About sibelius software

[dmoramanresa]

 Can I use vsl with siblelius 4?

[john_1332]

I would say the answer is probably yes, but I'm writing to urge you to consider Sibelius 5. They made many improvements in 5, and many of them were in playback. I consider 5 less an upgrade than a fulfillment of the promise of Sib 4. I realize not everyone has the money to upgrade willy-nilly, but this upgrade is really worth it.

[nicks]

Dear dm4m,

The answer is "yes", but how you go about doing it depends on your setup.  I used VSL with Sib 4 for a long time (in fact, until Sib 5 appeared).  However, what you need to bear in mind are:

1) Sibelius 4 only talks MIDI - not plugins.  Therefore, if you want to use VSL plugins, you will need to either have them running on a separate box and routed the MIDI, or use IAC (Mac) or (I think) MIDI Yoke or some similar on PC to route the MIDI data to your host running the plugin.

2) Sibelius 4 wasn't very good on sending the continuous controller type data and keyswitches to change articulations.  Therefore, you found yourself using direct MIDI messages such as ~N12,127 to switch notes on and off.  It got to be quite a bit of work to maintain this data.

Sibelius 5 has addressed issue 1, and mostly addressed issue 2.  Additionally, sound sets are available for VSL Special Edition and Solo Strings to allow articulations to change automatically based on the semantic content of the score - i.e. a staccato articulation in Sib initiates the staccato patch in VSL.  This is a huge step forward from the fairly unpleasant workarounds of Sib 4 and, since plugins can be hosted directly in Sib, makes it a more viable platform.  It isn't a sequencer, so you shouldn't expect that, but you get a much higher standard of playback "out of the box".

As a for example - crescendos can be mapped to velocity crossfade in VSL Special Edition, so that the crescendo just plays back in Sib 5.  With Sib 4 you have to do quite a bit of jiggery-pokery to get it to work, and it's never been great.

Hope this is of some help.

Kind Regards,

Nick.

[stevetrumpet]

Nick

Sorry to hijack this for my own personal needs! But you mention just at the end, mapping cresc to Vel cross fade.... I've being trying to work this out for a few weeks and searched on Sib and VSl to no avail. Could you poss give me a few lines to tell me how?

Thanks in advance

Steve

[nicks]

Dear Steve,

Off the top of my head, I don't remember exactly how I set it up.  However, I do remember that I have had to create my own sound sets with the sound set editor for my setup.  The control over the volume was set (I think) by mapping one of the volume values to the continuous controller that controls the X-Fade - in my case it's set to 2 (breath control), but in your case it may be different.  I took a look at the innards of the VSL Special Edition soundset, and am pretty sure I got the exact syntax from there.

Kind Regards,

Nick.

[DaveDrewry]

Steve

Look at the Vienna instruments (not ensemble) documentation on User area / Software / Documentation and set the velocity crossfader control to work off CC11 - from memory Sibelius maps hairpins to CC11 so you just need to switch the control on. I set exp and vel xf to run off CC11 and you can also define an off/off controller if you wish.

Dave