Finale Forum

There are enormous differences in my situation between using Native Instruments VST and not using it for playback.

Nearly all dynamic setting change radically and without a discernable pattern when moving from one playback method to the other.

Currently NOT using Native Instruments VST gives me somewhat pleasant results but the volume is incredibly low. It's so low I have to turn my speakers up until I hear a system hum without playing anything. With N.I. VST the volume, in general, is where I would expect it but all of my settings have gone to an alternate universe.

I have another issue which may be related.

When I purchased Finale 2007 I also bought the stand alone Garritan Personal Orchestra which has many more sound samples than the bare bones version that comes with Finale. I have been going bonkers trying to get Finale to recognize Garritan Personal Orchestra. I have no idea what I did, but in the dozens of installations - un-installations - re-installations I've done of both in the past two days somehow I blundered into something that seems to work. Somewhat...

Without N.I. VST turned on, the Garritan sounds are wonderful, except for the trumpet which sounds more like a Kazzoo being played in a bathroom. (I have reverb OFF) With N.I. VST on the sounds are radically different in timbre and dynamics but the trumpet is marginally better in quality.

There is another issue related to all of this:

Every instrument, except for the English Horn, seems to be hitting each note with a sledgehammer! I've never heard such heavy accents before.

I have the base key velocity turned down to about 40, which makes the sound lower in volume but has no effect on articulation. Even instruments such as strings marked at PPP are heavily accented on each entry.

Finally, any long note - - especially a whole note tied into other measure - - seems to swell dramatically in volume.

There are many other phantom quirks with sound in this setting but I don't see any purpose served by going into detail about it here.

I'm going to attach the Finale file for those of you who may want to hear what I'm doing. I'm re-constructing Aaron Copland's Quiet City from a piano score to full strings with English Horn and Trumpet. (I played this piece on my senior trumpet recital at OSU back in the late 1970's)

With a limit of only 100 KB per attachment it's really difficult to provide a representative example of what I'm doing.

I created two versions of just ONE measure of the trumpet part. In the first example, attached here, Native Instruments VST is ON. It sounds a lot like a real trumpet.

And here is the radically different version with Native Instruments VST OFF.

Note the EXTREMELY MUTED Kazzoo in a bath-room timbre...

Now I have two examples with strings and English Horn. It seems odd how many measures I can upload with all this going on but could only do one measure with trumpet ALONE.

Here is the sample with N.I. VST OFF

Here is the same excerpt with N.I. VST ON.

I'm not absolutely sure what you have going on here. I haven't listened to your music, but there are some obvious issues.

First, you cannot playback full GPO without VST turned on. It requires VST to be turned on, or it will playback whatever other instrument in General MIDI that you have chosen for your instrument program number. You can always assign program 57 for trumpet in the "non-VST" general MIDI instrument, and you can assign and MIDI channel that you want for it. Similarily when using VST, you can assign any MIDI channel, but you can assign any program number that you wish. However if you want to compare general MIDI to VST by turning off VST, then you MUST make sure that the instruments are using the same program number (in the case of the trumpet, it MUST be 57, as well as using the same MIDI channel.

"Currently NOT using Native Instruments VST gives me somewhat pleasant results but the volume is incredibly low. It's so low I have to turn my speakers up until I hear a system hum without playing anything. With N.I. VST the volume, in general, is where I would expect it but all of my settings have gone to an alternate universe."

Most people complain about it the other way around.

As far as recognizing full GPO, go to the NI service center and make sure that you have all the appropriate updates installed, and that you have registered full GPO properly. Kontakt Player must be at version 2.2.4. Also, GPO must be at version 2.2.3 to work properly.

The problem with your dynamics is probably related to human playback settings in Finale. Dynamics will not work without Human Playback being turned on (what a pain) however human playback has lots of settings that seem silly to me. Default settings are things such as irregular tempo. The first count of every bar is dragged out unless you turn on "exact timing don't randomize". If you have a bunch of 16th notes in any bar the dragging effect is incredibly annoting. Also long notes on endings will decrease in volume unless you turn it off. Etc., etc., etc. some of these things are very annoying out of the box because they are not intuitive to you and I as "Human Playback". (I think that I have mentioned this before.)

Something else which may affect your volumes could be the way that you enter dynamics. There are settings for Note Assigned Dynamics (or any other expression) and for Measure Assigned expressions. If you have one instrument in the bar assigned a dynamic using Note assigned and another instrument in the bar has a different dynamic assigned using the Measure Assigned method the Measure Assigned dynamic always seems to take preference over all instruments.

Warren
Before you do anything else, make sure every thing is hunky dory at the Native Instruments end. Check your Human playback settings. Check your Instrument settings in the Instrument List. Check your Kontakt 2 settings.

Thanks for this Warren, I know it's been a while and the OP doesn't have appeared to acknowledge this but it I helpful to me. Especially the standard HP making non standard assumptions. I was not aware of that.