Greger
Thanks for your suggestions, and I agree with everything you said.
There is a very long chain that has to be set up for Sibelius and VE Pro to work together. I'd like to go through it just to be sure we both agree on the procedure. The first step involves the selection of the correct staff for each instrument in Sibelius. Most times the choice is obvious, but not always -- this is discussed in the Optimizing Sibelius help document from VSL. Each staff has one, and only one, MIDI channel and port, so, in effect, you use a staff to assign a channel.
The second step involves the rather hard to find (at first) "Playback Devices" dialogue, which you get to in Sibelius through Play-Setup in the Sibelius Menu through the small drop down icon. In Active Devices you find, in the left panel, Vienna Ensemble Pro - in my case, since I use OSX, I use the .AU version. You activate that and choose, in the right hand panel, Sound Set by double clicking on the text. If you have different instrument groups, such as strings and brass, for example, you must set up an ADDITIONAL Active Devices, since each will require its own Soundset designed for the instrument group. Until just now (when I have the problem that led to my post) I have been able to use "Vienna Ensemble Pro Event Input" as a second (or third, etc., depending on the instrument groups) Active Device and choose a Sound Set for it.
At this point you click on the Manual Sound Sets tab in Playback Devices, choose a Device (from those you have just set up) and click Show. If you are just setting up a score the VE Pro Server Interface, a square box, will appear indicating in red that it is not connected. You connect it to one of the IP addresses shown in the window -- now Sibelius is communicating with the server, the interface will change on the Server, and now click the "Raise" button, and the VE Pro mixer will appear. Continuing down the Playback Devices dialogue, confirm you have the correct soundset for the instruments you are about to add, click "Use manual sound set", select a number of channels for the instruments the number of instruments in the family to which the sound set belongs, and then at the right begin to add instruments. The Optimizing Sibelius manual from VSL contains guidance on which instruments to select -- again, it is not always obvious which instrument to choose.
If you try to test the instrument you have just added to the Dialogue you won't hear anything, because you must add the instrument to the VE Pro mixer. The procedure for doing so is set out in the VE Pro Manual, it is fairly easy, and by using either Shift or Alt when you enter the Port and channel for each instance of VI Pro in the mixer, you can save youself alot of work in assigning these numbers. In VE Pro you must then use the SIBELIUS Presets, at the right of the VI Pro player window, to load you instrument sample matrices.
If you now return to the Sibelius Playback Devices dialogues, when you press TEST for a given instrument, you should hear the instrument. Going back to the VI Pro window within the VE Pro mixer, you should also be able to play the keyboard and hear sounds. As I stated, in my case, I cannot hear any sounds when I Test instruments loaded into an Event Input device (but I can for a VE Pro activated instance), and the VI Pro keyboard window shows sounds being sent, but I cannot hear any.
The last step is to open the Mixer in Sibelius, expand the Mixer window to its full height to show all controls, and then press the ridiculously small green lettered windows at the top to find "(Auto)". If the Gods are smiling on you, all your instruments at once will be assigned a proper channel and you are done! You only have to press "(Auto)" once.
I have been using this system for some time by now with pretty good success. It is usually the Mixer in Sibelius that gets things wrong sometimes when I have used Event Input instances and I have to manually select the proper Activated Device (Port) and channel. It usually takes some fiddling and more (Auto) presses to get it right. BTW, you can see what Activated device is selected for a given instrument by putting your mouse over the green lettering at the top of the mixer and holding (but not clicking) it there briefly, and the assigned port (Activated Device) will appear. As you mentioned, you must be sure that your port and channel assignments in the VE Pro mixer correspond to those in Sibelius Mixer.
I think just about all that I have written above is contained in the Sibelius Reference Manual, the VE Pro Manual, and the Optimizing Sibelius Manual, the latter two from VSL.
The frustration that comes is when you do all this methodically, and it does take some time to set up, and you still can't hear anything -- at least from Event Input instruments. I did have my Audio Engine Options set correctly, but you are right point out that the assignment in the "Augio Enging Options" dialogue must be correct. I was able to hear the VE Pro instances because of this -- with the SAME setting Event Input was silent. I've got a problem in a chain of data somewhere, or perhaps, the Sibelius-VE Pro linkage gets confused somehow once a VE Pro instance is set up and you attempt to add an Event Input, or even another instrument to an exiting VE Pro instance.
Steve
