BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover
A downloadable Sibelius sound set for Windows and macOS
You will need:
- Licenced, installed copy of BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover
- A Mac with 10.15 Catalina or above, Windows 10 x64 or above.
- Licenced copy of Avid Sibelius
Thanks to our template, Spitfire Audio and the BBC, composers all over the world can enjoy quality orchestral ensemble patches in their Sibelius files, hassle-free!
Just download, run our installer, then click on a template and start listening and composing! Be cautious: the sound can get very phat very fast!
How does the library sound? Well, you have to do a bit of cramming, but here's a rendition of Danny Elfman's "Cathedral Chase" from "Batman the Movie". It's messy, it's unrealistic, but then so was Batman!
This drives the VSTs pretty hard: much hard than you probably would.
If you like slower, more reflective music, then here's what the string section sounds like in Adagio form, with legendary musician Rob Hubbard's arrangement of his own composition "Goldrunner" (was: Human Race on the C64). This elegant and simple arrangement plays to the library's strengths in the string section.
In the free version of the BBC Symphony Orchestra plug-in, instruments only have a "long" articulation and a "staccatissimo" articulation. However, the Sound Set does some mapping to make sure nothing is left out, and Sibelius itself does a lot of heavy lifting by providing trills and trems out of the box.
The string ensemble sizes are large: for example Violin 1 has 16 violins.
- Violins 1 (+ Pizzicato, Tremolo)
- Violins 2 (+ Pizzicato, Tremolo)
- Viola (+ Pizzicato, Tremolo)
- Celli (+ Pizzicato, Tremolo)
- Basses (+ Pizzicato)
- 4 Horns
- 3 Trumpets
- 3 Tenor Trombones
- 2 Bass Trombones
- Tuba
- Piccolo
- 3 Flutes
- 3 Oboes
- 3 Clarinets
- 3 Bassoons
- Timpani
- Celeste
- Glockenspiel
- Harp
- Marimba
- Tubular Bells
- Xylophone
- Bass Drum
- Tenor Drum
- Snare Drum
- Cymbal
- Piatti
- Tam-tam
- Vibraslap (!)
- Woodblock
- Tambourine
- Triangle
- Cowbell
- Anvil
You can use BBC SO Discover with NotePerformer or Sibelius 7 Sounds out of the box, but if you want to use it with other libraries, you can buy our playback configuration merge tool which makes it easy:
https://sibelius-services.itch.io/sibelius-playback-configuration-merge-tool
More BBC
We have released integrations for two more versions of the library: "Core" and "Pro", with exponentially more options.
https://sibelius-services.itch.io/bbc-symphony-orchestra-core
https://sibelius-services.itch.io/bbc-symphony-orchestra-pro
How do these Core/Pro differ from the "NotePerformer Playback Engine" implementation?
1) Drawback: obviously no AI "performing" the playback
2) Drawback: forced to load the whole library, even the instruments you're not using.
3) Positive: you don't have to do any additional configuration.
4) Positive: Ability to use individual percussion staves together.
5) Positive: total control and predictable output: you can use Graphical MIDI Tools 2.0 to tweak the expression curves nicely, and you can over-articulate your score for playback as you want it. Things can still get crackly when you turn on "Espressivo" though!
6) Positive: explicitly created instruments such as Horn 2, Horn 3 and Horn 4 to make it simpler to see what's going on.
7) Positive: BBC Instances can be seen and tweaked from within Sibelius itself.
Purchase
In order to download this Sibelius sound set you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $10 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
- How do BBC Core and Pro compare to NotePerformer's new engine?Jun 11, 2023
- New version: less dynamic range, more flexibility, less crackling (hopefully)Apr 30, 2023
- New Installer (Fixed)Apr 21, 2023
- Windows users - a question about the installerApr 08, 2023
- Oh, FFS NotePerformerApr 07, 2023
- Added the manual filesApr 06, 2023
- Update acquiredMar 08, 2023
- LaunchedMar 05, 2023
Comments
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I did a clever thing with the Discover sound set which unfortunately doesn’t sit well with Sibelius. In the sound set, I use Sibelius’s “AttackType” parameter and attach it to the expression controller (CC11). This vastly increases the dynamic range.
Unfortunately, it also generates many more controllers, especially in Espressivo. So I’m going to upload a new build where it’s commented out.
If you’re confident, you could download the new sound set from here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tpvmog4yotfwv3l/BBC%20Symphony%20Orchestra%20Discover.xml?dl=0
And then dump it into your friendly Sibelius library directory.
