Q: I recently upgraded to Finale 25 and I cannot get the Garrison sounds reverb to work. When I go to the Audio Units Banks and Effects window it tells me that Garritan Ambience is missing! Do you perhaps have any idea how I might resolve this?
A: The legacy Garritan Ambiance plugin is no longer installed or supported in Finale. If you are starting a new project, this won’t be a concern, as the new Aria reverb is incorporated automatically, but older projects may have been saved with the Garritan Ambiance plugin enabled.
The good news is that Aria’s Convolution Reverb and Ambiance are easy to incorporate into your updated Finale files. Let’s take a look:
First, open Audio Units Banks and Effects (on Mac):
When the dialog opens, make sure Aria Player is selected in the Instrument pop-up menus on the left. (make sure the volume sliders on the right side are turned up for all active instrument instances so playback is audible):
The Garritan Ambiance plugin is no longer available in the Audio Units Banks and Effects main dialog, so for now, if only to hear how these Aria reverbs sound, you can deselect any Per Channel effects as well as the Master effects:
Either Ambience or Convolution Reverb can now be added per Instance from right within the Aria Player. Click on the little pencil / edit icon next to the Aria Player popup(s), then, Click on the Effects tab on the right side of the Aria player window:
Choose either Convolution or Ambience, where you can choose from a number of available presets. The Convolution reverb has over two dozen presets:
In addition to adjusting common reverb parameters like Decay, Diffusion, Size, etc., the Ambience reverb lets you create your own custom presets, which you can subsequently load into other Finale projects.
~robert
for Peter Longworth
Note: you also need to adjust the ‘send’ dial on the Mixer tab for each channel where you want to render the effect. You can go anywhere from 1% to full-on. If you like a little bit of dry mix, which can help with articulation, select something meaningfully short of 100%.