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Question: What is the difference between the regular Garritan Personal Orchestra and the Sibelius Edition of Garritan Personal Orchestra?

Answer:

The Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO) Sibelius Edition integrates directly into Sibelius for easy control of the instrument selection, dynamics and articulations. The regular stand-alone Garritan Personal Orchestra requires you to use an extra program (called GPO Studio) to link the GPO samples to Sibelius and you must manually program the instrument selection, dynamics and articulations into Sibelius. The sounds used by both editions are identical.

GPO Sibelius Edition
The GPO Sibelius Edition is integrated right into Sibelius in the same way that Kontakt Player Silver and Gold are; it handles the loading and saving of sounds automatically (just like any other Sibelius score); it does a good deal of the MIDI programming automatically to achieve better, more realistic playback.

For example, with GPO Sibelius Edition you need only mark up your score with articulations, dynamics, hairpins and slurs, and Sibelius will automatically insert the necessary MIDI messages before playback to ensure that it plays as well as possible. You add a trill line, and Sibelius automatically activates the keyswitch for the trill sample of the appropriate interval; you add a slur, and Sibelius automatically applies the "legato" controller; you add an upbow or a downbow articulation, and Sibelius automatically plays the right sample; you add a set of dynamics like p < f over a held note, and Sibelius plays it right first time, without you having to do anything.

There are some disadvantages to GPO Sibelius Edition, however. You can only load up to 32 sounds simultaneously rather than 64 with the regular GPO; you can't use the external reverb plug-in easily (you can either use the existing Kontakt Player reverb or leave the sound "dry"); and you are forced to compromise a little in terms of the sound choices you can make (GPO has more than 280 individual instruments, but our Kontakt Player can only address subsets of up to 128 sounds at a time, so you need to choose an appropriate sound set for the ensemble you're working with for a particular score; in practice this isn't likely to be too much of an issue).

Since GPO Sibelius Edition is integrated into Sibelius, you can't use GPO Sibelius Edition's samples in any other program (e.g. you can't host them in Cubase or Logic or another DAW.)

Regular GPO
The stand-alone GPO does have some good features. For example, you can load up to 64 sounds simultaneously (each Kontakt Player instance can load 8 sounds, and you can run up to 8 of them in parallel via GPO Studio) and it also supports the Ambience reverb plug-in, which isn't bad for something that's free.

However, the stand alone GPO does not integrate directly with Sibelius. Instead, you load the instruments through GPO Studio which connects the two programs.

The advantage of using the GPO Studio is that you can use the regular GPO with virtually any MIDI software. The disadvantage is that it's not entirely transparent. In other words, it is not as easy as using Kontakt Player Silver or Gold, which are fully integrated into Sibelius itself. If you use the regular GPO, you have to remember to do things like save your GPO Studio configuration for a particular score independently of the score itself so that you can load the same sounds into the same GPO Studio configuration next time you want to work on it.

The GPO sounds really only come to life when you do a certain amount of MIDI programming to make them sound good. Sustaining instruments (like strings, wind, brass) use the modulation wheel to control volume rather than plain old MIDI velocity, so you need to be able to add modulation controller messages to your score in order to shape the dynamics nicely. The MIDI velocity value is used to adjust the attack of the note and with the regular GPO you have to program this by hand into Sibelius.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks for Daniel Spreadbury at Sibelius for his help in preparing this FAQ.