Folks, I have been tied up for the last year or so, and am only now getting back into making music.  For the life of me, I cannot understand how to simply set up Sonar X1 and Garritan's Aria to play GPO instruments, JABB instruments, Steinway, etc. in such a way that I can have one instrument on each separate midi track.  I have everything installed correctly, but I know there must be some tutorial out there that can help me set things up in this simple fashion.  I can add the instruments to Aria's interface, but when I click on a track, solo it, etc. I expect for that instrument to play.  Some times it does, some times another instrument plays I am starting out VERY simply, and really appreciate your help or guidance!Thanks in advance for your help! By the way, I am using Sonar X1 producer expanded.

There are a couple key things you need to do to get Aria player to play nice with SONAR. Randy Bowser has posted a lot about GPO, JABB and Aria Player, so try Googling those search terms with his username, rbowser, against site:forum.cakewalk.com, and I think you'll find a lot of good stuff.

To get you started:

Unlike most synths, Aria uses CC1 (Mod Wheel) to control instrument volume. So you need to have at least one CC1 message in every track to establish an initial volume when playback starts, and you have to disable "Zero controllers when play stops" under MIDI preferences so that SONAR won't silence the instrument by setting CC1=0 every time you stop playback.

From there, it's basically a matter of ensuring that you're either recording notes with the correct channel sent by your controller, or setting a "forced" Output channel on each track to drive each instrument independently, and creating audio tracks to host the audio output of each instrument (or group of instruments) as assigned in Aria.

I haven't used Aria for a while, and am just writing off the top of my head, so that's just a rough outline. As I said, you'll want to Google and read some of Randy's stuff, especially regarding the use of CC1 and CC11 (Expression) to control instrument volumes.

Somewhere in the options menu there is a checkbox about "return to 0 start" or something like that. Check it or uncheck it and the Aria player will stop setting itself to 0.

Press "p" for preferences.

Click on midi in the "project" section.

Uncheck the "zero controllers when play stops".

I'm pretty sure that's the problem.

HTH