'Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback'

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Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Scott Gendel, 06 Jul 06:32PM
     Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Sam at Sibelius, 06 Jul 06:51PM
         Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Scott Gendel, 06 Jul 07:25PM
             Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Peter Smith, 06 Jul 08:47PM
                 Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - John Tyson, 06 Jul 11:36PM
                     Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Craig F, 07 Jul 12:52AM
                         Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - John Tyson, 07 Jul 06:48AM
                             Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Daniel Spreadbury, 07 Jul 12:00PM
                                 Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - John Tyson, 07 Jul 03:54PM
                                     Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Scott Gendel, 09 Jul 05:39AM
                                         Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Musaed, 22 Jul 07:16PM

Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Scott Gendel - 06 Jul 06:32PM
Hi! I'm a Mac OS X user, and just upgraded to Sibelius 5. I'm writing some choral music, and I generally dislike fake "voice" sounds, so in previous versions of Sibelius, I just changed the playback sound on Soprano to "violin section," Alto to "viola section" and so on. I've been trying to do this on Sibelius 5 in a number of ways, but none of them quite seem to work. Let me explain:

First, I went into the mixer and manually changed the sounds from "voice.ensemble.female.soprano.ah" to "strings.violin.ensemble" and so on. The new sounds loaded, but on alternating slots, so that the voice sounds were also still loaded, and they were used for playback. Even though the mixer reflected the new sounds visually, the old sounds were heard.

So, I created instrument changes, pretending that right at the start of the score, the soprano changed over to being a violin section, and so on. Then, I hid the instrument changes and changed the names of the staves back to "soprano" "alto" and such. This worked okay, but not for the tenor part. No matter what instrument I changed the tenor part to, Sibelius automatically ignored the treble clef with the little 8 under it, and moved all the notes down an octave. Is there any way to ask Sibelius not to change the notation at all, just the playback sound?

In any case, I'm at a loss. It seems like a very simple thing to do, but I just can't get my tenor section to play back as a cello section without messing up the notation. Any help? Please?!
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Sam at Sibelius - 06 Jul 06:51PM
Scott,

Changing the sound in the mixer should be enough. make sure you don't have pieces of text that may be altering playback.

Post the score here if you like and we'll take a look.

Sam

--
Contact Sibelius technical help:
North/Central/South America: sibhelpUSA@sibelius.com / 925-280-2101
UK: sibhelpUK@sibelius.com / +44 (0)20 7561 7997
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Other countries: contact your distributor (www.sibelius.com/buy for details)
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Scott Gendel - 06 Jul 07:25PM
Hi Sam... thanks for helping. I thought there might be text issues, but I just tried getting rid of text, and the same problem is persisting. I've attached the file here. Any help you could lend would be much appreciated!

-Scott
Attachment Night Knight.sib (57K)
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Peter Smith - 06 Jul 08:47PM
I get the same result as you, Scott. I think lots of us are struggling to come to terms with the new way in which playback works - no doubt Sam or Daniel will explain how to do what you want. I'm on a PC, by the way, so it's not a Mac problem. But it's a nice piece, and I thought it sounded ok with the default voice sounds. Though I'd like to find a way of making voice parts sing real words!

Had you considered using a key signature, by the way?
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by John Tyson - 06 Jul 11:36PM
I will add my voice to all this (I have a question in to tech support relating to this). (PC by the way, not Mac.)

I first tried loading a file (which worked pretty well in Sib 3 and 4). Initial playback (with recorder sounds) seemed pretty reasonable but boring, then I switched the bass line to string contrabass, and got a beautiful sound! So far so good. Went to the tenor line and couldn't get it to change for anything; same for soprano and alto lines (I think one may have switched to some sort of violin sound).

At that point I decided to start a file from scratch in Sib 5, starting with soprano/alto/tenor/great bass instruments, then copying and pasting in the notes from the earlier file. This worked pretty well; I could switch the great bass recorder to string contrabass just as before, and the other lines also now took other instrument sounds. Everything was looking pretty good until I did the sound upgrade yesterday. Now I'm back to square one if I try the new sounds; if I switch back to "Sibelius Essentials" it still seems to work pretty well, but with "Sibelius Gold" it doesn't.

