Wallander Instruments has released an update to NotePerformer 5 which discontinues support for third-party VST3 instruments. NotePerformer 5.0.1 no longer includes the Playback Engines (NPPE) extension, which was the main focus of the NotePerformer 5 update, released earlier this week.
Statement from Wallander Instruments
Posted on the NotePerformer home page and published in the version history May 10, 2025, here is the statement from Wallander Instruments regarding this news:
Playback Engines Discontinued
We regret to inform you that VST3 hosting has been removed from NotePerformer 5.
While some plugin developers were enthusiastic about the preloading technologies introduced in NotePerformer 5, others were uncomfortable with them—partly due to mischaracterizations of how the technology works in public discussions. These systems were developed to push boundaries in performance and efficiency—but ultimately, we’ve found them too powerful to distribute responsibly without full cooperation from all content owners. Without developer support, we cannot continue offering VST3 hosting for notation safely or sustainably.
Our current release, NotePerformer 5.0.1, no longer includes the Playback Engines extension. It retains all improvements, fixes, and new sounds from version 5.0.0, apart from the removed module. We remain committed to developing our own built-in sound engine and will be focusing our efforts there moving forward.
Refunds and Downgrades
If you purchased NotePerformer 5 between May 5 and May 9, you’re eligible for a full refund.
If you previously purchased NotePerformer 4 engines, you may downgrade to version 4.5.1 to continue using them (link). However, we are no longer offering Playback Engines for sale.
In addition to quality limitations and ongoing challenges around VST3 integration, these engines were always operated at a financial loss, as users often expected us to resolve VST3-related issues that were beyond our control. Looking ahead, we also recognize that advancements in AI may significantly shift how this kind of technology is developed and delivered, making this trajectory increasingly unsustainable.
We understand this will be disappointing for some users. The decision was made out of necessity, in response to circumstances that were partly outside our control, and we’re grateful for your continued support. We hope this explanation has helped clarify the situation, and we respectfully ask for your understanding that we won’t be sharing further details at this time.
The future of NotePerformer
We’ve reached out to Wallander Instruments, and they have respectfully referred us to their statement that they will not be commenting further at this time.
However, a recent comment by Arne Wallander on the Dorico forum about his opinion of the future of orchestral demo technology may provide the rationale behind this decision, and offer further context about what may be next for NotePerformer:
It’s a safe prediction that generative AI will soon dominate the field of audio production. It’s only a matter of time before you can upload your mockup—of any quality—to the cloud, and generate multiple version, all sounding like perfectly authentic orchestral recordings.
From an audio producer’s perspective, the mockups that our software generates may soon only be an intermediate carrier of a musical idea. In the world of generative AI, chasing the perfect sampled legato at the expense of 64 GB RAM becomes pointless, if it’s just an intermediate mockup, and the same production goals are met with a lightweight software like NPPE5.
Given how AI technology has been evolving lately, it makes more sense for us to focus on what we do best, which is usability. Generative AI is still very far from delivering an affordable realtime orchestra that loads quickly and responds directly to changes in a score, on a basic machine, but we can provide that. It’s a space for us to occupy, even as more powerful AI technologies become dominant.
Fixes in NotePerformer 5.0.1
NotePerformer 5.0.1 does include two small fixes:
- In Dorico and Finale, the popup menu in the NotePerformer mixer wouldn’t always be accessible when overriding sounds. This issue has been fixed.
- In Dorico and Finale, the mixer would not properly display levels for unpitched percussion sounds. This issue has been fixed.
Price and availability
With the exception of the removal of the playback engines, most of the previous information regarding the price and availability of NotePerformer 5 remains the same as before.
NotePerformer 5 is currently free for all existing NotePerformer users. Current registered users can request a new download link at the NotePerformer web site, which will provide the user with NotePerformer 5.
The latest edition of the version history is found by scrolling down to near the bottom of NotePerformer’s home page, or you can download it directly from this link. The User’s Guide is also available.
