Help - Scoring for clarinet

[composer]

I'd use external libraries with N3, but there are so many problems with the N3 engine, it wouldn't be worth investing money in external sound libraries as N3's faults(no dynamics for one) would still be present.

I'm a little confused by this. Notion3 responds to dynamic instructions (and the four libraries supported by Notion3 have rules to include dynamic instructions - still waiting to write custom instrument rules for other libraries, though); are you talking about automatic variance in dynamics or libraries that aren't supported by Notion?

I'm talking about the lack of dynamic control in the N3 engine itself. Far,far inferior to the dynamic control with N2. The close mike samples sound poor, one can't tell the difference between an oboe and a clarinet or a flute in N3. The articulations in N3 are horrible....and on and on and on really. Notion threw the baby out with the bathwater with N3 in regards to creating a product that realizes music. This from a composer who was a finalist in the last,'Realize Music' contest. I'm not a fan.

[pcartwright]

I'm talking about the lack of dynamic control in the N3 engine itself. Far,far inferior to the dynamic control with N2. The close mike samples sound poor, one can't tell the difference between an oboe and a clarinet or a flute in N3. The articulations in N3 are horrible....and on and on and on really. Notion threw the baby out with the bathwater with N3 in regards to creating a product that realizes music. This from a composer who was a finalist in the last,'Realize Music' contest. I'm not a fan.

Do you think the issues you brought up with the sampled sounds carry over when using third party libraries in Notion3? Do you think the Notion2 samples sound worse in Notion3? I nver used Notion2, so I'm really interested in this kind of feedback.

[composer]

I've been using Notion since 2005.... Notion 1.0. I was very much looking forward to N3, and was looking to purchase East-West. The issue lies with the N3 rendering engine which has a lot of improvements, but far too many issues for me to use. I use N2 and have all the expanded kits for N2. N2 samples sound worse in N3, than in N2 because of Notion3's flawed rendering engine. N3 samples are mostly unusable for a classical composer.

I have a B.Mus, and M. Mus, and the problems with N3, as far as I am concerned are:

1. Lack of dynamic control. N2 has the most amazing dynamic control...fade to niente..etc.
2. Poor sample quality. I do think the brasses and strings are better in N3, but the woodwind are terrible. Piano too is bad.
3. Very poor articulation. N2 has amazing articulation quality.
4. Abbey Road studios is no longer an option. Abbey Road was dry, but an external .wav editor can fix that easily.

Jack Jarrett was the original owner of Virtuosoworks, and is a classical composer. The philosophy from the beginning was to create notation software for classical composers with a decent sample quality. In fact, if one really uses N2 to its full capacity, the quality of rendering is quite high.

With the advent of N3, Notion(formerly Virtuosoworks) cracked open the hood and now allows for external sound libraries. However, with the economy being what it is, I think they rushed this release. They now have more of a mass market product, but one(from a classical composer's point of view) is much less successful than its previous incarnation. N2 version 1.0 was 599 USD, I believe. N3 is 249 USD.

N3 has been a smart financial move for Notion. However, I have yet to hear a single piece of music rendered on N3 that is as good as or surpasses the quality of N2. How disappointing.

[pcartwright]

I have yet to hear a single piece of music rendered on N3 that is as good as or surpasses the quality of N2. How disappointing.

Interesting. Can I bother you to post some audio examples of this discrepancy for the benefit of users who didn't own a previous version of notion? A simple little melody (just a few bars would do) identical in articulations, dynamics, and samples (which, I suppose, means using Notion2 samples); one example should be rendered in Notion2 and the other rendered in Notion3 using the same Notion instruments.

Again, as I never used Notion2, I'd love to hear the difference in the rendering process.

[composer]

I uninstalled N3.

[pcartwright]

First, you have some very nice works; kudos.

Now, on to the sample library. It's hard to draw a comparison of the sound library itself and the rendering process without a side by side comparison, but I don't hear a significant difference between the quality of samples in Notion3 and the library used in your pieces.

I will add that, in my experience, using third party libraries (such as GPO and Miroslav) in conjunction with Notion's default sound set yields pretty impressive results that probably weren't achievable in versions of Notion that didn't support external sound libraries.