One thing I tried was creating a string contrabass instrument with "Sibelius Gold" selected, and it used the "strings.contrabass.ensemble" which plays ok, but doesn't have the resonance of the "strings.contrabass" that I can get from "Sibelius Essentials"

All in all, the new sounds seem to have some nice features, are a mess to unravel.

John
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Craig F - 07 Jul 12:52AM
Interesting. I tried a new file and changed soundIDs and everything worked as it should.

Now try this. Highlight each staff and go to House Style > Edit Instruments. Change the soundID in the instrument definition and save. This seemed to work for me.

--
Sib 5.0
PC: Athlon 64 3400+ 3GB RAM, Win XP Home SP2, Audiophile 2496
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by John Tyson - 07 Jul 06:48AM
> Now try this. Highlight each staff and go to House Style > Edit Instruments. Change the soundID in the instrument definition and save. This seemed to work for me.
>
I was playing around with that last night, but it seemed to give me the same results as selecting sounds in the mixer. My experiments so far have been hampered by numerous freezes in Sib 5, requiring me to unplug the computer to shut down and do a complete restart (symptoms are the cursor suddenly gets erratic, usually followed by a short 440 Hz burst - happened enough that I finally got out a tuner to verify the frequency - and then a complete freeze).

Maybe the solution is to either select "Sibelius Essentials" or "Sebelius Gold" depending on the sounds you want. In what I've read so far in the manuals, it may be possible to use a combination of the two, but I've got a lot of manual reading to do before I can figure that out!

John
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Daniel Spreadbury - 07 Jul 12:00PM
Scott, try the attached version.

The problem is that the Mixer only allows you to change the *initial* sound used by a staff, and because of the title page in your score, the initial sound only lasted for the system of music on the blank page at the start of the score; at the end of that first page were a bunch of instrument changes back to Altus, Tenor and Quintus, which thus reset the sound.

So you have two approaches: either use House Style > Edit Instruments to change the default sound of Altus, Tenor and Quintus to violin, viola, cello or whatever, which means you don't need to use the Mixer; or alternatively replace the Sibelius 4-era fake blank page with a real Sibelius 5 one. I have done the latter for you, even though it actually took longer than to just edit the instrument definitions. See the attached score.

--
Contact Sibelius technical help:
North/Central/South America: sibhelpUSA@sibelius.com / 925-280-2101
UK: sibhelpUK@sibelius.com / +44 (0)20 7561 7997
Australia: sibhelpAU@sibelius.com / 08 82 771 722
Other countries: contact your distributor (www.sibelius.com/buy for details)
Attachment Night Knight_fixed.sib (73K)
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by John Tyson - 07 Jul 03:54PM

> The problem is that the Mixer only allows you to change the *initial* sound used by a staff, and because of the title page /buy for details)

That explains the problem I had with the Sib 4 score I opened; no title page, but I had an incipit with instrument changes on the alto and tenor lines.

John
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Scott Gendel - 09 Jul 05:39AM
Thanks Daniel! That makes perfect sense, and I'm very appreciative of your solution (and your implementation of it... a delightfully unexpected bonus). Much gratitude for the attentiveness of everyone here as v.5 gets all up and running.

-Scott
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Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback
Posted by Musaed - 22 Jul 07:16PM (edited 22 Jul 07:17PM)
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Messages in this thread

Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Scott Gendel, 06 Jul 06:32PM
     Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Sam at Sibelius, 06 Jul 06:51PM
         Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Scott Gendel, 06 Jul 07:25PM
             Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Peter Smith, 06 Jul 08:47PM
                 Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - John Tyson, 06 Jul 11:36PM
                     Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Craig F, 07 Jul 12:52AM
                         Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - John Tyson, 07 Jul 06:48AM
                             Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Daniel Spreadbury, 07 Jul 12:00PM
                                 Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - John Tyson, 07 Jul 03:54PM
                                     Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Scott Gendel, 09 Jul 05:39AM
                                         Re: Sib. 5.0: changing sounds for playback - Musaed, 22 Jul 07:16PM