If you don’t already have NotePerformer, a single-user license is the same price as it’s always been: $129 for a perpetual license. That one license gives you the ability to not only use it in Dorico, Sibelius, and Finale, but it also allows you to use it on as many computers that you personally use.
Supported notation software and versions are:
Further, NotePerformer offers a rent-to-own option, where you can rent it for $10.75 per month, and, once you’ve paid a total of $129, it turns into a perpetual license, making this effectively an installment plan for those unwilling or unable to commit the entire cost of the product at once.
Site licenses are available; pricing starts at a very reasonable $200 for up to 5 seats, with each additional seat costing $40. This is a one-time, perpetual license. This differs from the individual license; whereas the individual license is valid for one user running on any computer that the customer personally uses, the site license is reserved for any computer owned by the licensed organization, but can be used by multiple people on a single site.
Finally, there is a 30-day trial available, which runs for one hour. You need to restart your notation software to keep using NotePerformer after one hour, if you’re in trial mode.
Wow, that’s a hard cut for .0.1 and will definitely split the user base; I did not expect that!
At second thought, for me personally it’s actually good news, since their capacities will be focused again where I use them (pressing play and get a usefully nice impression without wasting too much ressources in disk space and computing power) and not where I don’t use them (fiddeling around with Sound optimization in a scoring app instead of a DAW).
So thanks from me for making this difficult decision!
While disappointing, not totally unexpected. Version currency always seemed like a big problem to me. The third parties doing upgrades or bug fixes and breaking the NPPE technology. Perhaps instead of scrapping the tech, Wallander should pick one bespoke vendor they could work with and re-release NPPE for that vendor. That would give people a choice of the core product and one VST3 product.
Good point!
The first thing I thought was that this was a late April fools joke. I kept looking for the punch line.
With due respect to Arne Wallander, I don’t share his optimism about the trajectory of generative AI.
It also seems crystal clear that the removal of NP5’s signature feature, just a few days after launching the new update, was due to the threat of pending legal action, which makes one wonder what has been happening behind the scenes.
Ok… One step forward, two steps back.
Does the removal of the NPPE from v5 mean that I can no longer use the additional VST3 libraries I registered with the NPPE back in v4.5.1 (which worked pretty darn well in my opinion). Or, do I now have to re-install NotePerformer v4.5.1 in order to continue to use my external libraries with NotePerformer and NPPE? It would be a shame to have to fall back to the earlier version and not be in a position to take advantage of the improvement in NotePerformer itself (including, but not limited to, the additional instruments added in v5).
To expand a little on my previous comments, it seems that the VST3 folks are cutting their own throats by pushing back against this technology. If Scoring Notes is right about the march to the cloud and AI, people will no longer purchase these expensive libraries, at least nobody but the high-end professionals who do game or movie scoring. They’ll simply send their Dorico file to the AI cloud and receive back a high quality mockup, for which the library vendors will receive nothing for.
A major move like this will probably ruin the company. It’s a pity; they have done fantastic work, so far.
For myself, I think that I’ve been using NotePerformer ever since NP 1. It’s been a gift to composers/arrangers as far as it’s original premise; giving a very realistic interpretation of your score and your composing intentions as you work in order to check out different instrumentation, orchestrations, etc. etc.
(…my piano skills are pretty good, but I’m not able to play back everything I write all at once!…so, NP is like having an at-home world class pianist able to sightread and playback any piece of music at any time of day or night. What’s to complain about?)
I still find it amazing that Wallander has never charged for an update over all these years! That’s practically unheard of these days. I’m sure that every user of NotePerformer would gladly pay some kind of nominal update fee once in awhile.
NotePerformer has saved us all countless hours, days, and weeks of fidgeting around with 3rd party VST’s and back and forth to DAW’s just in order to create a very good demo/mockup of our music to get out to some performers/conductors so that they can can a reasonable idea of what we have in mind.
