Core update

Hi all,

Well, it's been an eventful time talking to Spitfire about how 21Gb of RAM taken up by BBC SO actually shows up as 42Gb of RAM in real-life. 

Anyway, in the first Core implementation, I tried to do some clever things. (1) I set everything to use CC1, to try and even out some of the potential volume differences between shorts and longs. (2) I tried to include extra strings that had a bigger dynamic range by using CC11 (Expression). Well, I've had to backtrack on both of those now. (1) was causing too much MIDI data, and (2) didn't work on hairpins. It's much better to leave you to use CC11 in Graphical MIDI Tools to draw your own expression in. In the end, everything I tried to do that was clever got saobtaged by either Sibelius or Spitfire, which is a shame.

The good news is that I think this version of Core fits better into the limitations of Sibelius than the other one did. I can play Zoids through with barely a crackle with a preload of 16384, which is good.

So, I recommend you download this. A few of the instruments have changed in the house style to have "BBC" in them, and the "Espressivo" strings patches have been renamed to "Xtra". But it's probably not worth re-importing the house style into any existing scores.

I'm also in the testing stage of the Pro integration now. I'm looking forward to leaving BBC SO behind now.

BTW, you will have seen that NotePerformer's new playback engine does BBC SO. 

+ve

Deals with some of the more obvious sonic problems of BBC SO, like tonal differences between articulations. 

And some of the timing, probably.

And it has all that performing AI stuff

-ve

Needs quite a lot of setting up

Uses quite a lot of instances, so quite heavy on CPU and RAM

Doesn't have the extra instruments, but sort of tries to have them anyway by juggling samples

You can't export the MIDI through the sound set to use elsewhere

Paul of ScoreLikeADaw is trying to do a comparison of this sound set going through VE Pro with NP's Playback engine, which should be fascinating.

Chris