Current versions of Finale can only directly address Native Instrument plugins - - that is, only plugins made by Native Instruments can be instantiated within Finale. This is due to contractual arrangement between MakeMusic (Finale's manufacturer) and Native Instruments. Nonetheless it is very easy to use Vienna Instruments sample libraries with Finale. The simplest way to do this is to use the Vienna Ensemble standalone as a host for Vienna Instruments and address Vienna Ensemble through the IAC ports available in Apple's Audio MIDI setup.

If you want to use Finale's Human Playback function, then you need to design your Vienna Instrument matrices to mirror those of Finale GPO - - i.e. with the same keyswitches set to activate the same articulations. Again this is simply a matter of identifying the keyswitches of the Finale GPO instruments and their corresponding articulations.

However this approach limits your articulations to those available in Finale GPO - - many fewer than are available in the Vienna Instrument libraries. If you are willing to forgo using Finale's Human Playback feature you can create visible and hidden markings in Finale that correspond to MIDI data points that change articulations within a Vienna Instruments Matrix. You can also assign Continuous Controllers to various parameters of the Vienna Instruments (e.g envelope shaping, velocity XFade (where instead of merely changing volume of a single sample, you change from one velocity layer to another), etc.

If you choose not to use Finale's Human Playback, you will be using Finale's MIDI Tool a great deal. For this reason, I'd strongly recommend that you upgrade to Finale 2008 as the Mac version of Finale 2007 has a bug which makes operations within the MIDI Tool window painfully slow. This bug was fixed in Finale 2008.  Also, if you are not using Human Playback, you might want to change the playback values (velocity) for Finale's dynamic markings - - or to set them so that they have no playback values and use the MIDI Tool to set the velocity values appropriately.

One other point: all versions of Finale that are capable of using Native Instruments Plugins (Finale 2006, 2007 and 2008) misidentify VE as a Native Instruments product and attempt to validate it every time you open Finale. Running under OS 10.4.11 this process can take several minutes and may result in a crash, running under OS 10.5.x the process is much quicker and does not (so far in my experience) produce a crash. To avoid this problem download the freeware utility Audio Units Manager, available at 

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/audiounitmanager/

This utility provides you with a control panel for turning plugins on and off and allows you to create sets of plugins for different applications. If you wish to use Vienna Ensemble with Finale, create a Finale plugin set with Vienna Ensemble turned off. Choose this set. Launch Finale. Use Audio Units Manager to turn Vienna Ensemble back on. Open Vienna Ensemble. Finale will not "know" that Vienna Ensemble has been turned on, but will be able to address it through the IAC ports.  

All of this may sound more complicated than it really is in practice - - it's really fairly easy.

I hope this is helpful. 

Thanks stevesong!

I was acutally also thinking of the possibility to use it standalone.

Thanks for the sharing your experience. It was really helpful, I will remember that. It doesn't sound complicated at all.

I already knew before that it's possible to use other "non-Native Instr." plugins within Finale, but I just wanted to get the confirmation that VI works just fine as I'm working most of the time in Finale though I usually realize orchestra stuff in Cubase, but when I have to compose concert works I have to make professional scores and it's really a joy to hear you're writting with realistic sounds instead of those horrible GM sounds. I also enjoy GPO in Finale as it is really simple to use and far more better to listen to than GM stuff.

But I can't wait to purchase the VI SE. But the best thing will always be to work with a real live orchestra!!! I had that joy a couple of time and nothing is more beautiful than to hear your composed music played by an excelent orchestra in a wonderful concert hall!

But in my opinion VSL is really close to that emotional feelings and no other library can come seriously just "this" close.

Thanks for taking time to reply!

Best wishes,

A 

Andie: 

As Albert points out you could also use Cubase as a host for the Vienna Instruments sample player rather than using Vienna Ensemble. This would  have the added advantage of allowng you to bounce your Finale performance without any difficulty. It amy also be that Cubase consumes less CPU power than VE, although in my experience, the difference between Logic 7 and VE is not that great. However if you run under OS 10.5.x  more processing power is consumed than running under OS 10.4.11. Albert is right that Finale uses and inordinate amount of processing power simply for MIDI playback - - even with scrolling and Human Playback turned off - - perhaps 20 times as much as Logic or Digital Performer. If you have a G5 then you can still run Finale 2005 which consumes considerably less processing power - - although its operations get noticeably slower as the score gets larger (something much less noticeable in Finale 2008). 

The problem with Finale in general may be that it appears to be made up of many layers of legacy code kludged together. Thus, even at this late date, no version of Finale - whether for Windows or MacOS is multi-processor aware. Similarly, it has duplicate features from different eras. The manual, for example, describes the procedure for splitting  a measure between two systems. If you split a measure in this way, you will have all kinds of problems - - note attached slurs disappear from the second part of the measure, note and measure expressions appear in the wrong place, etc. However, Finale also has a plugin for splitting measures which works without any of the above problems. (No doubt the first method has been kept so that scores created in earlier versions in which that method actually worked properly can be opened in the newer versions.) 

 In the end, if its possible, the best thing would be to purchase a new MacPro Desktop where the amount of available processing power is many times greater than on any G5. Another possibility is to run Finale on a separate machine such as a Mac Mini and use the main machine for samples. Finally, you don't mention what, if any audio interface you are using or what setup you would use to stream the samples. An audio interface would definitely improve performance. You definitely need a drive or drives dedicated to streaming samples to maximize the number of instances you would use. As you can see from the description of my setup, I use a RAID 0 array made up of two 500GB drives for this purpose. When formatting the drives used for this purpose, it is also helpful to turn journaling off.

Albert:

It's hard for me to give a meaningful answer to this since most of what I've been writing has been chamber music - - with - - usually with 2-10 instances and large numbers of articulations per instance.  However I can say that using Logic 7.2.3 as the host I have been able load about 3GB of Vienna Instrument samples with no clicks or pops during playback (after the first playback - - VI seems to need one play through to get everything to work without a stumble or stutter. Interestingly enough, Activity Monitor shows Finale 2008 using about 60% of processing capacity when playing back a blank score!! When playing back 18 virtual instruments (12 VI the rest EXS 24) hosted in Logic 7.2.3, Activity Monitor reports 67-68%. In other words, Finale is consuming most of the processing power and uses far more processing power to play a soundless blank score than is consumed by Logic hosting and laying 18 instances of virtual instruments. (One can only imagine the huge numbers of gears, pistons, camshafts and belts in motion when Finale engages in playback....)

Comparing Finale 2008 to Finale 2005b, Activity Monitor reports  that Finale 2005b consumes about 45%  of processing power during playback. Thus if you are  working on  a G5 machine running OS 10.4.11 you will likely maximize performance (and the ability to play a maximal number of VI instances) by using Finale 2005b (rather than Finale 2008) as the MIDI source for Vienna Instruments hosted by Logic 7.2.3. 

 Alain:

There appears to be a bug in AUM so that Vienna Ensemble does not appear with its name in the control panel window. However it is actually there (at least on my system) - - it shows up as the first Audio Unit with a blank space next to the check box rather than a name - but with version number 2.0 on the right of the blank space where the name should be. If you select it and choose "Get Info" from the Audio Units menu, you will see that it is actually correctly identified. I have notified the manufacturer, Audiofile Engineering, about this problem (which did not exist in the previous version), but it would be helpful if others did the same. They've made this very easy - - simply choose "Support" from the help menu and a form will appear where you can describe the problem.  I've found the folks at Audiofile Engineering quite responsive.  Let me know what happens.