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,

Great review Dan, thanks. I have JABB and got the same email last night and was wondering about it. Keep us posted on how it works for you.

Bob

Thanx Dan for the great review.

I got the email announcing the GPO also and I’m very interested. I would love to hear what you think about it after a day or to playing with it.

Songsmith came with the Aria engine and some really good sound sets. I wonder if it's possible to somehow use that in BIAB or RB , PTPA etc.

Could it be added into the lineup, along with the Roland VSC, and Forte' and other soft synths?

If so, Songsmith is cheap enough, even if you just used it to have access to the aria engine and sounds.

Anyone savvy enough to figure this out?

Great news about the GPO-4 update. I have Akai EWI-USB that come with ARIA. I just can't get it to run in BIAB. The fine folks at BIAB couldn't do anything and either can AKAI. Does the new GPO-4 package work with both the EWI and BIAB.

I got it and the Aria engine is way better than the old Kontakt interface. The sounds have been improved from GPO3 and the only thing I miss is the Honky Tonk piano which seems to have been replaced with various Steinways. ( Nothing wrong with the Steinway's but they dont sound Honky tonk )

The Harp is luscious! The ensemble's are the Aria equivelant to Kontakts multi's and all sound good.

If you already have GPO the upgrade cost is easily worth it. Plus you also can retain your old version of GPO3

There are 2 dl files associated with Aria. Once I chose the correct one I had no problems running it in Biab.

I was considering upgrading from East/West Silver to Gold when I stumbled upon the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4.0 online. I played the samples and was so impressed that I immediately downloaded the library off the Garritan website for $149. Boy, am I glad I did. These orchestral sounds represent a significant improvement over the Apple Orchestral JamPack as well as East/West Silver. The variety of string articulations is impressive and I love the oboes and trombones in particular.

Anybody have any tricks to getting this to work with Band in a Box?

It should work however, just like all the other big samplers like Sampletank, Halion etc it doesn't work well. The reason is this is not your basic GM soundset like the VSC or Forte. These samplers will not simply load and play with different Biab songs. You have to open up the Aria player and manually set up each channel for each individual Biab song. You can get Biab sounding great this way but it's a pia to have to do that for every song. Also, there's a delay involved with the program loading a sample if there's a program change being generated by Biab and this can happen often. Since Biab is playing in real time, if there's a program change like switching from a nylon guitar to an electric in the middle of the song, there's no time to load that new sample so Biab will lock up. That's not Biab's fault, it's because of the sample loading times. A GM soundset only has a few different versions of sounds like strings, two acoustic pianos etc while GPO and other samplers have gobs of them. They can certainly sound killer but it takes time for you to decide which patch you want for a given song. This is why the VSC and other basic GM players work so well but only sound decent, not great. There's a limited number of samples and they have to be small enough that they can all load into RAM so they're instantly accessible by Biab.
If you're into creating finished masterpieces of your songs, going in track by track and tweaking everything to make it perfect then certainly this could be the way to go. Oth, if you like going through your directory of Biab songs and running through a bunch of them in one sitting or playing a live gig, this is no good at all.

Bob

The first time I eveer heard garritan personal 4, what a great sound. Would this take the place of Real tracks? does it work the same as Forte or VSC? Thanks Ed

I like to use either a sampling keyboard - like the Mo88 -or even better, a hardware sampler/midiplayer/synth, like my Akai S-5000 (Akai has other great ones)...but if you look, you could find one for about the same price as some expensive software program, used.

Of course hardware music equipent is usually improved over time with FREE upgrades, unlike most software approaches.

Another advantage is that you can take a hardware sampler that has features like midi playing and controlling/setting up song and set lists, along with selecting the specific samples you want, ON THE FLY, without loading time because they're part and parcel of the performance hardware. That's why these hardware-based machines are preferred in complicated Broadway Productions and Concerts where there are a number of sounds, effects are called up in specific sequence...without unnecessary delay or set transition delays.

I use software sequencing and samples myself... Pulsar, Sonar, etc., at home, but I feel more comfortable...and it's less stressful and more fun (for me, to invest in sampling hardware too.

If interest in used HW Samplers/Synths, check AkaiPro.com or other sources on EBay, etc.

Akai S-5000 Hardware Rack Sampler/Synth
Yamaha Motif 88-key Workstation/Sampler/Synth
Ensoniq EPS+ keyboard sampler/synth
Roland XV-5080 Rack Module Sampler/Synth
Yamaha CS6X keyboard Sampler/Controller
Yamaha Motif Rack
Roland M1+ Keyboard
Roland G-1000 Arranger
Roland GR 303 w/ GM-70 Midi Converter
2 Roland M3R Rack Modules
Korg Triton Keyboard/Sampler
Korg Karma Keyboard/Kontroller/"Brainiak"
Korg PS-80 Keyboard Synth/Arranger
Behringer Ultra-Dyne Pro Multi-Compresso
Lexicon L-1,L5 Rack Effects