Avid Sibelius Changelog

What's new in Avid Sibelius 2022.12 Build 1722

Dec 15, 2022

Score Subsets—Create a new score view with a subset of instruments
New barlines—Add triple, thick, and dotted barlines to your score together with new repeat bar properties in Engraving Rules

New in Avid Sibelius 2022.10 Build 1531 (Nov 23, 2022)

New in Avid Sibelius 2020.9 Build 107167 (Sep 18, 2020)

Focus on Staves and Hide Empty Staves:
This release enhances the Focus on Staves feature so you can use both “Hide Empty Staves” and “Focus and Staves” at the same time. This opens up several new possibilities to have scratch staves that you may use to work out rhythms, tidy incoming MIDI files or split out individual staves or even combined staves that you can still use in the parts.
The setting is tucked away in Engraving Rules > Staves and is called “Show hidden empty staves when using Focus on Staves”. When this is checked, you’ll get the existing behaviour, where using Focus on Staves will unhide any already hidden stave. Unchecking this option will enable the new workflow.
As you can see, we’ve moved the Focus on Staves button out and split it to add the dropdown. Clicking the top half now toggles it on and off, and clicking the bottom half shows the list of staves in the score or part.
When ticking or unticking the names in the list, Sibelius will turn on Focus on Staves and only display those instruments in the score. Choosing more instruments from the list will add them to the focussed set. If you untick them all, the score will revert to showing all the staves. To help you choose only a few staves, or omit a few (depending on your need at the time), you can click the “Clear All” or “Select All” options from the list.
There have been no changes in the way you can use a selection in the score to focus on a set of staves, so you’ll still likely find it’s just as useful.
We’ve also added a new Engraving Rule (Staves → Layout) that allows the Focus On Staves feature to be disabled in “Panorama” View while still being active in the “Page” view. This facilitates a workflow in which the Panorama mode could be considered a “Master Palette” for all available instruments within a score, whereas the Page View (used in conjunction with the Focus on Staves feature) may only show a subset of the score’s instruments. This allows users to see scratch staves within Panorama view that won’t ever appear within the Page View of the score. The new rule is ON by default (i.e. legacy behaviour), so you’ll need to turn the feature off if you’re interested in trying out the new workflow.
When a stave is hidden using Focus on Staves, there’s now a new layout marker (i.e. a dashed purple line) to indicate this. When an unfocused staves occurs alongside a stave that is also hidden using Hide Empty Staves (which uses a dotted line), then the two lines are slightly offset so that it’s possible to determine that there are two different types of hidden objects).
In this release, we have also included a small change to the way staves are hidden using Hide Empty Staves when Focus on Staves is on. Previously, if you were focusing on a set of staves and applied Hide Empty Staves on one or more staves, nothing would appear to happen until you turned Focus on Staves off. This would give the impression that nothing was happening to the score, but then have potentially undesired results when turning off Focus on Staves. Now though, Hide Empty Staves will only apply to those staves in view, so even if you do Select All and choose Hide Empty Staves, it’ll only apply to those in view.
In addition to these improvements to working with staves, the option when exporting audio and video to “Omit muted instruments” now works regardless of the selection in the score. So when this option is checked, the muted instruments will never be included in the audio export, and when it’s unchecked, the mute state in the Mixer will be ignored.
Now for the first time you can have scores and parts with their own independent set of focussed staves; and when combined with the new option to allow you to hide empty staves too, it unlocks whole new ways of working with parts. You’ll be able to have another “Full Score” that includes your scratch staves, parts with any number of staves that you can switch on and off at will, and all this while retaining complete control of the layout of each.
