Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 - really nice

[David Polich]

Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 is out and the upgrade to existing owners of GPO is
50 bucks. I downloaded it today and installed it.

GPO4 uses the new Garritan Aria Player. The content has been reworked and I have to
say, it's a big improvement over the original GPO. The solo instruments are all better, particularly
the brass and the solo strings. The harp is finally usable (doesn't sound like a badly recorded
nylon guitar anymore). Included are brass from Project SAM (the makers of Symphobia) and they're
great.

As a programmer/sound designer, I can say that it
seems Garritan paid attention to the envelopes and filters as well as the
modulation and keyswitching. It's very well-done - actually I think the programming
is better than any of the the VSL products I've tried. To me it's a real downer if the content is superb
but the programming is sub-par (or in the case of Vienna Apassionata Strings, completely
confusing).

The Aria Player works very smoothly, loading is really fast. Nice interface, and totally intuitive.
The new auto legato feature detects whether you're playing legato automatically. The included
reverb is excellent sounding and the mixer layout of the Aria Player allows separate aux sends
per instrument.

If you don't have GPO4 the full price is $149.95. I think it's quite a bargain considering
what you get. Highly recommended.

[dcoscina]

I love it!

[dbender]

I'm thinking of upgrading, but am wondering:

-- how do the sounds in this new version overall compare to the prior version?

-- how is the cpu hit of the new aria player, and does it play nice in DP?

If anyone who has upgraded can shed some light on this, that would be great, thanks!

[wurliuchi]

Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 is out and the upgrade to existing owners of GPO is
50 bucks. I downloaded it today and installed it.

GPO4 uses the new Garritan Aria Player. The content has been reworked and I have to
say, it's a big improvement over the original GPO. The solo instruments are all better, particularly
the brass and the solo strings. The harp is finally usable (doesn't sound like a badly recorded
nylon guitar anymore). Included are brass from Project SAM (the makers of Symphobia) and they're
great.

As a programmer/sound designer, I can say that it
seems Garritan paid attention to the envelopes and filters as well as the
modulation and keyswitching. It's very well-done - actually I think the programming
is better than any of the the VSL products I've tried. To me it's a real downer if the content is superb
but the programming is sub-par (or in the case of Vienna Apassionata Strings, completely
confusing).

The Aria Player works very smoothly, loading is really fast. Nice interface, and totally intuitive.
The new auto legato feature detects whether you're playing legato automatically. The included
reverb is excellent sounding and the mixer layout of the Aria Player allows separate aux sends
per instrument.

If you don't have GPO4 the full price is $149.95. I think it's quite a bargain considering
what you get. Highly recommended.

Thanks for this post! This is what I've been looking for, an orchestral library that doesn't scare the bleep out of me--technically or financially. I can even understand their product pages, now that's something new.

You'll always have a special place in my heart just for posting this. Thank you!

[papageno]

From official website, system requirements:

2.8 Ghz CPU Pentium 4 or better for PC, 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo MacIntel or better for Mac.

I have 2.4GHz MBP 4.1 with 6GB RAM. I can use DP6 as host and run basically a symph. orchestra, using Kontakt 3.5, MSI, Wallander combined + effects. At the same time I run Finale to feed MIDI into DP.

Is it really true that Garritan *REQUIRES* 2.8 GHz minimum? In that case it must be really badly programmed.

[BobK]

From official website, system requirements:

2.8 Ghz CPU Pentium 4 or better for PC, 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo MacIntel or better for Mac.

I have 2.4GHz MBP 4.1 with 6GB RAM. I can use DP6 as host and run basically a symph. orchestra, using Kontakt 3.5, MSI, Wallander combined + effects. At the same time I run Finale to feed MIDI into DP.

Is it really true that Garritan *REQUIRES* 2.8 GHz minimum? In that case it must be really badly programmed.

I thought that minimum seemed pretty high, so I checked the manual online. In the manual, it says 2.0 GHz minimum, not 2.8. Still, it requires a MacIntel, so I'm out of luck on my desktop computer. Might try it on my MBP, but that's only 2.33 GHz.

[David Polich]

I'm running it on my 2.4Ghz MacBook (it's the unibody one) in DP 5.13 without problems.

Mainly, though, I run it on my Windows PC which is where most of my VI's live. I've used
this 2nd computer setup for VI's for a long time. My main music Mac is a 2.3 Ghz G5.
GPO 4 probably wouldn't run on that.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

ALERT!

I spoke with Gary Garritan this morning and there is an error on the system requirements. It should be a 1.8, not 2.8 dual core Intel*.

*BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

He said they overstated the requirements to be on the safe side. The Aria Player WILL RUN on a G5 PPC machine. Great news! Performance will not be as good as the faster machines, but should be quite good.

He also said that the GPO 4 version will NOT run in the current Kontakt Player and needs the Aria player to run.

So us PPC guys and gals are in luck. We CAN update to the new GPO 4, but if you are using a G4 or less your performance will be diminished to a few instruments.

