I'm surprised that after searching the Forum, I don't see any posts regarding Apple's decision to eliminate MIDI instruments with Quicktime X (OS 10.6 Snow Leopard).
MIDI files can no longer be played on their own (unless you additionally install QT 7), and any scores that utilized the Mac's built-in MIDI instruments no longer play in Sibelius (any version).
Am I the only person in the entire Sibelius community that utilized the Mac's built-in MIDI instruments? Am I missing some work-around to get Sibelius (any version) to function with Quicktime 7's MIDI instruments?
Sibelius 3 presumably shows 'QuickTime instruments' in the Play > Playback and Input Devices dialog rather than 'DLSMusicDevice'. Sibelius 4 and later use the built-in DLSMusicDevice, which is an AU wrapper around the default QuickTime sound bank, which continues to work fine in Snow Leopard. Sibelius 3 requires a genuine MIDI device, which is what QT Musical Instruments used to present itself as. Perhaps you can use a stand-alone plug-in host to host an instance of the DLSMusicDevice and communicate with it via the IAC Bus?
"Sibelius 3 presumably shows 'QuickTime instruments' in the Play > Playback and Input Devices dialog rather than 'DLSMusicDevice'. Sibelius 4 and later use the built-in DLSMusicDevice, which is an AU wrapper around the default QuickTime sound bank, which continues to work fine in Snow Leopard."
In Sibelius 3 (if you don't have an external MIDI instrument plugged in via USB) the one option under PLAY > DEVICES... is 'DLS Music Device'. (see attached screen capture).
* If you click the CHANGE... button, the two options are 'MacOS X MIDI' and 'DLS Music Device Only'. Changing to one or the other has no effect. Both call up the 'AUGraphNewNode' error message.
* There is no option for 'Find New Devices' as stated in the 'Device Not Found' dialog box.
""
Also, Kontakt no longer functions since I updated to Snow Leopard (and the Kontakt Silver sounds are unavailable). I can open the Mixer, but the Kontakt button is greyed out.
Is anyone else using Quicktime 7's MIDI instruments and Snow Leopard?
I think you might be out of luck with the built-in sounds, Joe. You may need to either connect an external MIDI device, or use some kind of clever IAC Bus-related solution, or consider upgrading your copy of Sibelius.
I think Sibelius 3 might not work with Mac OS 10.6, period. I set up the IAC bus as usual (to use Apple Logic's Mainstage as a MIDI device), but Sibelius is being stubborn. When selecting the IAC bus in the Devices panel, the test notes (C-major scale) play back correctly--but when I go to a score to play it, no MIDI messages reach Mainstage.
So I guess Sibelius needs more $$$ to function. Annoying that updates aren't downloadable for those of us working on deadlines...!!!
(Also, why does the YEAR not appear on the timestamps in these forums?! What good are the time, the day, the month, without the year?)
Sibelius 3 was released in 2003, a good six years before Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I'm afraid it's completely impossible for us to predict what Apple might do so far into the future and program software in such a way that it will work on some as-yet-completely-unknown operating system, which I am sure you realise.
Have there been any changes or updates with this problem? Is there a way to upgrade to Sibelius 4, so playback works and I don't have to pay the $$$ to upgrade to 6?
> Have there been any changes or updates with this problem? Is there a way to upgrade to Sibelius 4, so playback works and I don't have to pay the $$$ to upgrade to 6?
It's my opinion that the reason this significant information was not revealed by Avid/Sibelius, was so that users who did not upgrade to 4.0 or later would be forced into an upgrade.
I find that behavior to be despicable, but I'm sure that someone in sales or marketing will say that's just "good business" practice.
You should have had the decency to be forthright with the information you certainly *MUST* have known regarding Apple's decision to discontinue CoreAudio (a required element for making both Apple's MIDI sounds and Kontakt Silver function). If there was an issue of confidentiality regarding "keeping Apple's secrets", you could (and *SHOULD HAVE*) published a statement saying that any Sibelius product prior to 4.0 would no longer have playback functionality under Snow Leopard.
By the way, Avid/Sibelius, you didn't just deliberately break the product I paid hundreds of dollars for, just so you could satisfy your selfish greediness. You also unthinkingly and disrespectfully destroyed the ability for me to ever hear any of the hundreds of compositions I'd created using the product you deliberately broke. If you had been decent and honest, I could have recorded all my compositions and saved them in iTunes before upgrading to Snow Leopard and throwing away the hundreds of dollars I spent on the Sibelius software.
...Oh, and for those of you still in "sales/marketing" mode (because I can just hear your replies of, "or you could just upgrade"), it's just none of your f***ing business why I can't upgrade.