ManuScript Plugin language:
In case you didn’t know, Sibelius has a programming language built into it, allowing you to create plugins that help you perform tasks that either aren’t necessarily easily available in Sibelius, or are repetitive. If you’re interested, check out the ManuScript Language Reference pdf, found in File > Plug-ins. In this release, we’ve added several improvements to the plugin language that we hope will go a long way. We’ve been careful to add new functionality that doesn’t affect older versions of Sibelius, allowing you to build plugins that will work in any (modern) version of Sibelius).
All new plugins can now have the following code inserted into the Initialize() method to allow Sibelius to switch on new behavior and to allow legacy plugins to continue to run as before:
// The following enables the latest behavior for the ManuScript interpreter.
// If you intend your plugin to run on previous versions of Sibelius where that functionality
// didn”t exist, you will likely have to revisit the following:
if (Sibelius.ProgramVersion > 20200600) {
SetInterpreterOption(TreatSingleCharacterAsString);
SetInterpreterOption(SupportHalfSemitonePitchValues);
With TreatSingleCharacterAsString, ManuScript will now treat a single character as a string rather than a number. SupportHalfSemitonePitchValues allow floating-point values to be accepted as “Pitch” so that plugins can add and manipulate quarter-tone values. Pitch is still specified and returned as a semitone, but 0.5 semitone is a quartertone. The same goes for Accidentals.
The following methods accept floating-point pitches:
NoteRest.AddNote
Bar.AddNote
Stave.AddNote
The following methods return pitches or accidentals in floating-point values:
Note.Pitch
Note.WrittenPitch
Note.Accidental
Note.WrittenAccidental
When using single-character literals within a conditional, ManuScript no longer appears to guess between types (numbers and characters), leading to more consistent results.
Various calls to close a score are now consistent and reliable e.g. Sibelius.Close(False) There’s also a new all Sibelius.CloseScore(score…). This helps to remove ambiguity when closing a score to ensure the right score is closed. It can also take a new argument fCloseAll that closes all parts and score. There’s also a new Sibelius.CloseWindowsWithScore() method that allows you to reliably close a specific score without having to search the list of open scores for it.
We’ve also addressed a longstanding ManuScript bug which resulted in inconsistent behaviour when importing Text Styles from a House Style. Previously, manuscript plug-ins would not import the “Music Text Font” when calling the ApplyStyles() command unless the call was made to import ALLSTYLES. Now, the ApplyStyles() command functionality mirrors the Import House Style UI dialog within Sibelius, making it possible to import the “Music Text Font” by using the TEXT Style name (or any Style name that depends on TEXT) . Thanks to Bob Zawalich for his detailed reporting on this bug!
We’ve also fixed a couple of bugs too:
Exporting a MusicXML file via ManuScript is possible once more when called from a plugin
Accessibility:
As with all recent releases, we have aimed to improve the experience for those with sight loss. Although the formal agreement we have with Berklee College of Music is coming to an end, we will always strive to offer the best experience for these users. Our dedicated developer for accessibility, Edith, has done an incredible job this past year and I want to express my sincere thanks to her for everything she’s achieved – Sibelius certainly wouldn’t be where it is today without her contribution.
So, in this release, you can expect the following improvements:
Screen readers now announce text as you type! It’ll announce each letter, then the word as you press space to move to the next word. It’ll also speak the letter after the caret line too as you move through a word.
