GPO & Notation

[TomcatII]

In order to use my full GPO with Sibelius I apparently have to buy a $49 adapter that let's me do this; do I also have to buy something extra in order to use my full GPO with Finale?

Thanks,
Tom

[rwayland]

I have the full version of GPO. I also have Sibelius. They work together. You can use GPO with Sibelius without an adapter, or add on. I do so, not often, because for sequencing I prefer Sonar, and Sibelius is strictly notational software in my usage. The GPO/Sibelius package should provide a smoother interface, more control. I have no experience with Finale in this regard, but I expect it would be similar.

Richard

[snorlax]

In order to use my full GPO with Sibelius I apparently have to buy a $49 adapter that let's me do this; do I also have to buy something extra in order to use my full GPO with Finale?

Thanks,
Tom

Tom,
Which version of Fin and Sib do you have?
The method of interfacing GPO with either program depends on the version of the program, but NEITHER program requires a costly addon for any recent version.

If you have the latest Sib (4?) and Finale 2006, nothing is requires--those work directly with GPO.

Earlier editions of Fin and Sib can interface with GPO via GPO studio, which is available here for FREE.

Jim

[Nickie Fønshauge]

No, you can use GPO as a VSTi plugin in Finale 2006 without any further acquisitions. It works great that way with Finale's Human Playback.

[Nickie Fønshauge]

Jim, according to Sibelius.com, there is a GPO Sibelius Edition crossgrade available to GPO Standalone and Sibelius 4.1 users. I would imagine this is necessary, before you can talk about integration the same way as Finale 2006's VSTi integration. Is this correct, or ...?

[TomcatII]

I have Sibelius 4.1 and Finale 2006c.

According to Daniel at the Sibelius Forum, you need the $49 cross-grade adapter in order to fully use GPO with Sibelius, so I was wondering if the same was true for Finale 2006.

What happened was that back in '97 I bought a copy of Rhapsody from Passport Design and they went bankrupt and closed in '98. Rhapsody didn't make the transition to WinXP (ie, it won't run in WinXP) and I couldn't afford to keep a Win98 machine around just to run it. Last fall I found out that MakeMusic would cross-grade from Rhapsody for $199 and I thought about it but didn't get around to doing it until last month when I was at the MakeMusic website and saw they were ending the offer on May 31, so I got out my original disks and sent them off to MakeMusic with a money order for $199 and about a week later I got Finale 2006 by UPS. After it was installed and registered, so that I was a legal legitimate owner, I then used that to get the Finale cross-grade to Sibelius 4 for another $199. So I traded a program that I could no longer use for BOTH Finale and Sibelius for $398; seemed a good deal to me because it now allows me to find out which one I personally perfer to use and do it for two-thirds of what either one sells for retail.

I've only had them for a couple of weeks and, as usual, there are some things I like better in Finale and other things I like better in Sibelius. I'm retired and doing this for fun, so I don't actually NEED a notation program; however I'm a working church organist so I read music and work from music so I thought I would check all this stuff out. So far, since I'm not trying to sell or publish any music (at this point anyway), I don't think either of these is going to replace my sequencer software (I use Cubase SX-3 because of the much easier midi PRV editing in it over Sonar, which I also have).

I get perfectly acceptable playback using my Tyros keyboard from Sibelius, so I'm not sure it's worth the $49 to get GPO playback. On the other hand, if I can have GPO playback in Finale 2006 without having to spend any more money, that may sway me towards using Finale.

I guess that, really, the bottom line is that these are good for notation, period, and that if you want good sounding playback you actually need to use a sequencer to do that.

Tom

[Nickie Fønshauge]

You should run the Version 1.1.8.3 GPO updater, available from NI for free, and let it install the Notation set. If it doesn't install the PersonalOrchestra.dll file in the Finale 2006\FinaleVST folder, just copy it manually to this folder, and you are ready to go.

[TomcatII]

Thanks a lot, Nickie!

Tom