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    @andi said:

    You can send your files to support@vsl.co.at.

    Thanks Andi, I will take up your offer. But think the Sibelius manual says why this is happening:

    "If your playback device provides lots of different playing techniques, working out which sound to play at any given moment can take a little while, particularly if you are working with a large score. So consider either switching off Play notes as you edit on the Note Input page of File > Preferences (in the Sibelius menu on Mac), or switching to a playback configuration that uses simpler playback devices; e.g. choose General MIDI (enhanced) from the Configuration menu in Play > Setup. You can switch back to your more capable playback configuration when you’ve done the majority of the input and editing work."

    😞


  • Hello Andi,

    this slow performance problem is not acceptable: more than 10 s response time after editing one note or articulation in Sibelius on MacBook Pro retina i7 connected directly via 1 Gbit-LAN to an iMac i7 with a full VSL orchestra. The same problem with single machine installations on iMac or on MBP, so it is not a network problem! Also CPU-loads are low, and storage is availabe.
    Where is the bottle neck, Sibelius or VSL?
    How many cores can one Vienna Ensemble Pro instance (and Sibelius) use in parallel? Can I configure that?
    Does it make sense to buy a Mac Pro with 6, 8 or 12 cores? Or is there a better solution? Thank You.

     

    Best regards,
    Reinhard


  • Hello Reinhard!

    There's not much I can add that hasn't been said here. caign has already cited the Sibelius manual why such a problem can occur. It has nothing to do with our software.

    In the VE Pro manual, page 13 to 15, you can find help on finding out the best Multiprocessing settings in the VE Pro Preferences.
    http://www.vsl.co.at/en/MyVSL

    It always makes sense to get a faster computer, but it's impossible for me to say how much it helps in your case.

    Best regards,
    Andi


    Vienna Symphonic Library
  • Hi Reinhard,

    I agree this issue is hugely debilitating and somewhat spoils the wonderful advantages of this method of using VSL. My delays hit the 20 seconds mark for my more complex scores. We have both paid a lot of money to get the best system available, so I agree that it's pretty frustrating.

    Unfortunately I have not followed up the issue since my last post, but I'm about to get into some intensive composition again in the next couple of weeks. I was going to send an example to Andi - I expect he will sympathise but not be able to do anything about it, because it's a Sibelius problem.

    So I will be testing Sibelius 8.0.1.40 first and then registering an issue with Avid. I'll let you know how that goes.

    Kind regards,
    caign


  • Hello Andi, thank you for your advice, and hello caign,

    after hours of experiments with variable settings of VE Pro Preferences (1 ... 8 Threads, 1 ... 48 MIDI ports, 2 ... 768 Audio outputs, 2 ... 768 Audio inputs, both machines always rebooted) and identical hardware, software and score my conclusions are as follows:

    The bad message first: The problem , i.e. ~15 s delay after editing a note in Sibelius, did occur „sometimes“ and is not reproducable. I still cannot say, what and where the cause is.

    The good messages for all, who experienced similar delay problems: Now, the typical edit - sound response time on my system is ~ 150 ms, nearly independant from the settings variations mentioned above, which is a 100 times faster than in the problem case and very good for editing. Thus, the computer hardware I mentioned earlier is fast enough and I don't need a new Mac, which is a 100 times faster :-) 

    Best regards,
    Reinhard

    PS: The activity monitor on my iMac shows 51 threads for VE Pro in preserved mode (with 20 instrument channels). After starting and connecting Sibelius VE Pro uses 51+X threads for idle, editing and playing, where X is the number of threads I configured in VE preferences. An i7 quad core CPU has 8 logical cores, so I can use up to X = 8 threads in VE running with top priority in these 8 cores while playing sounds. Andi, is this correct? 


  • Hello Reinhard!

    The 51 threads in the activity monitor are something different than the up to 8 threads you can set up in the VE Pro preferences. If you run Sibelius with one VE Pro instance on one computer, I would try setting up 7 threads for multiprocessing in the VE Pro Prefernces. As Sibelius can't make use of the audio inputs and outputs, you can set them to a low number, maybe 8. For most cases 8 MIDI ports should be enough.

    Best,
    Andi


    Vienna Symphonic Library
  • last edited
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    @caign said:

    So I will be testing Sibelius 8.0.1.40 first and then registering an issue with Avid. I'll let you know how that goes.

    I sent Andi my setup and he was able to reproduce the problem - which appears to be a Sibelius problem, not so much a VSL problem. Here's what he said:

    I can reproduce the delays with your score and Playback Configuration. Here's what I would do.

    - Keep this Playback Configuration as a template.
    - For every new project create a reduced Playback Configuration from your template that only includes the instruments and sound sets that you need.

    This should improve the performance although you still might get delays.

    I'm sorry to say that there's not much more I can do about it.

     

    I also contacted Avid support because I believe the problem is squarely in the Sibelius court. Here's what they had to say:

    From your comments, I'm assuming you have already explored the 'speeding up Sibelius' options in the first section below, but I'm including them here to be sure.  The one I find most effective in such situations is the last, 'Focus on Staves', as it's easy to get in and out of this mode with the shortcut option-command-F.

