Sibelius 3 Playback

These pages refer solely to the upgrade from Sibelius 1.x and 2.x to Sibelius 3. All the improvements and many more are incorporated in the more recent upgrade to Sibelius 6.

Create audio CDs

The revolutionary Save as Audio Track feature creates a high-quality sound recording of your score, ready to burn straight onto CD. So now you can produce high-quality CDs of your music to demo to performers and publishers, for people to rehearse to, and for friends to enjoy.

Save as Audio Track uses the exceptional sound from Kontakt Player Silver/Gold to create standard .wav and .aiff files, which you can burn to CD using any CD writer. You can also turn them into MP3 files to post on the Internet or send by email.

(Due to the processing requirements of high-quality audio, you need a high-specification computer for best results from Save as Audio Track and Kontakt Player Silver/Gold.)

Kontakt Player Silver

Sibelius 3 includes Kontakt Player Silver, which produces surprisingly realistic playback of your music using top-quality instrumental samples.

From Native Instruments, the world's leading software synthesis company, Kontakt Player Silver includes 19 unpitched sounds and 100 unpitched percussion sounds (marked * here) - covering a useful selection of brass, woodwind, strings, percussion, voices and a Bösendorfer piano. You can expand this to 64 or more pitched sounds and 110 unpitched percussion sounds, including a wide range of useful orchestral and band instruments, by buying Kontakt Player Gold (see box, right).

If you already have a good MIDI sound module or sampler, you can use it in conjunction with the Kontakt Player.

Sample library by Sonic Implants with instruments from Peter Seidlaczek (Best Service), Northstar, Zero-G, Tap Space and Dan Dean Productions.

Live Playback

If a score was created with Flexi-time or from a MIDI file, you can click the new Live Playback button to hear it with all the subtle nuances of the original performance. You can also fine-tune playback to perfection, like in a sequencer: view the dynamics as colored bars and re-shape phrases with the mouse.

The new Transform Live Playback dialog also lets you adjust timings & dynamics en masse, such as making notes more staccato/legato, scaling dynamics, and making rhythms 'tighter' or 'looser'.

Live playback: view movie » (MOV, 966K)

Repeats

Sibelius 3 supports every kind of repeat you can imagine - not just D.S., D.C., Coda, Segno and Fine, but complex repeat structures with up to 8 repetitions. You can even make Sibelius jump between arbitrary points in the score during playback, e.g. to skip guitar fill boxes or simulate aleatory performances.

You can make individual notes, dynamics etc. apply only to certain verses or repeats, so you could have the brass play only the second time round, or make verse 3 p and verse 4 f. What's more, timecode now shows separate timings for each repeat.

Repeats: view movie » (MOV, 4M)

Further improvements

The mixer is now resizeable so you can view any number of faders, and you can hide the data panel at the right-hand side.

Sibelius 3 automatically plays dynamics written between keyboard staves, metric modulations, and glissandi from tied notes and over barlines.

You can set a metronome mark just by clicking the mouse in the desired tempo. The keypad and properties window now disappears during playback, so you can see as much of the music as possible. Sibelius 3 also includes a sophisticated sound set editor.

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