Special Edition VS and Sibelius 5

[cgassi]

I am having trouble creating polyphony using VSL special edition and Sib. 5. I understand that I should be using 1 instance of VS for each staff or instrument in my Sib. 5 score. I am using and Intel-Mac and when I launch Sib. 2 different VSL appear, one is VSL - VST and the other is VSL - AU. Which one should I be using and is there any other special setup that has to be done other than assigning the instruments to an instance of VSL? Do I need to set up Manual Sound Sets? Thanks a lot - New to VSL and love it!!


Carmen

[jbm]

You can use either VST or AU, it's up to you... you could even use both!

And you do need a custom soundset, if you want all the automatic articulation mapping to happen. Sibelius is apparently working on one as we speak, so hopefully it will be out soon. If you're not xml-phobic, you can also edit an existing soundset to create one of your own. You'll find them in the Sibelius 5.app package, but I wouldn't bother unless you have some idea of what you're doing. They are also supposed to be coming out with a utility app for editing soundsets, which will hopefully be out soon.

J.

[cgassi]

Thanks J. Is there a limit to the number of instances of VSL that Sibelius can handle, or does it depend on RAM etc.? I also was wondering if I were running Sibelius on my PC and VSL on my Intel-Mac, both connected to the same router, if I could access the VSL from my PC. Just wondering.

Regards,
Carmen

[jbm]

hmm... I'm not sure what the limit would be - it would depend on whatever maximum number of staves there is in Sibelius. Not sure. Anyway, you'd run out of RAM and CPU long before reaching the limit of plugin instances.

As to the networked situation, probably your best bet would be to boot the Mac into Windoze and run FX-Teleport. That way, you could load the VIs hosted on the PC directly, and VIs available on the Mac as Teleported plugins This would be the most seamless setup. Otherwise, you could certainly use the Mac as a slave, with hardware midi and audio passed between the two. You'd make the instruments running on the Mac into MIDI staves in Sibelius, and the hosted plugins would be VSTs. You can also use LAN midi, but I personally don't think it's worth the cost for one machine (MIIDIOverLan is what people usually recommend).

Good luck.

J.

[cgassi]

Hi J

I understand that connecting my MAC to PC over Ethernet can be done a couple of ways, I can either use the built in MIDI network service on the MAC, or use something like MidiOverLan by Music Lab. I have downloaded and installed the MidiOverLan product and after configuration it is able to receive MIDI data from the MAC to the PC. Can I use VSL through this type of connection? I would think it should be possible to but I haven't been successful yet. Not sure if I can assign the VSL instances to different MIDI ports in this application. Let you know if I'm able to.

Carmen

[jbm]

Yeah, if the PC is getting midi from MOL then you should be good to go. You'll probably need to get audio back into the Mac at some point (unless you're just monitoring, which I sometimes do), but otherwise all you need to do is assign the MOL ports in Sibelius, under Play->Playback Devices->Active Devices. You'll see that the MOL ports should show up as MIDI devices (on the left). Assign those by "Activating" them, then in the Mixer make sure you're using the MOL devices. The only funky thing is how Sibelius automatically chooses MIDI channels... I'm really not sure why they didn't allow manual settings - or maybe it's just a bug. But what I do is just to let Sibelius do the assignments, then adjust the channels in the VI host on the slave machine. That parts a bit lame, but hopefully they'll fix it and just allow us to manually assign midi channels. Would make a lot more sense...

Hope this helps.

J.

[DG]

@jbm said:

Yeah, if the PC is getting midi from MOL then you should be good to go. You'll probably need to get audio back into the Mac at some point (unless you're just monitoring, which I sometimes do), but otherwise all you need to do is assign the MOL ports in Sibelius, under Play->Playback Devices->Active Devices. You'll see that the MOL ports should show up as MIDI devices (on the left). Assign those by "Activating" them, then in the Mixer make sure you're using the MOL devices. The only funky thing is how Sibelius automatically chooses MIDI channels... I'm really not sure why they didn't allow manual settings - or maybe it's just a bug. But what I do is just to let Sibelius do the assignments, then adjust the channels in the VI host on the slave machine. That parts a bit lame, but hopefully they'll fix it and just allow us to manually assign midi channels. Would make a lot more sense...

Hope this helps.

J.

If you are using a soundset in Sibelius then the channel numbers are irrelevant. If you are not, then you can set them manually.

DG

[jbm]

Oh, okay... didn't know that, since I'm using custom soundsets. Good to know, though.

[EDIT: Huh? Wait a second. You say irrelevant, but that's not really true. If you're using a MIDI soundset, to an external device or slave machine, then the midi channels are relevant. It seems to just select them in sort of quasi-ascending order, from the top of the score to the bottom. But even that's not entirely consistent. I don't know... I have to mess around with it more. I'm still trying to get my custom soundsets and everything sorted out. Once everything is good to go I think it should be a great system. But I'm kind of waiting for fall to really dig in. I'm hoping to jump over to a Mac Pro around that time, which should make it run more smoothly. It seems to run *much* better on Intel Macs than PPC - my Macbook runs it *much* better than the G5.]

cheers,

J.

[mathis]

@jbm said:

If you're using a MIDI soundset, to an external device or slave machine, then the midi channels are relevant.

Yes, that's correct information. You can combine manual midi channel selction with "Midi" and "Fixed" soundsets.