First of all, I suggest reading the Garritan manual that comes with each of the Garritan libraries. That will give you a lot of information. That being said...

Unlike a General MIDI synth engine, the Aria player (stand-alone or VSTi, which you need to play the Garritan instruments) does not respond to patch (instrument) changes. So you can't just take a BIAB file or any old MIDI file and play through it.

When you open the Aria player (either stand-alone or VSTi), you'll see your 16 MIDI channels available to you. You then need to assign specific instruments to each of the channels you want to use.

What I do is go to BIAB Prefs and remind myself which channel each track is on (for example, the melody track is on channel 4). If I assign the melody track to the Aria player, I go into the Aria player and select the instrument I want to use for channel 4. That's the instrument that will play when I press the play button. Whatever instrument is showing on the main BIAB screen has no effect. BIAB will pass its MIDI data to the Aria player and the Aria player will use the instrument assigned to that track.

Also, be careful about the Mod (modulation) wheel parameter. There is already another thread on how to fix it at the beginning of a track. Garritan libraries use the Mod Wheel to affect volume. So, if you've to a keyboard with a mod wheel, you can do swells and decrescendos using the mod wheel, much like an organist can with the pedal.

The Garritan instruments generally sound pretty good and can sound great with tweaking. But you can't use them as a general MIDI synthesizer unless you plan for it. I find that I only use it in BIAB for the melody or soloist track. It really is better suited to RealBand, where you have finer control over each track.

And I'll loop back to my original statement; you should read the manual that comes with each of the Garritan libraries to get a better idea of how to use it. There is a learning curve (I've still got much to learn) and it has its unique peculiarities and non-standard aspects, but in the end, you should get some pretty good, if not great, sounds from it.

I hope that helped more than confused.

John

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