After some experimenting with other cheaper and/or inferior sound libraries I settled on a lasting relationship with the Vienna Symphonic Library certainly the most comprehensive orchestral sound library available and over several years, and taking full advantage of their not infrequent and generous offers, have buit up the entire Symphonic Cube as well as their Bosendorfer Imperial Piano and the Konzerthaus Organ.

Aside from the wonderful instrument samples it is VSL's innovative and extraordinary software that has kept me hooked. After intially supporting the subsequently doomed Gigastudio technology they created their own instrument software the "Vienna Instrument" followed by the VI Host "Vienna Ensemble", the effects suite "Vienna Suite" and recently (summer 09) the astonishing "MIR" mixing and reverberation engine (as they quaintly title it).

None of this is specifically designed to work with Sibelius but there is clearly a close working relationship between Sibelius and VSL as both companies have made big efforts to ensure they work together as best possible. The majority of people creating orcherstral mockups work through sequencers such as Pro-tools, Sonar etc and using MIDI keyboards whcih is how VSL is primarily designed.

However it has always been my goal to be able to produce a full score in Sibelius, press play, and hear the most realistic performance possible. The problem has been that the memory size of the VSL samples and the computing power needed to reproduce decent room acoustics have, until now, been beyond the capabilities of a single computer. To reproduce a full orchestral performance it has been necessary to have an awsome master PC or more often MAC which is connected to a "farm" of slave PCs where the samples are housed.

But now with the advent of 64 bit computing (which enables a good motherboard to host up to 24 GBs of memory) and the best Intel i7 processor it is now possible to create a modest orchestral live performance on a single PC which would sound as near to the real thing as the majority of people wouldn't know th difference. It needs just one more leap forward to cope with a live performance the size of the Jami Symphony but it wont be far off.

This performance of Malcolm Arnold's Symphony for Brass was made with with Sibelius and VSL but pre-mir. It's not great.