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I've got a bit more time now, so if you want, you can you explain a bit more about how/when Sibelius is crashing. Obviously I can't fix BBCSO or Sibelius, but I might be able to help narrow down the error. Screenshots would be useful. (I'm offering because I'm helpful rather than because I think anything I did is causing the problem).

If you can look at the Documents/Sibelius Services/Logs folder and send the install log to chris@sibelius-services.com I can also check if there's some clues.

if BBC SO Pro is crashing your Sibelius even when BBC SO Pro is not in use in Sibelius, then you need to talk to support at Spitfire Audio (on their website), or support at Avid (Facebook group is best), sending them screenshots of the crashes you're getting. In the mean-time, have you rebooted your Mac?

When you talk to Avid support, you have to tell them when you installed BBC SO Pro, what you're doing when the crashes happen (are you using specific templates? Does the program start?), what sound set you're using, etc. You also need to tell them version number, maybe grab some screenshots.

It's not clear whether you're talking about my sound set or the BBC SO Pro library itself. It's impossible that anything I did is crashing your machine (unless you're trying to load one of my BBC SO Pro template on a machine with limited memory, which would kill the machine, not just Sibelius).

The sound set installer that I sell delivers an XML file to Sibelius to the user editable directory "Sounds", some playback configuration files to "Playback Configurations", some patches to BBC SO Pro, a house style in "House Styles" and a plug-in: it's not possible for that payload to crash Sibelius. 

Should be Sibelius Services/Mix Configuration BBC Symphony Pro

Be careful about activating multiple mics, it's outrageously greedy on RAM.

New version you can download, sends less MIDI messages without damaging functionality.

There's a new version to download, in which I've tried to cut down on the MIDI messages being sent. It seems to be a little bit more manageable, though it's still a memory hog. Zoids plays back nicely with 16384 prefetch though.

I will upload new builds with this change. Allowing people to get creative with CC11 seems to me to be a good thing.

I did a clever thing with the Discover sound set which unfortunately doesn’t sit well with Sibelius. In the sound set, I use Sibelius’s “AttackType” parameter and attach it to the expression controller (CC11). This vastly increases the dynamic range.

Unfortunately, it also generates many more controllers, especially in Espressivo. So I’m going to upload a new build where it’s commented out.

If you’re confident, you could download the new sound set from here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tpvmog4yotfwv3l/BBC%20Symphony%20Orchestra%20Discover.xml?dl=0

And then dump it into your friendly Sibelius library directory.

It’s basically the old one with the attack type of “Expression” commented out.

What this will do is greatly reduce the amount of data heading out of Sibelius, but also mean that the volume range of the library is now restricted to CC1. What it does mean is that if you really want to draw expression curves in with that nice MIDI plugin, then you can do it with CC11 without Sibelius interfering.

I will probably port this to Core as well as restoring the use of NoteVelocity where I can so minimise MIDI throughput.

BTW, what version of Sibelius are you running? Some of them are very unstable.

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.

As an aside, aside, aside, I can play Zoids on a 64Gb Pc from 2016 with a 32768 prefetch/preload in the Spitfire settings without it crackling, and there are other people using the sound set happily on more limited equipment for their own scores.

As an aside-aside, Avid are well aware their playback engine needs a thorough overhaul.

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.

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...

I did a build, got a couple of things to fix. Will be launched over the weekend.

I'm almost done, it's in testing. It's taken a while to test - there's some issues related to how much memory it uses and how different configurations lead to dropped note endings on live playback. If your library settings have an audio prefetch of 12288, it will need to be ramped up to 32768, which will increase the memory usage of the library. If you can't do that because you run out of memory, then (depending on how complicated your piece is), you might experience dodgy live playback on long notes. Renders would be fine whatever though.

Since the previous installer actually runs, the new one may not fix any problem. If there's no Sibelius Sound Set Installer on your desktop, could you search for one on your hard disk and send to chris@sibelius-services.com?

Hmm. So it doesn't do anything after asking if you want to make changes? Does it throw up an interface? Could you describe the sequence of events? Is there a Sibelius Sound Set installer log file on your desktop?

Maybe try https://qr.c64audio.com/bbcsod/setup.exe ?

Try http://qr.c64audio.com/bbcsod/setup.exe 

Did it get as far as asking for admin permissions? And did you make sure you extracted the Zip file? The EXE needs those 2 DLLs… 

It's here!