Unfortunately, there are people out there who think that an inexpensive program like NotePerformer should be able to ‘do everything’ for us and make it possible to help eliminate real humans from the all the various processes that go into composing/arranging and producing music. There are a lot of people out there who are looking for this ‘holy grail’ (at least in their minds) that will compose, mix, and master their music with the push of one or two buttons. We all know this to be true, and that there are indeed many unscrupulous minds working in the music business….or, in the ‘business of content creation’ as they refer to it.
‘Music content creators’ can carry on and have a field day of battling each other… whatever. It’s hard to feel sorry for any them if they feel let down by Wallander.
So, all the more power to Arne Wallander and whatever it is that he wants to do. It seems like he’s going back to his original dream of creating software that will interpret music from a notation program in a very realistic manner in order to help music creators hear what it is that they’re working on, and to further develop his program.
What’s to complain about? It’s still an amazing piece of software and is helping humans create music which is 99% of the time ultimately intended for other humans to perform.
(…if you’re willing to put the time in, you can massage NP audio output and do further mixing/mastering on your own in order to create pretty decent finished audio products. The new ‘individual track outputs’ in the new NP5 for Dorico will be very useful for this)
I couldn’t agree more Cam! We all wish the symphonic VST3 vendors would have joined in and collaborated with Wallander further improving the realism of instant score playback. Sadly, they are not the least interested in doing so, and Wallander’s choice to focus on what he does best makes perfect sense. I also agree that the promise of generative AI might not turn out the way tech optimists are dreaming about. There will always be Bachs, Beethovens and Puccinis whose imagination and genius will make AI sound and feel ridiculous and irrelevant. And a decent symphony orchestra will always sound more sincere and authentic than AI. A real composer will always want live musicians to learn the music and make it their own. AI can never ever be creative, it can only mimic (steal) a real composers style. Then this real composer wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to write something he just dreamt. Something odd that might sound strange or even ugly. 50 years later, time is ready and the music is seen in a new light. If you listen to music composed by computers 50 years ago today, it sounds hilarious. AI is a dead end for creative work, because all it ever can do I pastiche, pastiche and pastiche.
For what it’s worth, I think the people who are upset are not upset with Arne Wallander. I’m upset with the shortsightedness and lack of technical understanding on the part of the VST publishers. I don’t think there’s any question, not that he’d say it outright, that they threatened him with legal action and forced his hand. (Though I also agree that his focus on AI is disappointing, but that’s a separate issue entirely.)
This isn’t, “We expect an inexpensive program like NP to do everything,” it’s, “We had a tool to do this and now some lawyer somewhere decided that we can’t anymore.” Entirely different. The first is an unrealistic expectation, whereas the second is just the expectation that we won’t have a rug pulled out from under us for essentially capricious reasons.
I’m a little confused – in order to keep using the playback engines that I purchased previously should I downgrade to version 4.5.1 or just stick with 5.0 (ie, not upgrade to 5.0.1)? What is the best option? Thanks.
Downgrade to 4.5.1. That version uses the version of the playback engines that you previously purchased.
Philip, if you downgrade to v4.5.1, how do you take advantage of the new instruments and fixes introduced in NP 5.x? For that matter, how would you be able to apply any future enhancements or fixes to NP if you stick with NPPE? I don’t see a maintenance path forward for customers that what to continue to use NPPE, but also wish to take advantage of current and future NP enhancements and fixes. It seems like you would be locked down to only using v4.5.1 forever, without support.
Thoughts?
Hi Timothy. Yes, your analysis correct, I believe. It appears to be a business decision that Wallander made for the reasons that were stated. I would advise that anyone with a specific question about their setup, especially those with previous NPPE purchases, should contact Wallander directly.
Why not stay on 5.0 ? You get the improvements for example Dorico mixer and you can use the playback engine for every library.
5.0 is essentially withdrawn, not to mention they use a different way of generating the libraries. Although there won’t be any more updates to 4.5.1, customers who have purchased NPPE libraries can continue to download them from Wallander, although it is true that they won’t receive any of the new benefits in NotePerformer 5 core.