Sibelius is a software designed for creating, manipulating and sharing music notation. It is mainly developed for composers, arrangers and publishers.

When you first initiate the program, you can view videos to get familiarized with the Sibelius platform (whether you have used a similar software before or not), look into tutorials, as well as into the reference guide.

When you create a new score, you can either choose from a blank, bass staff or treble staff, or from categories - bands, chamber groups, choral and song, handbells, jazz, latin, marching band and percussion, orchestral, orff instruments, rock and pop, or solo instruments.

Optionally, you can import a MIDI file created in another music application or downloaded off the web, or a MusicXML file.

The GUI is very attractive and easy to navigate through (tabbed document interface).

In the ribbon you can select note input (triplets, respell), notations (clef, key signature), text (lyrics, chord symbol), play (live tempo, live playback), layout (magnetic layout, freeze positions), appearance (reset note spacing, beam groups), parts, review, or view.

Overall, Sibelius offers a professional sound library (includes over 38GB of professional content), optimization for single monitor use (especially useful when you have a laptop), advanced text and typography options, as well as the possibility of importing and exporting graphics (from all major formats).

Sibelius is highly demanding when it comes to CPU and memory, but that's to be expected since it is a complex program.

The bottom line is that Sibelius is truly a complete program designed for professionals in the music-creating environment. Its price alone confirms this.