by Credo » Mon Dec 26, 2016 6:23 am
Yes, I started with the old GPO4 soundset and adjusted accordingly to account for GPO5. I've much larger versions where I'm trying to get the new GOS strings to work well but it has far too many issues to post anywhere at this time.
I put this together using Sibelius 8.5 on Windows 10 with an xml editor called XMLpad. It should work for Macs as well, but I do not include instructions on how to install it on a Mac (sorry, I don't know where Macs like to keep Sibelius soundsets).
I've only done limited testing as I don't have very many 'orchestral' scores to run through it (being a mostly wind/marching band guy when it comes to Scoring software).
It's mainly meant for people who have purchased GPO5 and have no way to roll back to GPO4 for use in Sibelius, or for someone who just needs quick access to some of the new elements in GPO5 (pinaos, organs, choirs).
I do encourage people to study the soundset, learn a bit about how SoundWorld and ARIA play together, and make personal adjustments to their own copies to suit personal needs.
When it comes to the GOS Strings, I'm finding it pretty easy to just make quick short soundsets as needed and add to them on a score by score basis as needed. The big problem with the GOS sounds is that they really need specialized tweaking for style changes in a score/passage. I.E. Sometimes you want staccatos living under slurs to be spaccato, others you might want martele, sautille, etc.
I've got some GOS models working where users can add/drop nodes in the score to change default translations for things like staccatos and tenuto (alone or under slurs), but that's going to require users to read a pretty big manual and remember things, plus it's not very flexible on attack/release times. For instance, it'd really be nice if attack and release times could be adjusted for each key-switch position, but we can't (I.E. A longer release time for martele than the sustains), so we must fiddle with these parameters using CC messages in real time and the abrupt universal changes to a KS loaded slot don't always translate well.
For GOS, I'm probably just going to make a stand alone soundset that doesn't use KS versions of instruments at all, but instead unfurls single slot articulations over several ARIA slots. This way the user can just pop open ARIA and tweak each articulation to taste (things like attack/release time, air, etc.). Again, such an approach will require a good bit of user understanding and intervention....not nearly as plug and play as the legacy section strings.
