If your score has many instruments and you are running low on memory, you should definitely consider using the “Lite” harp and piano (especially if you do not need harp harmonics, which are omitted from the “lite” version). Garritan Personal Orchestra contains “lite” versions of the piano and harp that do not require as much of your computer’s RAM as the full-sized versions. By deselecting Scrolling Playback in the Playback Controls, you allow your computer to devote 100% of its system resources to playback. While it is very convenient to use scrolling playback to follow along on-screen, it also means your computer has to do two things at once - play back the Garritan instruments and constantly redraw the screen. Some digital audio applications will even allow you to apply Ambience to a saved audio file after the fact. You can lighten the load on your computer by reducing the Quality/CPU percentage in the Ambience settings (see Ambience Reverb) - or you could turn it off entirely by unchecking the Ambience Reverb box in the Audio Units Banks & Effects dialog box. Using the Ambience reverb can make Garritan instruments sound more realistic by creating the illusion that they are playing in a concert hall or other performance space, but it also takes additional processing power to apply.
Open the mixer and drag the master volume slider down a level 64 or lower is recommended.
If you set the master volume in Finale too high, the sound often becomes distorted. Turn down the master volume in the Mixer.
Even with virtual memory management and multitasking built-in to Mac OS X and Windows, you don’t want Finale to have to fight other applications for physical RAM and other system resources, especially during playback.
More memory means you will be able to load more Garritan instruments simultaneously. Some of the Garritan instruments take up quite a bit of memory (for example, the Steinway Piano, or the keyswitched section violins) and if you don’t have at least 2 GB minimum, you will probably find yourself running out of memory very quickly. We recommend that you have 4 GB of RAM or more installed. Garritan samples are RAM-intensive, meaning they load in system memory (instead of being streamed from a hard drive like some other sample libraries). If you are experiencing playback problems, here are some things you can do to help, in order of priority: But even if you have the latest and greatest hardware, you may still run into situations where your computer is overwhelmed by the number of instruments playing at once. If your computer does not meet or exceed the minimum system requirements for your sample libraries, the results will most likely be disappointing. Using high-quality sampled instruments makes a lot demands on your computer’s hardware, and the more instruments you use, the greater the demands.