should I get GPO?

[Dewdman42]

Well that's what I'm asking. Somehow the GPO rules know about a bunch of instrument-id's. where are they defined? Perhaps its possible to get instrument id's for kontakt based instruments?

[lazerlike42]

another question I have for you guys, in looking at the prules file, i see a lot of instrument-id references and I have absolutely no idea where those numbers come from. That is the kind info i need to figure out a prules file for Kirk Hunter. But where on earth are those instrument-id's defined such that they can be referenced by this prules file?

There are ways to do it.

Not to go too far OT, but are you saying you can assign plugin IDs to other VST instruments (other than the four that are currently supported)? I didn't think that was available. I was under the impression that instrument specific rules could only be written for GPO, VL, EWQLSO, and Miroslav; other plugins could only have broad, plugin rules (for example, rules for kontakt couldn't differentiate between an acoustic guitar from the Chris Heinz library and a violin section from LASS).

I was trying to refer to determining the instrument ID for Garritan instruments. I didn't mean to give the impression it would work for the KH library. Ooops!

[lazerlike42]

That's not to say I know for certain that you can't do it for KH - or other - libraries. I'm not sure.

[Dewdman42]

Well the question is where those instrument id's are defined.

[pcartwright]

If I remember correctly, the IDs are in order based on their appearance in GPO. There are a few GPO instruments identified in the rules already, just follow the pattern.

[Dewdman42]

it would be nice if Notion had a debugging mode we could use to display the details of the rules are doing, including logging instrument ids

Basically what I'm getting at then is it sounds like it would be possible to write some rules for KH on kontakt probably would work only with a particular kontakt multi, where the order of each kontakt instrument in kontakt would determine the instrument id. How we can figure out what those id's would be, I have no idea.

[wcreed51]

Instrument ids have remained an enigma, and Notion has had zero to say about them. They’ve also had zero to say about how to address multiple instances of a particular VSTi.

That leads me to believe that both of these things are dead ends, and best to forget about.

[pcartwright]

Instrument ids have remained an enigma, and Notion has had zero to say about them. They’ve also had zero to say about how to address multiple instances of a particular VSTi.

That leads me to believe that both of these things are dead ends, and best to forget about.

You're probably right, and it's a real shame that Notion doesn't seem to want to expand these features at the user level. Finale and Sibelius have custom playback options for third party VSTs that I think, IMHO, are inferior to Notion's rule system in terms of playback (primarily playing things such as glissandos true to the instrument); however, it wouldn't take much for Finale or Sibelius to make fixes to their custom playback to make it as good or better than Notion (especially since both Sibelius and Finale have a GUI for custom rules).

I'm a huge Notion fan, but I'm afraid that Sibelius or Finale could be one version away from perfecting VST custom playback and making Notion irrelevant.

[Dewdman42]

Well let's hope for more playback support. I think Notion is on the right track. They are small shop, its hard to respond to everyone, but hopefully they are listening.

I find the basic interface of Notion to be supremely easier for composing and working on ideas that just about anything else I can think of, when traditional staff entry is the desire. Even the built in sounds are not half bad for this purpose. Yea, I'd like to be able to use it with KH. But the program is still useful to me without that. Its still a lot easier to work with than Sibelius, which has a million options for printing scores.

[kelldammit]

I'm a huge Notion fan, but I'm afraid that Sibelius or Finale could be one version away from perfecting VST custom playback and making Notion irrelevant.

it depends. i just had to go for the sib crossgrade for the video support. once you get things set up, it's pretty powerful. i particularly like that i can define ensembles, and sib will map appropriate staves to their relevant channels, controllers and all. it works well.
vst playback does have its drawbacks, though. while vsti midi instrument/stave support is better in sib, the mixer is far worse. sib's mixer does NOT deal with the actual audio outputs, like notion's does. it sends midi controller values to the instruments' output/pans. this is a HUGE problem if you opt to use, say...a multi-osc synth, with no master pan output (like zebra2). sure, you can assign the synth's volume and osc pan controls to receive midi messages from the sib mixer, but if you have a multi-osc stereo sound, and just want to shift the existing stereo image halfway to the right, you'd have to either do so on the instrument itself, or assign a separate controller to each osc's pan control, and deal with it that way, or just use it in rewire mode. so, there's benefits to be had, but different issues to reckon with.
otherwise, notion's gui is a shining example of "clean". i've always though sib and finale's were just a horrific mess by comparison. note entry in notion is also much easier, faster, and much more intuitive (for me, anyway...but granted, i'm still getting my head around "the sib way". it is more powerful, but it's more of a PITA, too).
for note entry, and banging out stuff quickly, i decidedly prefer notion's elegant simplicity. ensemble support like sib, video support and cc editing would really close the gap, imo.

k