From the course: Sibelius Ultimate 2019 Essential Training: The Basics

Playback preferences - Sibelius Tutorial

From the course: Sibelius Ultimate 2019 Essential Training: The Basics

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Playback preferences

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- [Narrator] Now, let's talk about playback preferences. As a reminder, preferences can be opened using the shortcut command comma on mac, or control comma on Windows. There is some general settings in the playback page of preferences that affect the playback of all of the scores that you open in Sibelius. For example, setting the default playback configuration ensures that your copy of Sibelius will always be loading the same playback configuration every time you launch the application. If you always want Sibelius using Sibelius Seven Sounds for example, then check the box next to when starting Sibelius, load this playback configuration, and choose Sibelius Seven Sounds as your default configuration. So, there are about three levels of configurations. Sibelius the application, has a preferred configuration here in preferences. Second, your scores have their owned saved configuration, whatever configuration you've chosen within the score file to playback the score. And that information is saved within the score file itself. And third, anytime you close a score, whatever its configuration was, that configuration remains as what Sibelius calls the active configuration. To understand this, let's build the situation from the ground up. So right now in preferences, I am going to select Sibelius Seven Sounds as Sibelius's preferred configuration, When I save this setting in preferences by clicking okay. Every time Sibelius launches on it's own without a file involved, it will load Sibelius Seven Sounds as it's active configuration. I want to also point out the additional setting below that in preferences. So, control or command comma, that says let me choose whether to change to the new configuration. I'll explain that in just a moment. Now, within my score, I'm going to go ahead and click okay on preferences again. I'm going to select the General MIDI configuration now. So, in the play tab setup group configuration, I'm going to choose General MIDI. And then I'm going to do a quick save, so the scores save with that General MIDI configuration. Now, right now when I close this score, the active configuration is General MIDI, and that configuration is still active. So, I'm going to close this score. If I open 0403, Which was originally saved with Sibelius Seven Sounds as it's configuration. Watch what happens. (silence) Because General MIDI was the active configuration when I closed the last score, and because I told Sibelius in preferences to let me choose whether to change to the new configuration, Sibelius is asking me what I'd like to do. In this situation, I can click yes if I want to switch to the files saved, configuration Sibelius Seven Sounds, or no if I want to use the currently active configuration, General MIDI. I'm going to go ahead and click yes. Since I clicked yes, you'll be able to see in the play tab in the setup group, if I click on configuration that we're using the Sibelius Seven Sounds configuration. Now, let's throw in one more scenario for you. Remember that Sibelius has a default configuration of it's own. I've set that to Sibelius Seven Sounds. But remember the original score file for this video, 0404, which I saved with a General MIDI configuration. Let's quit Sibelius entirely and relaunch it all by itself without opening a file. (silence) Since we've launched Sibelius on it's own without a score file, it's open with a Sibelius Seven Sounds configuration active. Now, if we open the 0404 file, which has the General MIDI configuration. This happens again. Sibelius is asking us if yes we'd like to switch to the files saved configuration, or no we'd like to use the active configuration, which is Sibelius's preferred configuration and preferences, Sibelius Seven Sounds. Hopefully, your mind is a bit more clear now on what's happening with all of these playback configurations. I'm going to go ahead and switch here yes to Sibelius Seven Sounds. But, there's a little more and this may please some of you. If you find Sibelius's line of questioning about playback configurations to be a bit annoying, you can turn it off. So, let's go back to that playback page of preferences, control or command comma, and click on playback. And in that area where it defaults to let me choose whether to change to the new configuration, you have two more choices here. Always change to the new configuration, meaning that every score that you open, regardless of the configuration it was saved with, will immediately switch to it's own saved configuration without asking you. And never change to the new configuration means that no matter what configuration the file was saved with, Sibelius will always revert the file to whatever the active configuration is. It will not change the files saved configuration. To simplify this for you, for those of you who want to use Sibelius Sounds all of the time, the best thing you can do is set up your preferences, so that the Sibelius Seven Sounds is your default device. And then select never change to the new configuration. And always launch Sibelius by itself before you open any files. It will load the Sibelius Seven Sounds configuration and any file you open will automatically be assigned to it, no matter what configuration is saved within the file. I'm going to go ahead and click okay and save these settings. I'm sure you've probably encountered the playback configuration warning dialogue at one point or another. So, I hope that all the information provided in this video has helped you understand it a bit better.

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