Finally: WOW!

I installed the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Windows 7/x64, and read through some of the documentation of GPO and Sonar. Finally I figured out how to install GPO as VST player: needed to copy the DLLs (I only took the two x64 DLLs) into the VST directory of SONAR. Then I could setup an ARIA player as a VST soft synth and control the 16 channels of this player through 16 MIDI tracks. This works remarkably well: even in the DirectSound mode and MME mode there is very little delay, and no crackling in the audio. And the files load so fast: I can configure a set of sound banks in the VST ARIA player, and the files are all loaded within a few seconds - no comparison to the minute-long loading on the old PC MAESTRO-1. I am using the onboard soundcard, which has a good enough sound quality. The XONAR Essence works ok too, but I do not hear any significant difference when using it: the ASIO mode which it provides does not seem to make a difference. I will use it when I will require external audio input.

One problem: when using the ARIA player in standalone with the ASIO mode of the ASUS XONAR soundcard, the buffer is fixed at 4 bytes - no way of changing this. And this appears to be too small: instead of instrumental audio, all I hear is audio crackling. I guess I cannot use the ARIA player in standalone mode then - it seems to work best as a VST within Sonar.

One other issue: it appears that when starting up Sonar one has to go into the audio menu. Doing nothing there, just loading the menu, then ckicking "OK". If this is not done, there is some crackling at the audio, as if there is some clipping or some non synchronised master clock... no idea what the reason for this is, but after doing this look at the audio menu, the audio signal is clear.

I begin setting up a few templates, and I am very impressed by the sound quality of Maestro-2 now!