Sibelius and RAM

[Pyre]

Hi all,

I have recently upgraded to Sibelius 7 for the purpose of VSL integration (and the older Sibelius versions apparently aren't so good on Windows 7), but have yet to set it up to run VSL. Something has been bugging me, though - surely for Sibelius to be able to play back a sample, that sample has to be loaded into RAM? So loading all of my Symphonic Cube would take 550GB?

This isn't so much of a problem when using a DAW, as Learn can be used to only play the samples needed, saving me huge computing requirements. But for writing something new on Sibelius, I can't use Learn, as I don't know which notes I'll need. So it seems the only choice is to keep everything in RAM. Am I missing something crucial here? If I get a striped RAID 0 array and spread VSL across four fast SSDs, will I be able to read samples quickly enough from disc, or do they still need loading into RAM? Is everyone else limited to the significantly-less-than-550GB of RAM their computers can hold, or does everyone use enormous RAM-heavy servers for storing the samples?

Many thanks for your thoughts, suggestions and answers.

Pyre

[andi]

Hello Pyre!

Only the beginning of the samples gets loaded to the RAM. The rest gets streamed from your hard drive or SSD. For most projects your 8 GB RAM should be fine. It's also possible to reduce the preload size that gets loaded to RAM in the Directory Manager. However, this is only recommended, if you have stored your sample content on SSDs. So if you are working on big projects, I recommend either getting more RAM or getting SSDs for the sample content (or both).

Best regards,
Andi