Despite opening the VDL template on sibelius 6 first, I haven't been able to add VDL instruments. The only available instruments are ";common";. There should be a separate category titled ";VDL 2.5 instruments"; or something.

I used VDL on sibelius 6.2 crossgrade, then i returned crossgrade for sibelius 6 first. I had problems with the Kontakt 2 player not showing up on the list of active devices under play>playback devices. Fixed it, with the help of this site, and discovered this new problem.

Welcome to the forum!

Sibelius Student and First do not support the creation of custom instruments, and as a result you can't view custom groups like you can in the full version of Sibelius. The ";Common"; group of instruments is the only one that will appear, regardless of what has been added to a file in the full version of Sibelius. There's no way around it, so unfortunately that's just the way it is. You would've been better sticking with the regular crossgrade.

Any particular reason you decided to go to First instead?

i didn't have the user manual or disk for finale, which i needed to send to sibelius in order to get it registered