System object navigation just for easier, as it’s now possible to navigate to Instrument Names using Ctrl+Shift+-/+ and Cmd+Shift+-/+. Under the hood, it uses the ClickArea (i.e. can it be clicked on using a mouse pointer) to help the selection navigate to it. This has an added bonus of being able to navigate to an instrument name that has been deleted (e.g. select the instrument name and press delete. Select the Instrument name below it in the score and use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+- or Cmd+Shift+- and it’ll move the selection to the empty text field. Press F2 or Return and you’ll get a flashing cursor – it’s not incredibly clear, but useful nonetheless!).
In addition to this:
Screen readers can now access word menus using VoiceOver
When a stem is selected, the beam information is now read by the screen reader.
VoicerOver announces the values in numerical spin boxes on Mac e.g. number of copies in File > Print, Text > Numbering > Bar Number Change to set the new bar number etc.
File names, rather than the score’s title, are now read in the Recent Scores tab in the Quick Start
ComboBox controls are now accessible on Mac using VoiceOver
Checkable lists are now accessible, such as Preferences > Accessibility > “Exclude action types”. Previously, it wouldn’t announce whether the option is ticked or not, but now it does.
File > Import:
We’ve had great feedback on the recently improved MusicXML features, and in this release we aim to fine tune this even further. These include speed improvements to fine tuning the UI.
To help you speed through the mapping table, Sibelius can now handle stave mappings if done in quick succession.
We fixed a crash that could occur after mapping and adding techniques on Mac
The score preview progress bar is now consistent on both Windows and Mac platforms
Sibelius no longer crashes when importing a MIDI Type 0 file to a multi-stave instrument you’ve already assigned music to.
Up until now, tuplets have remained fairly allusive to the new MIDI and MusicXML import features. Now though, incoming tuplets (as well as any other borrowed rhythm) are no longer lost when merging into a single voice. Previously, Sibelius would bail out and omit these notes entirely.
The new “merging” logic only applies when merging monophonic lines (i.e. it won’t work with chords yet), and it does not work with nested tuplets. For unsupported passages, Sibelius reverts to the legacy behaviour. All these changes also apply to the Arrange feature too.
General:
As usual, we throw in a number of smaller fixes that cover several areas of the program, and this release is no different:
We’ve had reports that the “Magix Low Latency 2016” ASIO driver causes problems in Sibelius so we’ve blacklisted it from being initialised on startup.
The ‘Orchestra, film’ manuscript paper has been tidied up so the instrument name is no longer doubled, and the staves are all the same size in the parts.
Octave Lines can once again co-habitate with barlines. This is now the default in all new scores, but in your existing scores, you’ll need to restore the defaults in Magnetic Layout Options.
Palatino (used on Mac) and Palatino Linotype (used on Windows) now automatically substitute for one another, so you no longer see the Font Substitution dialog appear when moving a score across computers.
The “Musical structure” word menu in File > Preferences now displays correctly.
Tied Grace notes move the correct note within tie chains
We’ve fixed a rare crash on macOS 10.15 Catalina
Sibelius now displays Korean characters correctly in lyrics.
We’ve cleared up some inconsistencies with the Manuscript papers in non-English versions of Sibelius.
All the blank manuscript papers now use Podium fonts in all language versions.
In other news, we’ve started our validation on Big Sur running on both Intel and Arm processors. Initial tests have been very positive, so we’ll keep you updated as time goes on. If you’re testing on Big Sur too, please be aware that Sibelius is not officially supported at this time and we’ll be announcing compatibility as soon as it’s ready.
We hope you enjoy these improvements. We’ve already started on our next release for this year, and can’t wait to show you what we’ve been up to.