    Speding up Sibelius:

    -----------------------------------

    In File > Preferences, do the following from the categories on the left:

    - Display; untick Translucent tool windows. In Sibelius 7 and later, untick Smooth staff lines, barlines and stems. 

    - Score Position; untick Use Different zoom. For Flexi-time input, it also helps to untick Follow playback line.    

    - Textures; click both the Color buttons and click OK. This will change the appearance of the score and desk to be plain colors, which will decrease the load on your computer.

    - Using the Focus on staves feature reduces the number of staves that Sibelius has to actively update, thus saving CPU time, and making Sibelius more responsive. It also allows you to focus on individual instruments which can make larger scores less bewildering and more easy to work on.

    -----------------------------------

    It's really a threefold issue when this starts to occur with VSL and other complex VST setups in Sibelius.

    Sibelius processes the score linearly whenever change is made or a note is clicked, so it has the previous information available to it in order to play the note correctly or apply any layout adjustment as required.  

    While this is useful for keeping everything in check throughout the editing process, as you've discovered, it creates an increased drag on processing the larger a Sibelius score gets, and it would take multiple iterations of exponential increase in computer processors speed to actually have a significant effect in reducing this.  

    As processor speed is no longer something that increases dramatically with the release of new of computer models, a 'newer faster computer' isn't really going to help much in most cases, if you're using a reasonably powerful computer already.

    The use of complex VST's that make use of a lot of switching via the Sibelius 'Sounset' setup coupled with the issue mentioned above creates a further intensive processing requirement.

    If you're finding this becomes too crippling, although such processing procedures and VST handling may be improved in Sibelius in future to make it more efficient under heavier loads, for the time being there are three practical options I tend to adopt when this becomes a problem in larger scores:

    1. Switch to Sibelius 7 Sounds and see how performs with those by comparison (if practical - some VST's use vastly different 8ve ranges etc for their own internal reasons, so I understand it's not always easy to do this).

    2. Switch to general MIDI (if practical as above) if it's only pitch-feedback that is really important at the time, and I can get by with this during the editing and composition process, without the burden of my complex third party Sound library slowing everything down unnecessarily.

    3. If the third party library is integral to the composition process, consider shifting the third party VST to a Digital Audio Workstation Application like Pro-Tools or Logic, and connect sibelius to this via the use of IAC busses, which are essentially virtual MIDI connections you can use between applications in Mac environment.

    The third option is a bit music-tech intensive, but if you do a lot of writing for the same type of ensemble, then you may only have to create a handful of playback configurations in Sibelius, and session templates in the Digital Audio Workstation that you can call upon to reuse as and when necessary.

    More info on this is available here:

    http://www.sibeliusblog.com/tutorials/route-sibelius-or-finale-midi-to-logic-via-iac-bus/

    This essentially removes the processing burden of running the third party VST in sibelius itself.  It's certainly not as convenient, but if it gets around the situation of suffering a 15 second delay on clicking a note and hearing it's audible result, while allowing you to use the sophisticated virtual instruments you require then I think it's worth a look.

    Let me know how you go or if you'd like more info on any of this.

    *I imagine you'll want to add your vote to this entry on Sibelius ideascale too:

    http://sibelius.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Better-VST-integration/103400-22221#idea-tab-details

     

    There was some additional conversation with Avid support about a computer's "linear processing speed". Basically increasing the number of cores and amount of memory does not really help to solve this problem, as it's the "linear processing speed" that determines the delay I have been experiencing.

    Personally, I think it's a problem that could be solved by some clever software engineering within Sibelius, but I suspect it's not first on Avid's list of proirities to address.

    In summary, there's no solution.

    To work around it, I'm going to use shorter Sibelius scores and one configuration per score, using only the instruments I need. And continue to swap to general MIDI configuration 😞  And after I'm done with my short to medium term requirements to write in Sibelius, I'll use VSL more from within a DAW (MOTU Digital Performer), which gives you finely grained access to the entirety of your VSL library. Apparently this is the way to make really expressive music using VSL - see this post.

    I'm sorry this is not more helpful. It's definitely an unsolved problem.


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    @andi said:

    Hello Caign!

    I can't reproduce such a problem here and don't know where it comes from. If you can't find a better solution, you can at least turn off the option "Play notes as you edit" in the Sibelius preferences under "Note Input".

    Best regards,
    Andi

    Thank you Andi!

    I´m also running on an i7, 16GB RAM and SSD. and I´m having the same issue. Adding more RAM can speed things up?

    (Turning this "Play notes as you edit" option off seems to work out fine. Thank you for the tip!)

    Best regards,

    Markus


  • Hello Markus!

    Unless you are using your 16 GB RAM to the limit, adding more RAM will not speed things up. It will simply enable you to load more samples.

    Best regards,
    Andi


    Vienna Symphonic Library
  • The sluggishness in Sibelius is a long-standing problem based on how they handle playback. With every click on a note they scan the score from the beginning to determine what the correct articulation and sound is for that note based on all instrument changes and text which exist prior. It works fine on smaller scores, but becomes extremely sluggish as scores get large. They will need to fundamentally change how they track articulations under the hood before this problem can be significantly improved.


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