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  • Great great grandnephew of Tchaikovsky... needs help

    Hello,
    I am a 22 year old composer, who is suffering from bad sounds. I compose all of my music using Finale 2005. I was curious to see if Vienna Library could help me with these generic sounds I have been using for years now.
    If you want to take a listen to what I have been doing -

    http://www.artistlaunch.com/artist4.asp?artistid=4952

    I do not have any controllers or any equipment - just my computer and me. Every note of everything that I write is individually imputed by hand. I do have the option of adding soundfonts, but can I use Vienna with Finale? Please Help. I can be reached via e-mail Schalcosky@msn.com
    Thank you for any comments.
    -John D. Schalcosky

  • You can't just use VSL samples in place of your samples without having other software like Gigastudio and a virtual midi program like maple midi to allow the two programs to communicate. I use Sibelius 3 and Maple Midi (free software) and Gigastudio all on one computer, and it works great. You need a GSIF compatible sound card to run Gigastudio. You can do the same thing with Finale, although it is not as easy to set up. I would recommend getting a SATA hard drive or two set up in a RAID 0 (striped) format. You should at least have one drive for samples only - otherwise you will get lots of cutting out and skips during playback. You can find great prices on hardware at www.newegg.com ,which is where I buy all of my computer stuff. Remember that there is no one standard sample system setup, everyone's computer and sample system is different and custom built. If you could give me some more info I could help you more - for example:

    1.) What VSL library are you going to purchase?
    2.) What are the stats on your computer? (Processor speed, RAM, Hard drives, sound card, etc.)
    3.) What is your software/hardware budget?

    -mvanbebber

  • What mvanbebber said.

    Just one more thought: be patient. You're at the beginning of a learning curve. You've learned Finale's interface. Now you're going to have to learn at least the basics of some playback program (like Giga).

    And soon, you'll need to understand at least the fundamentals of MIDI, because that will be the common language between Finale, which is sending MIDI, and your playback software, which is interpreting MIDI.

    Though I have not heard your demo, the good news is, you can dramatically improve the expressivity and authenticity of your orchestra. That much I can infer from your question and the nature of bundled Finale orchestras. So good things await you. But give yourself time.

    Along the way, you will probably benefit greatly from a keyboard controller.

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    @mvanbebber said:

    I would recommend getting a SATA hard drive or two set up in a RAID 0 (striped) format.
    I would recommend NOT putting the drives in RAID mode. Many people are suffering from audio glitches in their setup with RAID enabled. RAID is more useful when a lot of simultaneous long files are played back like in a multitrack recording system. Samples are short so a RAID wouldn't do much good there. Get a large 7200 rpm drive for samples.