Sibelius will allow you to save your favorite ensemble setups, so you don't have to keep rebuilding them over and over again.
You can also create your own custom commands in the Sibelius Dictionary that bypass the Sibelius-soundworld system of instrument control, or even drop actual MIDI commands in the score by preceding text with a tilde ( ~ ) character. Sibelius would then be able to automatically choose instruments and articulations that you have loaded according to your Sibelius Dictionary settings. For this scenario, you'd just load an instance per instrument/articulation in the Sibelius playback manager, disable any unused articulations for that instance (to save memory), set it to use velocity mode, and give it the relevant soundworld id in Sibelius. With that in mind, you can start using HSO right away in Sibelius without needing to make special soundworld xml maps to go with it. You can choose articulations from momentary or held style key switches, program changes, CC messages, or separate each articulation out over its own channel by using multiple instances and disabling all but the articulation meant for that channel. You can set it up to use velocity or cc messages for dynamics. In both Sonic or H5, you can load as many instances as you need in Sibelius. In the H5 VST2 plugin, you can load 16 instruments per instance on independent MIDI channels, but you can load far more and have them set to the same channel for 'layered' effects, and you can directly edit the HSO content (all the synth paramters, unlimited layering, fx, and to some extent even the samples themselves). With Sonic you can get up to 16 instruments loaded into the same VSTi instance, and you get an added ability of creating layers that will trigger over the same channel. Both of these require a Steinberg USB dongle. The stand alone version can handle up to 64 channels (over 4 input ports). Sonic and Halion 5 come with stand alone, VST2 and VST3 plugin options. At this time Sonic and H5 both require a Steinberg USB dongle. In these players, HSO gets a special macro screen that looks very similar to the screen shot offered above, but you can load up several of them at once in the same instance if you like. HSO also works as a content library in Halion 4/5/etc. If you do not use the dongle option, it can be a bit fussy to move around from machine to machine (requires interaction with your MySteinberg account).Ĭlick for image of the included HSO VST2 UI. As far as I know, you can only use HSO on one computer at a time (either in soft-eLicenser or on a dongle). HSO does not require a Steinberg USB dongle, but it can be moved to one permenantly if you so choose. The included VSTi is a single instrument/patch per instance UI. It comes with a small VST2 interface in one of the Extras folders that is VST2 compatible with Sibelius. I have Halion Symphonic Orchestra (HSO) as it is currently sold on its own as a sound library.