Now, I may be completely stupid and missing something obvious, but I've looked everywhere and haven't found any good solutions to this problem. First off, I have Sibelius 7 on Windows 7, and whatever version the newest VDL is. I do not have the VDL template right now, though, since thewritescore's store is down.

Now for the problem: if I am only running the Kontakt 5 device in the configuration, everything works fine. But if I try to mix it with another device, say Sibelius 7 Sounds, the unpitched percussion won't play the VDL sounds, rather it will play the Sibelius 7 Sounds. Even with Kontakt 5 being the preferred device, that is the case. All other sounds work fine (Ex. the marimbas play with VDL), which seems like the strange part. It's just the Unpitched percussion that won't play properly.

Also (not really part of the problem, just me being clueless), how would I switch between, say, Snareline AutoRL and Snareline Manual? Is that something that needs the VDL template or is that doable without it?

Much of this may have to do with what sound set you've assigned to your Kontakt 5 instance. Once you can get your template, you'd choose the template's customized VDL sound set for best results. For now, Sibelius comes with a stock ";Virtual Drumline"; sound set that should get you in the right ballpark. You might be able to force those tracks to choose that K5 device by selecting Kontakt 5 in the mixer rather than leaving it set to ";auto"; (although, once you get your template, keeping it set to ";auto"; is definitely the preferred approach).

The different snareline instruments (manual, autoRL, etc) would be either chosen from your template when you're adding instruments (staves) to your score, or conversely, if you're using manual sound sets, you'd just load those into your kontakt player the same way you'd do it in standalone mode. The latter is more the ";old fashioned"; way of doing things, and I'm not sure how well it works in Sibelius.

Hopefully you can get up and running with that template soon as I think it'll probably solve most of your problems.

Thanks a lot! Changing it in the mixer fixed it all, so now its just a waiting game for the template store to come back online.

Another thing to double check would be the version of Sib 7 you're running. I seem to remember that the original Sib 7.0 had more issues with this kind of odd playback device behavior, and that after doing the various maintenance updates (7.1.3 is the most current), much of that disappeared��_at least for me.