Yes, there will be a video. It's very easy though: you just click on the "install" button in the installer and then open one of the templates. 

I'm starting work on it today after releasing a lot of stuff on this site yesterday, so maybe a couple of weeks? Do you own BBC Core already? Are you a Windows or Mac guy?

I'm on it :)

Thanks Matthew :) Just in the last day I had Sibelius refusing to find plug-in functions, and a weirdness where export audio gave a different result to playing in real-time. Both solved, but maaan.

I have to say that Spitfire Brass is only my second favourite brass library (it lacks nuance), my favourite being Orchestral Tools Berlin Brass,  (though that really needs the mute and additional expansions, which come standard in SSBP). 

Being a big fan of Cinematic Studio Strings I was disappointed in Cinematic Studio Brass, which is too fizzy and severely lacking in instruments, though I used my skills to bulk that out a bit.

What percussion are you using? What other main libraries do you have?

Send me an email on chris@sibelius-services.com and I can send you stuff for testing as it's ready.

Tell you what, I'll send you a free download code for Spitfire Brass Pro when I launch it, to (a) say thanks, and (b) I'd quite like to see how it goes. It's quite difficult to find testers for these expensive library integrations because of the licensing restrictions. I just have to try and be exhaustive, and if I find someone who can put it through its paces, great.

Yes, I don't blame you, though Spitfire Brass Pro will be launched fully this coming week - I'd already done that some months ago because I owned the library and was using it myself, so 75% of the work was done. I had to thoroughly test it, create the templates, and do a lot of extra work on the underlying patches, and create the plugin to do the microphone configuration. That thing has just under 300 custom patches, so if you need to change one thing (like a controller assignment), you've got 300 things to manually change, and Kontakt doesn't do shortcuts!

I will actually be launching quite a few sound sets next week, and I've got my Windows dev certificate so I can sign my code now. The work recently has gone into upgrading the installer and testing it with various kinds of sound set - namely (a) non-kontakt player (such as BBC Discover), (b) kontakt player with numeric library id (Action Strikes), (c) kontakt player with problematic library id (Spitfire Brass), and (d) a library that needs full Kontakt retail (Glory Days Horns) - the challenge with (c) and (d) is making them autoload by cheating. It's a long story. The installer also needed to be upgraded to support a playback configuration merge utility - which allows you to combine libraries in a mix-and-match way. So basically, by challenging my installer with different kinds of libraries I had already created sound sets for over the last few years, I was able to make it flexible enough to not need too much changing in the months ahead. It's an installer that can now install multiple sound sets into multiple installations of Sibelius at once, for instance: and when it delivers patches to Kontakt, it searches out the library, creates the directories, and also creates pointers if necessary so that it just works without any batch resaves.

With the BBC sound set, I had to wait until Spitfire had their current 50% sale to buy the Pro version because no one's giving me these libraries and BBC wasn't one that I owned - I had hoped pre-orders would help buy it, but that didn't really pan out because there were relatively few orders in the soft launch. So in this whole venture I'm still quite in the red financially. I hope my faith in the Sibelius community to support this is going to be vindicated.

Anyway, so I have BBC Pro now and it's next in the queue, and will be started this week. Much of it is quite similar to Spitfire Brass/Spitfire Strings Pro in available articulations. I will finish Core first, and then move onto Pro. I imagine that it will be a couple of weeks before Pro is launched. Honestly, it's the patch alteration and drum maps in Sibelius that take most of the time!

After that, I will do Spitfire Strings Pro, because again I already owned it and used it. I'm trying to cover as many genre bases and vendors as possible, and have some exciting ideas about delivering curated collections of sound sets in one hit for specific genres: like Big Band, where if you have Glory Days Horns, you're still missing flutes, clarinets, a double bass and percussion which can be patched in from other libraries and vendors - including some of the excellent free/cheap instruments currently available in Sinus or SoundPaint.

I hope that's enough detail about the plans!

Chris

There's another factor here in that BBC SO Core/Pro would have many more playback devices, but less data going to each one.

But yeah, the only thing standing in the way of massive Sibelius success is Sibelius ;-)

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.

NOTE: There is a known issue with the suspended cymbal roll, which applies to this library overall (not just the Sibelius version).

As soon as they give me my EV Security Certificate, it will be here.

Yes, and yes.