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:
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
← Return to Sibelius sound set
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
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!