Recording - June 2012 - 13

Figure 2 A tall order When we initally planned this issue, we intended to take a broad look at how Finale, Sibelius, and NOTION deal with integrated samples and with third-party sounds, and at some point we made that intention public. Several reality checks later, while chasing new facts presented by upgrades and dealing with new complexities due to our own computer upgrades, we have come to our senses and decided to address—for now—the topic that seemed the most pressing, the new Finale 2012 and its new sounds. We’ll follow up on the other programs in upcoming months. Finale 2012 and Gary Garritan Gary Garritan has long ago established his name as a highly respected brand of sample libraries, going back to the days of GigaSampler, and his sounds have long since been playable under Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player. When MakeMusic, the company behind the music notation program Finale (and its many offshoots), recently announced that it had purchased Garritan’s company, we decided to explore what that meant to Finale users. Which Garritan sounds would be incorporated into the sound library that comes with the standard Finale installation? Which—if any—Garritan legacy sounds could be added by the user, and how would that work? And what about other third-party sounds? Turns out that the news is good, on three fronts—what is included now is great, what can be included by the user is fairly wide open, and what can be expected to come with the next upgrade of Finale may just be more of Garritan’s best. Garritan in Finale 2012—now Figure 1 shows the list of Garritan sounds already incorporated into Finale 2012. MakeMusic’s product specialist explained to us that this list includes many but not all of the instruments from Garritan’s Personal Orchestra, now in version 4, and still available on www.garritan.com. At some point that website may go away, but how soon all the Garritan products come exclusively under the MakeMusic umbrella remains to be seen. New Finale, new Mac, old samples We did our explorations not just with the brand new Finale 2012 and its many new features, but on a brand new MacBook Pro under OS X 10.7.3. This meant a fresh start even with programs and libraries that we had been using on earlier Macs. So—tabula rasa, start from scratch. If you’ve been reading this far, you might be a notation maven yourself, and you may recall having bought some Garritan libraries in the days when they ran under Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player 2. From those days we still have two stellar strings volumes, a Stradivari solo violin shown in Figure 2, and a Gofriller cello (the original Gofrillers were made around the turn of the 18th century) shown in Figure 3. Both now come with the latest version of Garritan’s Personal Orchestra and may at some point become a part of the standard Finale sound set. As we tried to make those two accessible in Finale 2012 as third party sounds, we couldn’t add these volumes to the Sound Map Priority list. See Figure 4. What’s a Sound Map? Quoting the Finale website: “A Sound Map is an internal file that contains the list of sound samples available for a particular sound library and matches those samples with an Instrument from Finale’s internal Instrument database. […]” Then we saw another notice that said “Editing or adding new Sound Maps of 3rd party sound libraries is not supported.” (Figure 5) After a cry for help, a quick reply from the very responsive
RECORDING JUNE 2012

Figure 3

http://www.garritan.com

Recording - June 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2012