Many Sibelius users also have one or more of the excellent audio utilities from Rogue Amoeba installed on their Macs, such as Audio Hijack Pro or Airfoil. Both of these products include a feature called Instant On, which allows the applications to capture audio from an application that is already running, rather than requiring the user to quit and restart those applications.
We received a number of reports from Sibelius users that they were experiencing playback problems when using the Sibelius 7 Sounds library, either getting no sound at all, or getting errors when Sibelius tries to auto-save, or even when the user tries to save directly. A common factor seemed to be that these people had Audio Hijack Pro’s Instant On feature enabled. We got in touch with the fine folks at Rogue Amoeba, and they immediately investigated the problem.
At the end of last week, updates for Audio Hijack Pro and Airfoil were released that resolve the incompatibilities with Sibelius. If you have either of these applications installed, make sure you update right away.
Thanks to everyone at Rogue Amoeba, and especially Paul Kafasis and Ed Wynne, for their help in resolving this problem.
Wheat Williams
As a long-time Audio Hijack Pro user, I’m very glad to learn of this.
Mark Sealey
Thanks, Daniel; even with this update, I still get about a 1-2 second delay between the note playing in Sibelius 7.1.2 and hearing it via AirFoil (and Airport Express) etc
Any ideas, please? TIA!
Daniel Spreadbury
I don’t know what kind of latency you should optimally be able to expect when using Airfoil, I’m afraid. I do know that this update was not designed to address any latency issues, and was instead targeted at resolving a conflict with Sibelius.
Mark Sealey
Yes, the Instant On conflict. Thanks for working with them on that.
I agree, this is different.
Any other instances of latency ever been reported?
Daniel Spreadbury
In a word, no.
Mark Sealey
Paul at RA just replied:
Hi Mark,
The delay you’re experiencing is inherent to the AirPlay for audio protocol, which is used by the AirPort Express and Apple TV, as well as our Airfoil Speakers software and third-party AirPlay devices as well.
Because of this delay, Airfoil is not intended for use with live audio, where such a delay is impractical.
-Paul