New in Avid Sibelius 2019.9 Build 1832 (Sep 20, 2019)

New in Avid Sibelius 2019.4.1 Build 1408 (May 13, 2019)

New in Avid Sibelius 2018.11 (Dec 13, 2018)

We’re really excited to introduce you to the November’s release for Sibelius | Ultimate, Sibelius and Sibelius | First. All three tiers are benefiting from this far-reaching update.
This release has mainly focused on modernizing the Sibelius codebase and many of the improvements are under the hood. These manifest themselves in the way Sibelius appears on your screen and draws the score, and is now even able to make use native OS features like Full Screen on Mac, DPI scaling on Windows, and so on.
In short, Sibelius has never been faster at redrawing the score as you drag individual objects or the page around; Sibelius has also never looked so good on high-DPI screens on Windows and Retina screens on Mac. We’ve thrown in some note spacing improvements and fixes to a slew of legacy bugs too.
If you can’t wait to get stuck in, open Application Manager on your computer to download and install the update. You can also get the update from your Avid account at my.avid.com/products. This update is available to all Sibelius | First users for free as well as all those subscribing to Sibelius or Sibelius I Ultimate, and to those with a license of Sibelius with a current Software Update and Support plan. If you need to renew, head over to your account.
If you’re on an older version of Sibelius, you can upgrade from one of our resellers or on our webstore.
Upgrading the Sibelius infrastructure:
The improvements in this release touch nearly every bit of the program. This is largely due to a complete upgrade of Sibelius’s underlying infrastructure, Qt. Qt is a cross-platform development framework that enables Sibelius to run on various platforms and devices. We’ve been using this since Sibelius 7, released in 2011, so it’s high time we upgraded this to take advantage of the new capabilities. The development team have been chipping away at this herculean effort for more than 2 years, so it’s a relief to get this out into the real world . This sets us up to provide more exciting features using the very latest cutting technology.
The UI:
I’ll start with the user interface (UI), since it’s the most obvious change. Overall, it now generally looks cleaner. Although Sibelius showed nice high-resolution images and icons in previous versions, Sibelius itself didn’t natively support high-DPI and Retina screens so very little of the UI was able to take advantage of these modern displays. Now though, you’ll notice some very subtle, and some more obvious, improvements in the way Sibelius displays the text and icons in the Ribbon.
Not all items in Sibelius have been upgraded to support the sharper icons – we still have some work to do in the Mixer, Ideas panel and so on, however the ground work has all been done now to make this much easier to implement and maintain in the future.
Sibelius is now able to take advantage of native OS features, and we’re able to make some other subtle changes such as:
You’ll see the scroll bars on Mac are now defined by the OS, so will show automatically based on your mouse or trackpad, as you set this up in System Preferences.
The pop-up messages now animate when they appear, and have the default color based on your System
On Windows, docked panels now have a narrower title bar so they take up less vertical space
Tick boxes in the Preferences used to be white-on-white, making it hard to know if they were ticked or not. These are now blue with a white tick, as you’d expect. This particularly affected the Input Devices and Timeline preferences.
Across all dialogs, the headings of each section would collide with the box below This was more noticeable in the Preferences and Engraving Rules dialogs.
On Windows:
Sibelius now respects any DPI scaling, and the evidence is apparent when you start Sibelius up. Everything from the splash screen to the Mixer are now scaled and no longer blurry or disproportionate. Since we can support any DPI scaling upwards of 125%, you’ll now see sharper icons as well as a well-proportioned Ribbon, utilizing the full horizontal space to display the features.
This also works when you have multiple monitors, allowing you to have your Panels on a different screen, or even your score and parts on different screens. Sibelius will now respect per-monitor DPI scaling, allowing the windows and panels to look great on a regular monitor or even a nice 4K monitor.
The Ribbon:
In previous versions of Sibelius, the Ribbon would get pretty crowded when using high DPI scaling, from 200%+, say. Now Sibelius will lay this out and better use the whole width of the screen.
Accessibility:
In this release, we’ve paid a lot of attention to improving the way Sibelius works with screen readers. Screen readers, for those who may not know, are applications that can read and describe what is happening on the computer screen to help users who can’t see the screen well, or even at all. Both Windows and macOS come with their own built-in solutions called Narrator and VoiceOver. There are popular 3rd party solutions such as NVDA that is an open-source screen reader for Windows.
The screen readers themselves don’t know anything about music notation, so it has been our job to generate descriptions of the score elements on the screen. As such, we have vastly improved the way screen readers read and describe what’s happening on the screen.
Sibelius will read the names of Manuscript Papers when tabbing through scores in the Quick Start, as well as read the dialog as you set up a new score. Once in the score, Sibelius will read the contents of the Ribbon as you access this with the keyboard. Since nearly all of Sibelius is keyboard accessible, it’s possible to navigate the program using keyboard shortcuts and hear what’s happening. For example:
Pressing Tab will select the first staff object in the score and describe what the object is and where it is
Sibelius will announce the action you do too, such as “Move” note, or “Edit” note. The description that follows is the same as when selecting objects.
