Sibelius 5 problems

[shappaeye]

We upgraded to Sibelius 5 about 8 months ago, upgraded from Sib 4.

Sib 4 no problems.

Sib 5, what a nightmare.

We have a music suite of 13 PC's. Intel Dual Core, 1gb memory, 80gb HD SATA, Creative X-Fi and Audigy cards. From one day to the next we have issues, here are a few..

Crackling when the CPU goes redline (seen through the mixer)
Stuttering and skipping when using Kontakt Player 2.2.4.
Poor playback quality and missing instruments.

I recently upgraded to 5.2 (suspicious of 2 upgrades already!) but this made little or no change at all. Most of the problems seem to revolve around Kontakt Player.

Then we brought in an iMac from technology and within 15 minutes I had it installed, updated and was running like a dream! The Head of Music is now using that to get his music exams in.

BUT we need to get to the bottom of this, do we go back to Sib 4 or can someone suggest whats going on, I have spent HOURS on this talking to Sib Support (who gave up in the end) and formatting, reinstalling, getting latest drivers.

Clues people!!

Thanks

[GrumbleDook]

Are you running it on XP? Make sure your chipset drivers are up to date as a friend had serious issues with this too. If you want to double check about it being the hard ware rather than XP (or running on XP) then set up bootcamp on the Mac to do comparisons on the same hardware.

[john]

Afraid to say I'm also less than impressed, and most issues I've had are again Kontakt Player related, Sibelius just buy that in and stuff it in so they are quite right in saying as its that which is at fault they cannot do anything really about it until they fix that. But we still have issues with VERY slow opening of files, and I'm talking slow, my licence server is now set to time out machines after 10 minutes, yes thats 10 minutes! it can take that long to open a demo score off the local machine.

I will be discussing with the music dept the option of going back to V4 more seriously again.

[shappaeye]

We are running XP SP2 which is fully up to date. I have ensured that all drivers/software is up to date especially the sound and gfx drivers.

I have spent hours and hours on this with very little consistent success. Success one day, the next day is a nightmare.

I will do as suggested though and bootcamp it and see what occurs, good suggestion although i already think i can predict the outcome...

[j17sparky]

You tryed using ASIO4ALL?

Unfortunately your soundcards wernt designed with music in mind so i suspect your problems can only get worse over time as the software becomes more demanding.

[shappaeye]

Tried ASIO4ALL, what soundcard would be good for this type of work?

I always assumed that Creative would be a safe bet......although with a bit of googling i am realising that maybe they arent ASIO compatible (completely)

[DMcCoy]

Tried ASIO4ALL, what soundcard would be good for this type of work?

I always assumed that Creative would be a safe bet......although with a bit of googling i am realising that maybe they arent ASIO compatible (completely)

Creative are horrible for everything, unless you like bad drivers, bloated software, random BSOD and overpriced junk.

[TheFopp]

How about just using the Microsoft GM wavetable instead of using Kontakt Player for the sounds. Yes the sounds aren't as 'realistic', but for the purposes of writing scores it doesn't matter so long as all the notes playback.

[shappaeye]

In some cases thats exactly what we did as the PC just wouldnt play anything through Kontakt Player.