It’s basically the old one with the attack type of “Expression” commented out.
What this will do is greatly reduce the amount of data heading out of Sibelius, but also mean that the volume range of the library is now restricted to CC1. What it does mean is that if you really want to draw expression curves in with that nice MIDI plugin, then you can do it with CC11 without Sibelius interfering.
I will probably port this to Core as well as restoring the use of NoteVelocity where I can so minimise MIDI throughput.
I will upload new builds with this change. Allowing people to get creative with CC11 seems to me to be a good thing.
Hi, just tried the windows installer today it did not seem to run properly. Nothing intalled.
Did it get as far as asking for admin permissions? And did you make sure you extracted the Zip file? The EXE needs those 2 DLLs…
It does ask for if I want to allow the app to make changes to my system, and I have unzipped the files.
I am also having trouble getting the file at qr.c64audio.com (my system says it can't be downloaded securely. (I will try on a different machine.)
Hmm. So it doesn't do anything after asking if you want to make changes? Does it throw up an interface? Could you describe the sequence of events? Is there a Sibelius Sound Set installer log file on your desktop?
Maybe try https://qr.c64audio.com/bbcsod/setup.exe ?
Since the previous installer actually runs, the new one may not fix any problem. If there's no Sibelius Sound Set Installer on your desktop, could you search for one on your hard disk and send to chris@sibelius-services.com?
Try http://qr.c64audio.com/bbcsod/setup.exe
HI,
I am on an Imac Catalina 10.15.7 and Sibelius 8.6.1 and playback is very bad because of continuous crackling (impossible to listen to the files). Moreover on the biggest files like Ark Pandora and Cathedral there's an untuned percussion that pounds away octaves from beginning to end without being written on the staff (you can see the key moving in the Spitfire plug-in.) The sound I hear in the Adagio for strings (the file with much less crackling) is AMAZING and sure what you are doing will be game (life??...) -changing for composers. Are these issues due to my MAC version (my Imac id too old to upgrade) or to not having Sibelius Ultimate ( I can upgrade if it needs). If these issues are fixed, I will certainly preorder the BBC CORE version and many others to come.
keep up this miracle!!!
The presets: I think you just ran into what we just ran into an hour ago: some of the presets in the shipped version got somehow munged - the percussion instruments got turned into timpani (timpani and unpitched percussion share a patch). Also, cowbell got turned into violin, god knows why. Anyway, this is why we have soft launches - there will be a new version in the next few hours depending on how quick Apple is at notarizing software builds.
With the crackling: yes, the demo tunes drive things pretty hard (though the crackling doesn't show up in exported audio). This could be partly because of the age of the computer, and it's also that Sibelius isn't the best at optimising its use of MIDI data: things get especially bad when Sibelius itself is having to do tremolos, because it's absolutely flooding the zone with notes. I think in Cathedral Chase I had to reduce the number of slashes or something. I think possibly Avid did slight improvements in that area at some point, but not enough.
Course of action:
1) Wait until the next build is shipped with the corrected presets (or, go into the instances yourself and correct them all to "unpitched percussion" and click "save". I'm on it as a matter of urgency.
2) Highlight sections and press play so you can hear the demos without stressing the computer out too much
3) For your compositions, combine this library with NotePerformer with your machine's limitations in mind. You're unlikely ever to drive this library as hard as I did in Cathedral Chase. After all, it has about 24 horns!
4) Bear in mind that I get crackles too on Windows on my 2016 motherboard and USB audio card, so it's not ALL the machine.
If enough people complain at Avid that their playback engine is inefficient, maybe they'll take notice and improve it a little. The documentation with BBC SO actually explains a little about that.
Basically, there's really nothing I can really do about the crackling though, and I have to say that at every point in this journey Sibelius has tried to sabotage me in some way, whether it's bugs in the manuscript engine, undocumented soundworld quirks and mixer oddities, and a lot of other things. In this case, their playback engine basically hasn't been touched for years, and it needs to be - but there hasn't been a pressing need until now.
There's another factor here in that BBC SO Core/Pro would have many more playback devices, but less data going to each one.
But yeah, the only thing standing in the way of massive Sibelius success is Sibelius ;-)
NOTE: There is a known issue with the suspended cymbal roll, which applies to this library overall (not just the Sibelius version).
You are amazing. please! windows version soon
As soon as they give me my EV Security Certificate, it will be here.
It's here!