I am absolutely stymied.
On 21 June, two things happened on my system: (1) Sibelius suddenly hung on startup, a problem that could not be fixed even by trashing the file containing my global Sibelius settings. I was about to give up, when I was informed by Avid of a new Sibelius release, which (2) I promptly downloaded and installed. And voila! Sibelius started up normally and all appeared to be well. I had started a support dialogue with an Avid chatbot named "Alex", which I promptly abandoned when it was clear that (a) the problem was fixed and (b) the bot's recommendations were unlikely to be successful if I downgraded back to the previous Sib version to try them, as its main recommendation was indeed to trash the settings file.
But then I started noticing differences in the instrumental timbres, specifically of the solo strings, and especially in renderings of my Sinfonia Solenne, of which I was in the middle of finalising the postlude. The violins now sounded more distant, the cello more "present" and reverberant. I assumed that I had inadvertently made some change, perhaps via a MIDI message or forgetting to undo a con sord, in the score. But this is definitely NOT the explanation as I carefully checked the score itself and the mixer and Performance settings. More to the point, the change does NOT affect renderings made before 21 June, and it affects ALL renderings made with the score since then. For clarity: I can make a new rendering with the exact same version of the score that I used for a pre-21 June rendering, and the solo strings sound will now be different from that in the pre-21 June rendering.
After discovering the issue, I found an update to NotePerformer 4.5.1 and installed it. No change.
The renderings that I've posted here of the most recent version of Sinfonia Solenne (Symphony No. 1 in C Minor) were all spliced together from multiple renderings using Audacity, and the passages that involve solo strings were all taken from renderings made before 21 June.
Obviously, because I made two different changes to my Sib installation on 21 June (trashed my settings file and updated Sib to version 2024.6, build 4260), I have no way to tell which one caused the change in timbre. Since the same score has produced different results, it cannot be due to a setting change made in the score (the .sib file) and would have to be a global setting in Sibelius. Is there a global setting that would affect the sound of NP4's solo strings, and (apparently) no other instruments? Or was there some change in the way Sib interacts with NP in the latest Sib release? To answer this question, I typed in a support question on Wallander's website. The support tech who responded was Alexander (no relation to chatbot Alex, I'm sure!) At his request, I sent them both the .sib file and the two clips linked to below, for comparison. That was last Wednesday and I have heard nothing from him since, even after asking if there was any news early Friday. This makes me wonder if the Wallander folks concluded that I was either deluded or a troll.
You be the judge: is it my imagination, or are the timbres and instrumental balance different between the two versions? The difference IS subtle, even to me, but I believe it is there, and there is enough difference that I would not want to splice new renderings with old ones. If this is not my imagination, I'm effectively stuck spinning my wheels for now. This is making me seriously consider moving to Dorico.
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Just an update on this issue (in case anyone is interested): Alexander from Wallander Instruments agrees that the cello is audibly less prominent in recent Sibelius renderings, but has no idea of the cause. He suggested that the mixer settings had changed, which is ruled out since mixer settings are saved in the .sib file, and the exact same .sib files now give different results.
So either there is a global Sibelius setting that I had changed and trashed along with my settings file on 21 June, or else the update from Avid that came through on the same day interfaces differently with NP than previously.
Since no one has been able to name a global Sibelius setting that would affect solo strings only, I've concluded that the second explanation is much more likely. And so I've given up on SIbelius and cross-graded to Dorico.
Interestingly, under Dorico the solo strings sound is more similar to Sibelius post-21 June. I've no issue with that, as long as it doesn't change unpredictably with updates.