Samples and Sibelius

[titser_marco]

Hi guys! I'm currently toying with Sibelius 3 and I have some questions:

1. I know that Garritan provides nice samples of instruments that I can use with Sibelius. However, I don't think I can shell out 200 USD at the moment. I do have some wav samples of instruments and other sounds that I'd like to use as voices for the staves in Sibelius. Would it be possible to assign say, a staff to a wave form so that it plays the sound with the pitch that I wrote it in?

2. If I can indeed do this, what are the specs of the PC that I need to buy so that I'd have optimum performance, i.e. minimal latency etc?

I'd really appreciate it if you guys can help me out here. I have some notated music here and while I like the fact that my standard sound card can generate MIDI instruments, I'd still like to hear my music using real instruments - without having to deal with musician's paychecks and egos. Thanks talaga.

[KitC]

I don't think the orchestral playback synth supplied with Sibelius (Kontakt Player) allows you to fly in samples, you will need the full version of Kontakt for that. If you use a soundblaster for a soundcard, you can create you own soundfonts from your wave samples and use the free sfz soundfont player, and have Sibelius use that as a vst synth.

As for the pc, with any program that requires a lot of samples, you need lots of RAM, 1 gig or more with 2 gig preferable. Avoid Via mobo chipsets as these have proven problematic with soundblasters and soundcards, in general, although there are exceptions to the rule. Also avoid high powered video cards in your planned DAW as these vidcards have a nasty way of consuming cpu bandwidth leaving nothing for audio. Go to musicxp.net to optimize your OS for audio. And make sure you have a 2 drive system, not a partitioned drive but 2 physical drives. One for the system and programs, and the other for samples and audio. You can make the 2nd drive bootable as a just-in-case should the system drive suddenly fail. (I also have a 3rd drive for backup of important data - short of a catastrophic electrical anomaly in the pc, it's extremely rare that all drives will fail simultaneously.)

[titser_marco]

As reliable, as ever - thanks KitC!  

Now, just a(nother) question. If I get Kontakt Player, how do I mkae it work?

[KitC]

It's the default orchestral player in Sibelius. I don't think you need to activate it. What I do know is that it can be expanded/upgraded to Kontakt Player Gold which adds several sounds. Haven't seen Sibelius 3 yet so I can't comment on it.