Sibelius 3, VD, and Mac

Ok, so I read in your help file the following:

"Our SoundFont banks are failrly large, with several velocity layers, which in our testing caused QuickTime (OSX's SoundFont playback engine) to give poor results."


Could someone elaborate? What KIND of poor results? Also, has anyone "tested" this with version 3 of Sibleious and OS 10.3? I also notice that pages later you have a MAC screenshot where the person has selected quicktime and virtual drumline on their list of devices-- what gives? I can't get the "virtual drumline" sound set to even show up in Sibleius 3! (I even tried changing the extension to .set but no luck!) Is it supposed to show up?

As an aside, I have tried using the sound fonts and the sounds seem ok, but some of them appear to be missing or don't play when the proper key is pressed. Were these the type of results you spoke of?
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Mac OSX built-in soundfont playback of VirtualDrumline soundfonts results in missing notes and extreme sample stretching. This built-in function of playing soundfonts from the OS audio/banks is handled by QuickTime. Incidentally, in our testing process, the same poor results occurred when performing these soundfont banks via Quicktime on the Windows platform.

Sibelius 3 uses a different format for its sound sets in version 3. The sound sets that were included on the Virtual Drumline CD were written for use in Sibelius 2, which at the time of release, was the latest version of Sibelius. We've created updated soundsets for version 3 which are in the final stages of testing, and we'll be making them available soon. You've probably already figured out that Sibelius 3 doesn't call Quicktime "Quicktime Music" any more, but rather "DLS Music Device".

The other disadvantage in trying to run the VDrumline soundfont through OSX is that the current quicktime architecture (as far as I know) doesn't allow you to use multiple soundfont banks. So, without another sound source, other staves (brass, winds, pit, etc) wouldn't be able to access the GM sounds if you had VDrumline selected as your default music device.
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