poor quality of wave exporting in sibelius

[agitato]

Hi 

I am using Sibelius 7.5 with VSL solo strings and ienna ensemble.  Evreything is great with the soundsents and the housetyle loaded. However there are a few issues.

One of them is that when I export to wave file, somehow the sound quality is not as good as when I play it wthin Sibelius. Particularly the wave file has less of a stereo effect, although its not fully mono either. The sound is also not crisp and is more synthy. 

I am using 44kHz 16 bit. in a windows 7 computer with 2.8GHz and 8Gb RAM 

Any idea what could be wrong? is there something specific in VE that I need to do when exporting the file? 

Thanks! 
Anand

[DG]

How do you know it's not as good? The best way to check would be to record the live output, record the audio export and then play them back in a sequencer with one of them, phase inversed. Then you could actually hear the differences.

Without doing this you are at the mercy of the  program you are using to play back your export, and some of these have "enhancement" settings that don't exactly do what they purport to do.

DG

[agitato]

I know it is different because it clearly sounds different. I was wondering if there is an export setting that needs to be changed.

perhaps what you are saying is that the media player on which I tested the wave file makes it sound so different. But I am not sure how it can change it so much.

[DG]

Yes, it sounds as if the media player you are playing back in is not giving a good playback. One thing you can do to check, which may or may not help, is to re-import the wav file back into Sibelius and play it from there. Does it sound the same as when you play it outside the program?

DG

[agitato]

I am trying to reimport the wave fiel into sibelius but no success so far. I selected import audio and it opens a small player. But nothing happens when I try to play it. Will keep trying.

[dr.Kev]

To my knoeledge,Notation programms have poor audio exporting quality.That's why you should use Cubase(or similar DAW)for audio producing purposes in order to have the best results

[DG]

@dr.Kev said:

To my knoeledge,Notation programms have poor audio exporting quality.That's why you should use Cubase(or similar DAW)for audio producing purposes in order to have the best results

Really? I've not heard this before. Do you have some evidence, or is it just a feeling that you have? If I get a chance I'll do some tests of this over the weekend and post the results.

DG

[DG]

OK, I've done some testing, but what I'd forgotten is that export from Sibelius is not sample accurate time wise. Therefore it is not possible to do a phase inversion test. Not sure how else to test to quantify what I, or anyone else, is hearing. Any suggestions?

The best I can come up whith is instead of exporting from Sibelius, record the output into a sequencer in real time and see how that sounds, or use something like Tapeit to record your output.

DG

[agitato]

wow if this is true it will confirm my suspicion that Sibelius was the culprit ni making the low quality wave.

The only DAW I have is Sonar. But I am confused how I can output the audio from Sibelius (playing through the Vienna ensmble and solo strings) directly to Sonar? I suppose I will load the VSL vst's inside Sonar. But will the Sibelius house styles play correctly even if Vienna Ensemble and instruments is inside Sonar? 

Thank you

[DG]

@Another User said:

The only DAW I have is Sonar. But I am confused how I can output the audio from Sibelius (playing through the Vienna ensmble and solo strings) directly to Sonar? I suppose I will load the VSL vst's inside Sonar. But will the Sibelius house styles play correctly even if Vienna Ensemble and instruments is inside Sonar? 

Thank you

Use a loopback from your audio card. However, a simpler test is to use the Tapeit solution i suggested, which you can do to check real time export.

DG

[agitato]

ok will check out using tapeit. Thank you.

[dr.Kev]

I can't really apply any hard evidence,it's just experience from Finale's audio export vs. Cubase's.