Last night I got an Garritan newsletter announcing the availability of the new GPO 4.0 with integrated Aria engine. Aria is the replacement for the Kontakt Player which was the original engine for all of the Garritan samples.

The upgrade price for owners of GPO is only $50 a generous and very worthwhile price in my opinion. The download was not quite 1 Gb and took only about 35 minutes over 6 mbps broadband. Installation was fast, consisting of about 4 steps. You can simply install everything to the default C: drive, or put the samples, for example, on a different partition or drive.

Once you have installed it all, you start the program and you are asked to activate your copy. You do this by using the registration "card" which consists of a graphic (png) that looks like a credit card with your name, e-mail, city, state, and phone number. You simply drag and drop this "card" onto the Aria player. Successful activation is confirmed by a short message. It did not work when I simply dragged and dropped from the Garritan Registration site following the instructions, but worked fine using the copy that had been e-mailed to me. Compared to the Kontakt registration, this is very quick, painless and, in my opinion, a superb way to satisfy both customers needs and the publisher's need to prevent piracy (this activation is not at all like the activation used by Microsoft, Adobe, and other software publishers).

The Aria engine is very user friendly and it took only about 5 to 10 minutes to figure out how to get it to work with my EWI wind controller. You can set up 16 instruments at once and you can save all of your settings. The Ambience Reverb makes the instruments sound superb.

Aria appears to be very efficient with both RAM and CPU overhead and I was able to run a single (melody) instrument in Aria and BnBox at the same time. I avoided any of the Realtrak stuff, until I figure out and implement running Aria and BnBox on different audio channels of my Echo Audio card.

The Solo Flute is the best flute I have ever found as is the Solo Piccolo Trumpet, along with the Solo Bassoon. Right now, until I figure out what tweaks are available for live wind controller playing, I'm not too crazy about the solo strings in general (the Ketron SD2 violin sounds better to me) and the trumpets are also disappointing on first hearing also. Don't misunderstand, I've heard these GPO samples playing from notation and they are superb - I'm talking about playing these samples live with a wind controller. I have not tested it with a midi keyboard. These are just my first impressions having only spent about 3 hrs having fun.

To sum up, the new GPO 4.0 w Aria is a great deal, super easy to setup and use and the sounds are superb. If you've never owned it, it costs $149, for previous owners the upgrade is only $50. In either case, it's an incredible value. Go for it.

Thanks for listening,

Last edited by Dan Tong; 08/17/09 04:21 PM.
Dan

https://soundcloud.com/dstong