48: Recording Sibelius files to an audio CD

You might want to save your Sibelius files to audio CD so that they can be played back through any audio CD player. This isn't as simple as it sounds; to understand why, you need to know the difference between MIDI data and digital audio.

Digital audio (usually in the .wav format) can be recorded to compact discs and played back through any CD player. In order to turn your Sibelius files into digital audio, you need to convert the MIDI data used by Sibelius to play back your score into digital audio.

In Sibelius 4, 5 and 6 you can create them automatically by using File > Export > Audio (or File > Save As Audio Track in Sibelius 3 and G7. Refer to your User Guide for more information.

In earlier versions of Sibelius (v2.x and 1.x), Sibelius Student (v3 and v5) and in G7 v2.7 it is a little more complicated and there are a number of ways of doing this:

• On Windows, provided your soundcard supports full duplex operation (most do), you can set it to record its own MIDI playback to a .wav file; see your soundcard's documentation for full details
• Audacity allows you to record anything the computer is playing so you can tell Audacity to record and then start Sibelius to play back. This will produce an audio file in Audacity, ready for you to burn to CD.
• QuickTime Pro, available for both Mac and Windows as an upgrade to the free QuickTime software from Apple's web site, can convert MIDI data to digital audio and save a .wav file to your hard disk, which you can then burn onto a CD - click here for more details
• Awave Studio, available for Windows only from www.fmjsoft.com, can also convert MIDI to digital audio

Note that the final audio quality of your CD will depend on the quality of the sounds used by programs which convert MIDI to audio; as a general rule, the more expensive the program, the better the quality of the MIDI sounds used.

Alternatively, if you have an audio CD recorder connected to your hi-fi or stereo system, you can simply connect the Line out output from your computer's sound card to the Line in input on your audio CD recorder, and make the CD that way.

Related article

• A308 - Using QuickTime Pro to create .wav files for audio CDs