itch.io

The presets: I think you just ran into what we just ran into an hour ago: some of the presets in the shipped version got somehow munged - the percussion instruments got turned into timpani (timpani and unpitched percussion share a patch). Also, cowbell got turned into violin, god knows why. Anyway, this is why we have soft launches - there will be a new version in the next few hours depending on how quick Apple is at notarizing software builds.

With the crackling: yes, the demo tunes drive things pretty hard (though the crackling doesn't show up in exported audio). This could be partly because of the age of the computer, and it's also that Sibelius isn't the best at optimising its use of MIDI data: things get especially bad when Sibelius itself is having to do tremolos, because it's absolutely flooding the zone with notes. I think in Cathedral Chase I had to reduce the number of slashes or something. I think possibly Avid did slight improvements in that area at some point, but not enough.

Course of action:

1) Wait until the next build is shipped with the corrected presets (or, go into the instances yourself and correct them all to "unpitched percussion" and click "save". I'm on it as a matter of urgency.

2) Highlight sections and press play so you can hear the demos without stressing the computer out too much

3) For your compositions, combine this library with NotePerformer with your machine's limitations in mind. You're unlikely ever to drive this library as hard as I did in Cathedral Chase. After all, it has about 24 horns!

4) Bear in mind that I get crackles too on Windows on my 2016 motherboard and USB audio card, so it's not ALL the machine.

If enough people complain at Avid that their playback engine is inefficient, maybe they'll take notice and improve it a little. The documentation with BBC SO actually explains a little about that.

Basically, there's really nothing I can really do about the crackling though, and I have to say that at every point in this journey Sibelius has tried to sabotage me in some way, whether it's bugs in the manuscript engine, undocumented soundworld quirks and mixer oddities, and a lot of other things. In this case, their playback engine basically hasn't been touched for years, and it needs to be - but there hasn't been a pressing need until now.