MOTUnation.com

http://www.noteperformer.com/

Here's the vi-control discussion, which is very informative as it has a lot of Q&A with the developer:

http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33564

I am posting this for the community; I do not own Sibelius (I bought Finale instead) and haven't had time to delve deeply into this new product yet. I imagine it will stir up passionate feelings on both sides, but suspect its primary audience is meant to be music students vs. professionals.

I don't know what to make of this. To me, this sounds like what you'd get if you found a downloadable MIDI file of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and played it through GB.

The demos sure do sound a 'cut above' a lot of libraries, indeed. As they advertise, this could really be useful for hearing your own work/orchestration being played back with a minimum of fuss at a moments notice as your writing away to check some things out.

I don't see it replacing any of the 'heavyweight' libraries as far as very intense mock-ups or creating super-realistic sample scores, but I think I'll be a future buyer just to save creative time and to hear excellent score playback.

I didn't like the Sugar Plum demo but rarely write that kind of music; the other demos (possibly added since we first started talking about this product, and also likely with an older and inferior version) impress me quite a bit in terms of acceptable results for early stages of writing so that time can be saved vs. an early rush to dealing with articulation-splitting and the like for MIDI mockups.

I am almost tempted to finally do the Sibelius cross-grade just to get Note Performer 1.5:

http://www.noteperformer.com/?mode=

Please note that this latest version represents about eighteen additional months of development from Wallander vs. what we all made our initial evaluations against.

It's not clear whether the WIVI instruments are embedded in this product in any form, for the instruments that WIVI covers.

I must be missing something here. I'm using Finale and it has had score playback for years and you're not limited to built in libraries. I thought Sibelius had it too. No? Or am I really missing something?

Phil

Yeah, you're missing something, from what I can tell based on Wallander's write-up.

The Wallander product does a lot more analysis of the score vs. requiring you to get to sort of an intermediary MIDI mock-up stage to access different articulations of external libraries (though I believe some of those templates allow for assigning criteria for articulation-switching).

At any rate, it's interesting how their shoot-out is most prominent when comparing NotePerformer to Sibelius default rendering, with Finale already sounding way better than Sibelius but not as realistic as NotePerformer.

I haven't had a chance to work deeply with the VSL template in Finale yet, so maybe it will turn out to be as or more effective. But if NotePerformer is a huge time saver at the earliest stages of a project, it would be worth it.

Thanks for that clarification. I don't do much with VI's and when I do it's mostly in DP. I use the playback in Finale just to check my work and then do all the heavy lifting in DP, so I wasn't thinking in those terms. Finale's Human Playback is interesting, but I haven't really played around with it much. I wonder how it compares to this.

Phil

In case someone comes across this older topic, note that NotePerformer 3 was released this week and has been significantly extended.