BTW, I've spoken to Gary in the past and he is one of the nicest vendors I've spoken to in a long time. Really nice and talented (obviously) man and I enjoy supporting his efforts.

My GPO 4 is also on the way now!

http://garritan.com/products_gpo4.html

[BobK]

That's great news, Mike. Thanks for the post and for calling Gary.

I downloaded on my MBP, but will now give it a try on my G5.

[dosuna11]

ALERT!
BTW, I've spoken to Gary in the past and he is one of the nicest vendors I've spoken to in a long time. Really nice and talented (obviously) man and I enjoy supporting his efforts.
http://garritan.com/products_gpo4.html

I agree. He has always been very helpful. For those wishing to study big band arranging. Go tohttp://www.northernsounds.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=107
For classical http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/for ... y.php?f=39
Both are such a good starting points.
They are working on an Aria player for JABB.

[papageno]

I've spoken to Gary in the past and he is one of the nicest vendors I've spoken to in a long time. Really nice and talented (obviously) man and I enjoy supporting his efforts.

Good. I silently hoped that Arne Wallander isn't the only one. This makes me look into GPO, will listen to demos.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Jut put the Aria player and new sounds thru some quick and dirty trials and they pretty much passed with flying colors. In particular, I LOVE the organ sounds. We're talking grand, cathedral organs here and OMG!

The effects are very nice too. Clean reverbs with independent sends on the Aria player mixer. I also like the fact the the key switches show you exactly what KS is active at that moment.

If I was doing a formal review I'd do a breakdown of everything. I will still be needing my other VIs, but the new version of GPO 4 is clearly a vast and welcome improvement over previous efforts - which were getting pretty good anyway. At $150 new and $50 upgrade I don't see how you can't buy this one.

Somewhat o/t: The thing about KS that bothers me is that it isn't "chased" by DP (as controllers are) and I find myself inserting duplicates every so often while editing so the right KS is active. It would be nice if they could be chased and if anyone knows how to do that, I'l love to hear it.

Back o/t: I really like the new version a lot and it worked just fine on my G5. I had 5 orchestral sections playing in my test and there was no latency or sound degradation. Mikey likes it!

ps - load times of the player and instruments was super fast.

[mhschmieder]

Oh, that's very good news indeed about the organs, since there is a long-delayed organ product from Garritan that was originally going to be the first ARIA-based product, and which planned to cover up to seven church-oriented organs IIRC.

I personally am only interested in GPO4 enough to learn whether I should start recommending this to beginners as their starter library or not (I currently recommend IK's Miroslav). I felt Garritan's earlier products had bright spots but were too uneven, but from recent reports on other products coming from that house, it sounds like that is now a thing of the past.

BTW that statement isn't meant to imply that GPO is only for beginners, it's just that I now have a satisfying subset of Vienna Instruments, and as of today am also now buying my way up to EWQLSO Platinum status. So I have enough orchestra.

I got to play with the ARIA engine a bit the other night while trying out the Akai EWI USB. They weren't very generous with what sounds they threw in for free, but that's understandable (sort of), if a bit bizarre to include a contra-bassoon but no bassoon! At any rate, I found the ARIA engine "different", but in ways that made sense after using it for a bit, and the decisions that make it a different type of interface seem designed to make it more reliable.

For instance, it is quite dynamic in interpreting and enabling interfaces, which most GUI's require you to do manually once the system has already started up. ARIA seems designed such that it will not be intimidating to people who are new to MIDI.

The library browser is fast as lightening and well laid-out. I also did not find my G4 iMac particularly challenged by ARIA, in spite of what I had read -- maybe those were the Leopard/G5 issues that seem to infect a lot of plug-ins.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I think it is a great beginner set for the price, but it certainly has some things I won't be using. The brass "mutes," for example, seem to be simply a higher EQ settings and are very harsh to my ear. (I'm being polite: don't get used to it!) I didn't like what is being used for the trpt harmon mute at all. All the sounds are "serviceable" but there are about 1/3 of them that won't pass on my projects. For the most part those are covered elsewhere and one can never have too many "good" sounds. BTW, the unmuted brass (which I use far more often) is damn good and, in conjunction with other VIs and MIDI devices, the GPO 4 set can be extremely useful. As a standalone, self-propelled set it would have limited use in a critical pro setting, IMO. It would still have a place there, but somewhat limited. In comparison, I like the Kontakt 3 sounds a lot and even the Plugsound Pro set gets a workout in my studio. But I still find myself going back to my PC2 for some stuff and, of course MachFIve 2. We're not really talking synth sounds or FX here, BTW, just straight instruments in connection with the GPO 4 set.

Back to the organs - it makes me want to write a work for organ if only I could find a benefactor or producer to pay me for it. I'd be all over it like snow... The percussion toys are pretty fun too, but the organ really has balls. No pun intended - but that is kind of a funny statement...

[RockNRoll]

Hello all, a quick question, does Garritan Orchestra provide ability to program vibrato?