I have been using Sibelius with VDL2 for sometime now, and yesterday it suddenly decided to start dying on me.  I was attempting to get audacity to record some drumline music, and the playback on Sibelius ceased functioning properly.  When I hit the play button, it would start playing, but I couldn't stop playback and the green line that follows the score was not lined up with the playback, sometimes I'd even get three or four green lines.  Today, the same thing was happening, this time with voice dropouts.  I figured it might be a memory issue, though I don't know why, so I tried only playing the snare part and it totally died.  Now I'm getting one note at a time.  When I play this or other scores through Kontakt Player, it works fine.  When I play notes on the keyboard in VDL2, it works fine.  When I use them together, it's chaos.  I'm not sure, but the Sibelius 4.1.5 upgrade might be the catalyst.  I downloaded it right before the trouble started, and installed it today just before it got worse.  Has anyone had a similar trouble?

HP Compaq Laptop
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz
704 MB RAM
Windows XP
Sibelius 4.1.5

It sounds like Sibelius and Audacity are fighting as a master.  I may be wrong.  In Sibelius, do you have the program enabled to run in the background?  Have you tried using another sound recorder?  Are you using a consumer or pro audio card?

Gabe

It still doesn't work even when it's just Sibelius and VDL2 running.  I have tried it with all three settings of 'run in background'.  It only plays when it's set on ";only in foreground";, and that's when the trouble starts.  I'm using the integrated sound card.  I know, I need to get a real one but that's not likely to happen immediately.  I tried using GoldWave as well.

Can you list your settings for the various midi inputs and outputs in Sibelius (playback/input devices window, as well as the mixer), as well as midi/soundcard settings, and DFD settings for VDL2?

I realize you may not have changed anything from when it was working earlier, but it may help to offer some other suggestions to try.

When you're able to increase your RAM and upgrade your soundcard, you'll be impressed at what a difference it can make.

Since you're running this on a laptop, and you're toward the minimum amount of RAM, I assume you have DFD activated. This is fine, but keep in mind your laptop's hard drive probably spins much slower than a tower machine, which can affect DFD performance. Also, if your hard disk is almost full, or overly fragmented, that can affect your performance as well.

If you haven't already, you should perform the various XP tuning tips at:
http://www.musicxp.net/