Problems with importing a midi from Sonar to Sibelius

Discussion of playback and midi issues go here.
Racer
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2015 9:03 pm

Post by Racer » Fri Jan 23, 2015 9:48 pm

Hello,

I work with Sibelius 7 to create lyrics for a choir. I import a midi with the voices and possibly a rehearsal piano in Sibelius. The midi is created in Sonar X3. Importing the midi brings a few problems with it. I hope somebody can help me to fix the problems.

1. Sibelius deletes rests by making the notes longer. Most of the time Sibelius puts a dot behind the note before the rest, so the rest will disappear. Why does Sibelius do that? It is not the information which the midi gives.

2. Sibelius transposes the voicetracks an octave down while the clef stays the same as in the midi. How is that possible?

3. Sibelius puts hyphens between two syllables directly behind the first syllable. I want them to be centered between the two syllables. How can you do that easily?

I hope my questions are clear. If not, I will hear it.

Kind regards,
Racer


bobp
Posts: 1182
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2012 12:53 am

Post by bobp » Sat Jan 24, 2015 6:03 pm

Make sure your Sibelius is fully updated. Sibelius 7 should be 7.1.3. There have been some bug fixes.

1. Importing from a DAW can be a problem. Make sure you take note of the import options. Better yet, if your DAW will export a music xml, use that instead. There is much better information in a music xml. If you were to use MuseScore instead, the results would be different. Maybe better, maybe worse.

2. Yes, tenor parts, especially. Easy enough to put the part in the correct octave.

3. I haven't seen this. I can only guess that there is some midi information in the way (?). If you toggle midi information on, you might see all kinds of stuff stacked on top of each other.


My personal observation (and you may not at all agree) is this. You don't want to hear it, but, in some respects, your workflow is not efficient. As you are finding out, you spend so much time correcting things that it would have been faster to just write this in Sibelius to begin with. After all, that is what Sibelius is for. A DAW is for writing music and creating a good sounding audio file. If you don't know notation, or prefer not to write that way, then you will have to deal with the problems that come up. There are limitations no matter what path you take.
For example, the score for the movie Avatar was written using Sibelius. Then imported into a DAW to tweak things until they got the sounds they wanted. Then the Sibelius version was updated (in Sibelius) and parts printed up and handed out to the orchestra.

Just my opinion.
Bob Porter
Sibelius 7.5, W10,i5,16 GB ram,desktop

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