Just went to check and found that my Cakewalk Sonar effects have all be scanned into the Master Effects pulldown. That should be interesting down the road.

I wonder if anyone will answer:  why is Garritan Ambiance no longer supported?  It was very handy, useful, easy to use, and I have a huge number of scores that include Garritan Ambiance which, apparently, I can now only revise, etc., in earlier versions?

I expect it's because Finale is now 64 bit while Garritan Ambience is not.

On my mac I now use Apple AU Matrix Reverb instead - and I notice a couple interesting things. First, my audio samples are richer and the audio file outputs *much* faster. (This is a 64 bit FInale improvement, not related to reverb.) Second, the reverb profile I prefer (cathedral-ish) has a long decay, but I note with the Apple AU Matrix Reverb I am now using the attacks are cleaner on voices that have fast-speaking leading edges (trumpets, organ reeds, chimney flutes), so there the different characteristics between the two reverb apps are discernible.  

Convolution is not usable if creating a realistic concert acoustic - in convolution, every single voice has to be patched. What kind of processor overhead is that consuming?! (And I usually have seven Aria instances active, six of them with all 16 channels filled, which would be roughly 100 separate convolution 'sends.') In a concert space, every instrument and voice is dry, it's the room that's wet (or not). The most realistic option is to apply the room acoustics one time, to the entire ensemble. So nix on convolution. 

But like most here, I hope a 64-bit Garritan Ambiance is in development.

You can control how much convolution to apply to each instrument in an Aria instance by adjusting the Send level of each instrument.

I wanted to revisit this; as I expected, putting convolution and sends on individual voices in a large GCPO 'organ' of four manuals, pedal, and couplers, resulted in an insane amount of latency: on a six-minute composition, 14 seconds before rendering an aiff began, and 26 seconds after the measures spooled out until the screen came back. I tried a couple 64-bit plugins that put a reverb back into the Master Effects options at the bottom of Banks and Effects. One was Magnus Ambience (free) - very good, but no early reflection control. Waves TrueVerb ($49, free trial) has a more complete room emulator with a working graphical interface. There was no initial latency, and 6 to 8 seconds after spool-out, which I expect is the Master Effects filters being applied (Magnus or TrueVerb), a 20-second improvement, to get a much better (for me) result.

In the case of simulating a classical ensemble (or a pipe organ), the idea of a different reverb on each voice is far, far from the ideal. These instruments - whether a viola, or an 8' principal - are as dry as toast at the point of sound production. The acoustics are provided entirely by the room they are all playing into, hence the need for an ambient acoustic filter to recreate the effect.

note: all tests on a machine with quad i7 processor, 16gb ram, max buffer

More research on the topic, with excellent advice from Brian Doyle's blog post.

• Convolution reverb is primarily for use on select, solo instruments and small ensembles.
• Algorithmic reverb (eg, Ambience as accessed on Aria's Effects tab) for large ensembles.

As many websites - not just Brian Doyle's - note, Convolution has a high CPU load, and does not produce a realistic sound on large ensembles. The loss of Garritan's Ambience (due to its 32-bit limitation) is huge, because it was positioned as single filter affecting the entire ensemble, exactly as happens in any performance environment with, say, an orchestra.

Keeping in mind my audio renderings feature eight Aria Player instances, I have experimented using third-party reverbs in that position, but have lately discovered that my signature compositions - centered around a pipe organ in a cathedral space - has profited better from using the Ambience reverb in the Aria Player Effects tab. This allows me to model the more complex acoustics of the kind of space I am simulating, thus I can put a longer tail with less damping on the low pedal notes (characteristic of a cathedral or basilica), with a shorter tail and earlier damping on higher notes from the organ's upperwork, strings, flutes, etc.

I have no affiliation with this guy but he puts out good stuff. 

www.lesliesanford.com/vst/plugins/

Just install the SanfordReverb.dll into your "\Program Files\Common Files\VST2\Garritan" directory,
Open Finale, MIDI/Audio menu, Device Setup, Rescan for VST Plug-ins
MIDI/Audio menu (again), VST Banks & Effects, Master Effects drop down, Select Sanford Reverb, Configure to Taste.

Like I said, I don't know Leslie Sanford but I was pleased with the results.

Andrew