On Sibelius and the music plug-in used on this site
In this article I will look at a few perks and twists of the plug-in for sheet music I use on this site, and I will talk a bit about sound cards and synthesizers and the like. Chances are, your computer isn't sounding that great.
For music notation purposes, I use a program called Sibelius. It is a very good program, capable of all I ask of it, and it has been my replacement for Finale, another notation program used often by musicians, for some years now. A great advantage of Sibelius over Finale is the availability of a browser plug-in, Scorch, which makes it possible to transfer documents created in Sibelius to the Web and have them visible for visitors who do not have the Sibelius program themselves. I have written the Joomla!-plug-in that is used on this site, so you can have the advantages of the plug-in without having to suffer the terrible website designs Sibelius supplies with the program.
When creating scores on the computer, it is an advantage to hear an approximation of the sound of the things you've written. Of course, any composer who's worth his mettle will be able to work with just his trusted piano and his ears, but it is quite handy to quickly check if the voicing you're using is working as it should, or if a key is correct.
The problem is, very few computers have good synthesizers on board. That's to be expected. A professional level synthesizer (as I am using) costs a lot more than your average computer. One way to circumvent that a bit is by using samples instead of waveform-based sounds from your sound card. I have a decent sound card (better than standard ones,) but mine is not up to the task either: my own synthesizer is literally worth ten times as much as my computer. Due to fancy built-in asio and such things, the samples sound acceptable, though, as I have a good library of sounds.
The Scorch-plug-in for the browser has to know what hardware it can use to let us hear the sounds. On my system, it knows that it can use the samples from my libraries. However, on a visitor's computer chances are that appropriate libraries are not installed.
For that reason, all of my scores have a set-up which tells the plug-in to use the very crappy waveform-table used by Microsoft, as that is the one present on most computers. Also, all MIDI-information is in the form of standard-channel convention for the instruments, so that, if a user does not have the required hardware, the computer has a good chance to find replacement sounds which come close to the original intent.
So here is the deal: my music may sound close to the way I want it to sound (although nothing beats live-performance or a good recording,) but then again, it might not. Volumes may be wrong. Sounds may be wrong. In the end, I've chosen a set-up which has the best chance of giving you some sort of passable result.
The main point to remember here is that the sounds you hear are just an indication. One thing about any score on this site is correct: the notation, and that is what it is all about.
