[Sherry C]

Howdy,

Garritan libraries can be a lot of fun and offer some great sounds but there is a bit of a learning curve. I'm going to go "in line" for my response here.

Originally Posted by jpbaker67

Hi. I watched your video for installing a virtual MIDI cable, and also the video about getting started with Garritan. All seemed to be well.

How did you test that? I'd presume by playing a song file in Composer?

I had the new virtual cable (LoopBe) connected to both the Aria player and Notation. When I went to play a MIDI file on Garritan, however, no sound.

Was this test playing the file in Composer or directly in the Aria player? I'm asking for this and the above question because you can play .mid files directly in the Aria player and hear them, but may not hear sound with that same .mid file in Composer. That's because the Aria player inserts an automatic Mod wheel setting. You can see below for more info on that in Composer.

If you weren't hearing any sound when playing the .mid file in the Aria player, then the audio output there may not have been selected correctly.

Obviously, I am missing something. One explanation might be that, although I have "Loop B Internal Midi" in place as my Device, I cannot find the same instrument names on Composer as exist on Aria (e.g. "n-Steinway Piano," as opposed to the standard "Piano").

That can be confusing because of how the Aria player gets set up.

The instrument names that you see in Composer's Staff Setup are the General MIDI (GM) default instrument names for MIDI devices that use the GM instrument name (patch) map. That instrument grid is sufficient for any GM setup because it communicates to the GM device about where to get the particular instrument sound, but the Garritan Libraries are not set up that way The Aria player assigns a particular instrument to a particular channel for that device (in your case using the LoopBe connection). So for your purposes you can just ignore the names in the Staff Setup grid.

The main things you will need to be sure of are that

1. For each staff in your song file, that the Channel number matches up with channel number you have assigned that instrument in the Aria player
2. That the Device is set to the LoopBe Device for all staves in Composer.
3. That there is some Modulation wheel setting well above 0 for each staff. Garritan libraries use the Mod Wheel setting to control a lot for the sound. If it's sets too low, you won't hear anything (You should also familiarize yourself with the various MIDI controllers (cc events) that Garritan uses for various effects - definite learning curve there). You can use Composer's Graph Over Notes feature to enter these either as a drawn graph over the notation, or to enter a set value for the selected Region. This is probably the most overlooked item for Garritan libraries. it's also worth mentioning that while many MIDI cc events go from 0-127, Mod Wheel events go up to 16,383, so be sure it's up there enough to be heard.

You can rename your staves to whatever you want to help you remember which instrument in the Garritan library they are matched to. We have some templates that you can download from here that are .not templates that are already pre-set to match the instruments in various Garritan Personal Orchestra and Garritan Jazz and Big Band instrument sets.

Also, I want to make sure I have it right for the Setup>Configuration. If I understand correctly, there should be no Input port selected, but the Output port should be LoopBeInternalMidi, if this is to work right.

That is correct for the Setup > Configuration in Composer. LoopBeInternalMidi should be set as an Output only, not an input, or you'll get the screaming meemies from feedback.

Hopefully something above will help you get going. If not, just let us know

ttfn,
Sherry