Hola-

I posted this over at the Sibelius Forum, too, but often feel like I get better info on Sibelius troubleshooting here because we are all using VDL and live in the same sort of niche. You guys know where I'm coming from...

Hello all,

I haven't dabbled in Sib7 sounds until here recently, and have been having a few problems with them.

1. In one score the sounds fade out during a long, sustained forte-piano hit followed by a crescendo to fortissimo (yep, you guessed it... marching band score). There are 15 staves on this score. For some reason, the bari sax faithfully executes his part. Everyone else takes a smoke break.

2. In another, not all of the sounds will play. Period. This score has 17 staves in Sibelius Sounds and several others in Kontakt Player 5 (those are percussion sounds using VDL and they are fine).

Here's my set-up:

iMac w/ OSX 10.7.4
3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Sibelius 7.1.2
Sibelius 7 Sounds 7.1.2 (just updated last night)

I house my Sibelius 7 sounds on an external hard drive (an Iomega 2 TB, USB Drive). Could this be part of the problem?

My current playback configuration has 4 instances of Kontakt Player 5 and Sibelius 7 Sounds. Again, the Kontakt Players appear to be doing their jobs swimmingly.

Thanks in advance!

ER

I've been round and round with Sibelius customer care and on their forums for a few months now with similar problems.  Your problem is that not all of the Sib 7 sounds will play back, which means that those sounds aren't loading into the player, correct?

According to customer support, this isn't a problem on Windows, which implies it's a Mac problem.  Due to their ";restructuring"; and the closing of their UK development office, no one's sure when the next big update will be, and we don't know if this problem will get fixed any time soon.

Supposedly, you can use the Lite sounds without any problems, but I've encountered problems with that set, too.  Plus, I've been able to hear differences in some of the instruments, so I'd rather not use the Lite sounds, anyway.  You may just need to find workarounds (like using Kontakt 5 to load some old Sib 5 and 6 sounds).

In Sibelius 6 and earlier, Sibelius does not interpret ";fp"; dynamic markings at all (i.e. it ignores them). Getting proper playback of a fp attack followed by a crescendo requires using the crescendo/decrecendo plugin. Unless this has changed in Sibelius 7, the same thing will need to be done for this Sib7 score. Turn on hidden objects and then examine that bari sax staff to see what entries there are. Perhaps these just need to copied and pasted to other staves.