I purchased the BBCSO Core Sound Set and installed it on my PC Music Workstation. When I opened the sample Sibelius file and attempted to hit play, after the library had loaded, Sibelius crashed. Repeating this produced the same results. Reducing the orchestra by almost half, I was able to push play, but all I heard was distorted clicks, pops, and wobbly sounds. Reducing the ensemble size further, I finally achieved something like intelligible playback, although marred by crackles and distortion. I have an Intel Core i7-3930K hexacore processor, operating at 3.2 GHz, 64GB of RAM, and five internal SSDs--one for my OS (Microsoft Windows 10 Pro) and the others for my sample libraries. I have successfully loaded entire VSL Special Edition orchestras into MIR Pro 2D on my computer and had them playback without artifacts. Am I missing something? How can I achieve undistorted playback on my workstation?
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Was this the template? That's very much a worst-case scenario, which is why the file says at the top you shouldn't try to play it all at once. Basically, Sibelius is not very efficient when it's sending data to the VST. The template is sending a lot of data to the VST (keyswitches, etc), but doing it for every instrument at the same time. No real score would ever do this, of course.
This Sibelius issue isn't something I can do anything about, but it's definitely true that with real music, even the whole orchestra can be in use with not that much crackling (though you would be advised on a 64Gb machine to up the prefetch to 32768, which results in a 21Gb memory footprint). Zoids for instance should be a lot smoother.
There's another couple of gotchas to watch for: first of all, when the file opens, the Spitfire plugin will still be loading the samples - Spitfire's manual advises you to wait until they're loaded, which can be seen from a flashing light in the corner if you've got an instance open.
Second, I've found that if you have the library loaded and you leave it for any length of time, Windows starts "tidying up" the memory: you can see if it's doing this because task manager will show the Sibelius process using a lot less memory than it should. Sometimes this results in disastrous, horrible consequences.
In summary I would: (1) reboot Sibelius, (2) load Zoids, (3) change the prefetch in Audio/Settings in Spitfire itself to avoid note steal, and (4) wait until the samples are loaded before pressing play.
I really need people not to play the template all at once though. Maybe I should make the warning a bit larger...
As an aside, this is kind of what I've been worried about because this is very definitely a problem with Sibelius, Spitfire and Microsoft: all I did was do XML and patches, which work as described... which reminds me, Spitfire have a lot of documents about optimising their libraries - crackling isn't necessarily just a Sibelius thing, the Spitfire player has its own issues which people spend much time complaining about on the Spitfire forums.
There's a demo file called "Zoids.sib" in the Documents/Sibelius Services/BBC Symphony Orchestra Core directory, along with other documents. The other best thing to do is to start using it in your own compositions and see how that goes. An idea for an optimisation that might help from my end did occur to me though, so I will be doing that next week.