Plug-in guru Bob Zawalich has produced another great plug-in to help with the preparation of materials for rehearsal. I’ve posted about the Rehearsal Rercordings plug-in in the past, and the new Export Audio With Count-In plug-in is something of a complementary solution.
Export Audio With Count-In creates a copy of the current score, and inserts bars at the start into which it writes suitable woodblock notes, simulating the metronome click that Sibelius itself uses during playback. By default, the plug-in then automatically exports an audio track of the copy of the score, with the count-in included at the beginning. The plug-in cleverly handles scores that begin with pick-up bars, so it will provide as many complete bars of count-in clicks you specify, plus an incomplete bar if required to lead in to the pick-up.
If you switch off the Export audio checkbox, then the plug-in simply creates a copy of the score and adds the count-in clicks for you, so you can edit the score further or use the Rehearsal Recordings plug-in to export audio files of each staff individually. If you intend to export individual audio tracks, choose the Add count-in notes in every staff option in Export Audio With Count–In to make sure that the copied score includes count-in clicks in every staff.
As with all of Bob’s amazing plug-ins, Export Audio With Count-In is free to download and use, and works with either Sibelius 6 or Sibelius 7. If you have Sibelius 6, find out how to download and install the plug-in here. If you have Sibelius 7, use the built-in File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins feature to install the plug-in:
Simply choose the Export Audio With Count-In plug-in from the Playback category, choose a destination category from the Location menu, and click Install. Within a couple of seconds, the plug-in is installed and ready to go.
Thanks, as always, go to Bob Zawalich for producing this incredibly useful plug-in and releasing it for the benefit of the whole Sibelius user community.
Peter Roos
Excellent – very useful.
mhch4
Great! So far, I had to create extra count-in bars with note clicks. They are a visual pain and also impact the bar numbering. But I’m also adding an extra note click at the beginning so that the count-in clicks and this last note click provide exact reference points for accurately importing and warping audio clips into a DAW.
Would be a worthwhile addition to also have an option to add the ending click at the beginning of an extra bar next after the last one.
Joe Keefe
Neat plugin. I do this myself in marching band scores for rehearsal purposes. Not only do I add clicks in the beginning, but also during bars where there is no rhythmic content to keep tempo (which is especially useful for rehearsing a front ensemble using audio of the rest of the band).
I don’t know if this plugin takes care of the bar numbering issue automatically (I suspect it doesn’t because it creates a copy of the score). Ideally the thing to do with countoff beats is to make them an integral feature of your score so you don’t have to re-do work every time you change the score. One of the steps in this process is to renumber your first “real” bar of music with bar number 1. Sibelius can do this with Create > Bar Number Change.
Jane
It seems to always export at a tempo of 100? Even if I save the playback tempo as something else?