Joe, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience caused by this problem, but I must stress that it is a problem with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and not with Sibelius 3 itself. We haven't changed Sibelius 3 in over five years, but Snow Leopard is brand new. Apple notified us of the problems that affected Sibelius 5 so that we could fix them, but they did not test Sibelius 4 or earlier on Snow Leopard, and nor did we: we do not have sufficient internal testers to test every version of Sibelius or indeed our other programs on every operating system. We likewise have not done any extensive testing of Sibelius 4 or earlier on Windows 7, for example.
Core Audio has not been discontinued in Snow Leopard. To be clear, what appears to have been discontinued is the way in which we were accessing the DLS Music Device via the Core MIDI route rather than as an Audio Unit, which is what Sibelius 5 and later do.
I take your point that we should publish the information that Sibelius 3 does not play back under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and I will make sure that we add this information to our Snow Leopard compatibility page as soon as possible.
In the meantime, to rescue playback of your scores, you could reinstall Mac OS X 10.5 on your computer, until such time as you might be able to upgrade to Sibelius 6.
> Core Audio has not been discontinued in Snow Leopard. To be clear, what appears to have been discontinued is the way in which we were accessing the DLS Music Device via the Core MIDI route rather than as an Audio Unit, which is what Sibelius 5 and later do.
Yes. You knew that all versions below Sib 5 would break under Snow Leopard, but kept that information to yourself even when users asked about possible effects of upgrading to Snow Leopard.
> I take your point that we should publish the information that Sibelius 3 does not play back under Mac OS X 10.6
No. You mistake my point - even though it was written in caps for emphasis.
> Yes. You knew that all versions below Sib 5 would break under
> Snow Leopard, but kept that information to yourself even when users
> asked about possible effects of upgrading to Snow Leopard.
I have never knowingly given out false or misleading information about this problem. At the time you asked your question at the start of this thread, we had not even installed Sibelius 3 under Snow Leopard. As I tried to explain, perhaps poorly, we don't have enough people on hand to test out every version of every product we make with every new operating system.
> No. You mistake my point - even though it was written in caps
> for emphasis.
Your point, if perhaps I may be so bold as to try a further interpretation, is that this information should have been available on the site sooner. I can't disagree. However, we didn't have the information available in order to post it on the site. It is now, as you may have noticed, posted on the Snow Leopard compatibility information page.
>>>>
Daniel at Sibelius wrote: "Joe, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience caused by this problem, but I must stress that it is a problem with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and not with Sibelius 3 itself. We haven't changed Sibelius 3 in over five years, but Snow Leopard is brand new. Apple notified us of the problems that affected Sibelius 5 so that we could fix them, but they did not test Sibelius 4 or earlier on Snow Leopard, and nor did we: we do not have sufficient internal testers to test every version of Sibelius or indeed our other programs on every operating system. "
<<<
So Daniel, if you knew Sib 5 had a particular problem, and exactly what that problem was, you should have known by default that Sib 4 and earlier had the same problem and thus wouldn't work without a fix - even without testing them.
On the other hand, I don't think Sibelius should be expected to support older versions forever, and I'm not really sure how many versions you should be expected to support and for how long.
But as an Mac user for twenty-five years, I do have a strong feeling that the pace of the old-version abandonment seems to be increasing under Mac OS X, not necessarily from Sibelius, but definitely from Apple (not that Microsoft would be any better.)
So here's a solution for the future: don't buy any software upgrades for anything if you've already got a working solution. Upgrade only if it's free. Or when you get a new computer system with a bundled new version of a system and are forced to.
If a software outfit doesn't need it's old-version users, the old-version users don't need you either.
[Luckily I have a second machine I can run Sib 3 on that still has 10.5 - I won't be upgrading it to 10.6.]
Thanks for your thoughts, JohnnyHands. Sibelius 5 actually uses a completely different approach to playback than Sibelius 4 or earlier: in Sibelius 4 back through Sibelius 2 we were talking to the DLSMusicDevice via QuickTime rather than directly as an Audio Unit, which is how we do it in Sibelius 5 and later. So unfortunately the problems that Apple notified of, and others that we discovered, with Sibelius 5 on Snow Leopard did not alert us to the changes in how QuickTime was addressed and hence caused the DLSMusicDevice not to appear in Sibelius 3 or Sibelius 2.
I would certainly agree with your assessment that if you find your current version of Sibelius or any other program adequate and you don't need any of the features that are available in newer versions, don't upgrade. Our job is to try and make sure that the features added in newer versions of Sibelius are compelling enough that you decide you need them!
So I'm on Snow Leopard, using Sibelius 4.1. I seem to be able to play back using DLS, and I can get Kontakt Silver to make sound, but I can't get Sibelius to play through the Kontakt player.
ERROR DIALOGS.jpg