I don't even know where to start

[zrmelton]

Sibelius 8 was working (relatively) fine for me for months. After several crashes, and reboots, and little help from Avid...I decided to uninstall Sibelius, then reinstall. As you may or may not know, this means I now have the most up-to-date version of Sibelius. This has proved to not work well with my VDL, or Kontakt 5, or iOS 10.9.5. One bug will get fixed by me doing the little I know with template, sound configuration stuff, then some other problem will pop up. Right now, it is Timpani part being read as Glissando or FX. I tried opening Kontakt 5 and running VDL on stand-alone mode, and it said "error writing files to disk, library will not load." I have no idea where to start.

[Hugh Smith]

Where to start. I think you're on the right track in getting VDL stand-alone mode working correctly. The guys at Tapspace are better equipped to assist with that. You can put in a support ticket.

Then, if you still have issues getting the Template going again, come on back and I'll help you through them.

[zrmelton]

Hugh, thanks to your advice I went through the process of accessing Tapspace's support ticket help, etc. It looks like I have installed VDL successfully, however it looks like there's something wrong with my integration of "The Write Score" into Sibelius.

In one of my scores, everything is working fine...except for my Timpani (VDL) is loading as a Timpani Glissando. When I manually switch this via Sound Configuration/Kontakt...the rolls sound choppy and unnatural.

I'm having other problems in other scores, but maybe we can start with that one for now?

Thanks again for everything.

[Hugh Smith]

Send me the file(s) in question. I sent you a PM.

[Hugh Smith]

In the file you sent me, the Timpani~VLD instrument used in the score is not one of the timpani instruments that is defined in the VDL Template. When I looked at Timpani~VDL in Edit Instruments, the Best Sound said "unallocated" and was otherwise one of the default instruments that ships with Sibelius. In future, be sure to use the predefined instruments from the Template (unless of course you know what you're doing ).

I currently see 2 options for fixing this particular file:

1) With one of the bars selected from this instrument, go to Home > Instruments > Edit Instruments. This instrument should already be selected, then click Edit Instrument. Once there, change the Best Sound to whichever VDL timpani patch you'd like. Save/OK your way out of those dialogs. Score should now playback as expected (it did for me).

2) Add a new timpani staff selected from the VDL list. Then copy/paste everything over from the old one to the new one - make sure the instrument change back to regular timpani points to the correct one. Delete the old staff.


Let me know how you get on.