Will the Finale GPO work in FL Studio?

[BardicKnowledge]

Anyone who can help me with this would be a livesaver.

I am unable to get people to play two things for my recital tomorrow, and so I want to have the Garritan piano play them inbetween other sets as an interlude of sorts. However, Finale is not good at varying rhythms (dynamics it handled surprisingly well), and so I'm trying to get the Garritan sound into FL Studio.

The catch is that I know next to nothing about the program, and am lost. My Garritan instruments come as .nki files, and my roomie's copy of FL Studio doesn't have the Soundfont plugin (though I'm told this shouldn't be an issue if we can do this in one sitting).

Any advice for a crazed musician? I can try to tweak with Finale as best I can otherwise. Please feel free to e-mail me directly (in my profile) if you have a simple solution as I'm pressed for time (the recital is tomorrow evening!)

[Smenelian]

DirectWave in FL can open .nki files. Whether or not it works with Finale GPO I can't say for sure.

There is a free soundfont player called sfz that you can download and it will load soundfonts in FL if that's what you want (not .nki files). FL has a somewhat okay sounding piano in the program if you can't get anything else to work.

[Hemophiliac]

if you have something like kontakt 2 you should be able to load those files into it.

[DZComposer]

NKI files are NOT soundfonts. They are Kontakt instruments.

Finale GPO is not designed to work outside of Finale. You may be able to load the NKIs into something, but I do not know if the programming will work as designed or if it will work at all. It also may be a license agreement violation (if that matters to you, of course).

Finale does have a human playback emulation function. Have you tried it? I don't use Finale myself so I can't tell you how to activate it, but I'm sure someone else can.

EDIT: Garritan's site has a tutorial on how to use Human Playback. http://garritan.com/tutorial/HumanPlayback_Tutorial.html

If you plan to use FL more, you may want to consider getting the full version of GPO.

[Moseph]

One other possible option: You may be able to create a MIDI file in FL using the timings you want, export the MIDI, then import it in into Finale and play it through GPO (with human playback turned off). I'm not sure exactly how Finale would handle this, but it might be worth a shot.

[blue.nocturne]

Well, I personally use FL studio + GPO.

And yep, you can use it. Assuming your GPO came with the Kontakt player.

GPO comes with VST's, and all you have to do to load the GPO module is:

1. Load FL Studio.

2. Go to "Channels," (at the top) then "Add one," then "More.."

3. At the bottom right of the new window, click "Refresh" and do a "Fast scan"

4. You should now be able to load GPO, look for it in the list, it should be newly added. And you can easily load it from now on if you also check the box next to it.

5. Then once you have the module loaded, you have to set up midi channels.

6. Notice the top right of the GPO module, it should say "Port," and each Midi channel has the same thing. Match GPO's port with the MIDI out Port and you can have as many GPO modules running as you like. For instance, for the first 8 instruments, set Port to 0 and MIDI out port to 0, then match the midi channels with the instruments loaded in GPO, first instrument loaded will be channel 1, next will be 2 and so forth. The midi channel's displayed instrument (default is Patch --- (None)) instrument has no effect on GPO.

Some hints when using GPO with FL Studio.

If you checked in the GPO options: Use STD. CC#7 and CC#10 for Volume and Panning, then ALL instruments loaded will be set to 100 Volume and 0 Panning, because that is the MIDI default for FL Studio. So you may want to uncheck that box if you are going for realism, but if you want to control the panning and volume, by all means have fun with it.

Also when loading MIDI out, you will notice all knob wheels are blank.

You will need Mod (expression) and Dampen (for legato) for the bare minimum.

Mod is CC #1, Dampen is CC#64.

Hope this helps!

[BardicKnowledge]

Thanks to everyone -- we managed to export / import the MIDI in and out of the two programs, and Finale manages the off-timings just fine that way. Thanks a bunch to everyone!