exactly the same.)

[Bill Reed]

It doesn't interface at all with Finale's lyrics. Ditto for any other notation program

[blueshift]

True, EW is not playhead aware - it is strictly MIDI "next note on" - exactly as it is in a DAW, and in either case, phonetics are entered in and handled by EW; it does not use lyrics or words. (edit: h/t @bill reed, though I never stated this, it is an important clarification.) If you configure your Finale file to a finished 'lockup' state you can indeed output performing files (and I have done it). That usually requires a copy of your Finale lockup, as a four part choir will eat up four entire racks by itself (and my choirs are six-part). But that's too much work. Though my instrumental output is audio tracks (wav or aiff) to mix in a DAW, to handle EW I create enough extra voice tracks in my mockup configuration, six slots in a single aria player instance, and output to MIDI and assign EW voicing and syllables in a DAW.

The reason I use EW is that the resulting mockup of my work is as close to a live recording as I can get. The voices are actual samples and the words enunciated phonetically, the same way singers would produce them. I can't imagine how such a construction could possibly be playhead aware, that would need to be synthesized voices and AI, a kind of next-level Note Performer. I think for a lot of Finale-ists, that would be a better-than-adequate result.