Finale Printmusic and Garritan GPO

I'm currently using Finale Printmusic to digitize my scores. It's a great piece of software, but has a pretty steep learning curve. Thankfully, the included video tutorials make using it much simpler. Took me awhile to figure out how to notate rests, until I went through the tutorials :3

Now I'm using this on OSX, and because Garritan were recently running a 30% of sale on their virtual instruments, I picked up the Garritan Personal Orchestra (I have grandiose dreams of remixing music, orchestrally) and Garritan World Instruments.

I understand that the full blow version of Finale comes with the GPO built in, but it's far to expensive for my newbie purposes. Connecting Printmusic to GPO is quite straightforward though - with a score loaded, go to the MIDI menu and switch from "Play Finale Through Midi" to "Play Finale Through Audio Units". Next, in the MIDI menu, go to "Audio Unit Instruments", and by default, channels 1-16 should be loaded with the finale soft synth - switch that over to the Garritan Aria Player. A little button to the right of the drop down list can be pressed to bring up the Aria interface. Load up the instrument in the matching channel and you should be set. The Window -> Instruments list can tell you which channel is assigned to which instrument.

Sadly, the GPO does not have saxophone sounds - as I think saxophones do not exist in traditional orchestras, woodwind or not. In any case, the book suggests working with either Strings Or Woodwinds for the melody, and the wind choices in the Garritan Personal Orchestra do sound much better than the softsynth.

Well that's it for today.