Searching Sibelius with “Find in Ribbon” will speak the results too. The keyboard shortcut to access the Find in Ribbon box is simply comma “,”. When it has keyboard focus, you’ll hear Sibelius say: “Find in Ribbon, Editing text”.
You can then start typing to find and perform any action you need, for example: To reset the position of an object, for example, you type “reset” and Sibelius will provide a list of all features that have Reset in their name or in their description. Use the arrow keys to cycle through the results to hear them.
Pressing Return will then apply that change – even when not using a screen reader, using ‘comma’ to access Find In Ribbon is by far the fastest way to use Sibelius!
Each screen reader is different, and it’ll take more work on our side to gain parity with them all.
During the development of these improvements, we’ve also fixed the following legacy bugs we had with screen readers:
Sibelius no longer crashes when closing Audio Options or Playback Devices when using NVDA
The bar number is no longer spoken followed immediately by the succeeding bar number
Goodbye EPS, hello true black PDFs:
Due to limitations in Qt5, we aren’t able to continue to support Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) file export. As such, Sibelius 2018.7 was the last version to support this feature. However, exporting to PDF has been improved to support greyscale, which converts to only the K color channel in CMYK.
To use this, go to File > Export > Graphics, choose PDF and untick “include colored objects”. Alternatively, go to File > Export > PDF and, again, untick “Include colored objects”.
Note Spacing:
To improve on the note spacing features we’ve been introducing this year, we’ve fine tuned the following:
Reset Note Spacing in the score or part no longer affects the This only affected scores using Version 3 spacing though.
Sibelius now only respaces multi-voice bars when adding or removing notes when the “Respace multi-voice passages during note input and editing” preference is set. In recent releases, Sibelius would perform a ‘Reset Note Spacing’ under the hood during articulation and accidental editing, which was found to be too heavy handed.
Video playback:
We’ve changed the engines used in Sibelius to sync a video (or audio file) to a score. On Windows, we now use DirectShow for QMultimedia and on Mac we’ve replaced the old 32-bit QuickTime player with AVFoundation. This change may require you to re-encode your videos to one Sibelius now supports, or install the necessary codecs to play the video.
Switching between feature-sets:
Since our release in June this year, your installation of Sibelius has had three tiers inside the single installation, so Sibelius will run the feature-set you are eligible for. This has been useful for those starting with Sibelius | First, trying out the Sibelius features then subscribing or buying the full feature of Sibelius | Ultimate. Since then, we’ve had several requests to allow you to check out the Sibelius | First features, say, to see if they are suitable for your beginner students who are starting out with their music studies. In today’s release, we’ve introduced this feature for Sibelius | Ultimate users only: simply hold down the ‘Alt’ key when Sibelius starts up and you’ll see the following dialog asking you which variant of Sibelius you’d like you run.
Clicking the version you need will run Sibelius with just those features enabled. Restarting Sibelius, without holding down ‘Alt’, will revert to running the full Sibelius | Ultimate feature set. Windows users should be aware that you need to hold down ‘Alt’ just after running Sibelius. If you hold ‘Alt’ at the same time as running the application, you will see a Properties window appear.
Overall stability and bug fixes:
As with every release of Sibelius, we fix a number of bugs, both old and new. Here’s a summary of what’s included in this release:
Rhythm Dots:
When dotted notes in multiple voices share the same pitch, Sibelius now correctly (and consistently) only shows a single dot. Previously, Sibelius would only do this for notes that were in a space and not when on a line.
The correct number of dots are now displayed on dotted chords with two or three notes.
Kontakt 6 Support:
Kontakt 6 is now recognised as a “Kontakt” device rather than a standard AU or VST plugin. This means Sibelius will now be able to automatically load sounds as it has been able to do with Kontakt 5 and earlier. So, if you have a Kontakt library, such as Virtual Drumline, old or older version of GPO/JABB, Sample Logic’s Fanfare or Rumble etc. you can now use these in the latest version of Kontakt. It’s worth noting that Kontakt 6 appears simply as “Kontakt” in your Playback Configuration.
Bug fixes:
All the “Name” fields in the Edit Instrument dialog are retained when saving and reopening a score. As such, you can now use the “Instrument change name” and “Instrument change warning name” fields independently.
Engraving Rules > Chord Symbols: Characters are now displayed correctly in the Language drop-down list on Mac.
In the Timecode and Duration dialog, the “Start video from” field now works correctly.
Note input, and dragging text objects are no longer sluggish when the Inspector is open.
The Edit Lines and Edit Symbols dialogs are now much more stable under the hood. Before, it was even possible to invoke multiple cursors on Windows and cause incorrect navigation behavior on both Windows and Mac.
Plugins:
Split Bar plug-in no longer overwrites the right hand side barline with a Normal barline.
Join Bars plug-in works properly once more when creating special barlines.
Compatibility:
It’s important to be aware of the latest system requirements for the Sibelius products and this release contains the following changes:
Full support for macOS 10.14 Mojave
Sibelius will no longer run on Mac OS X Mavericks
Performance:
On the whole, Sibelius is now faster than ever before. You should notice this when dragging around the score, performing edits to multiple text objects, adding slurs and articulations across several systems, and making changes at the end of large scores – all of which are vastly improved.
If you’ve made it this far down the list of improvements in this build, I’m impressed – thanks for sticking with it! This release has been a long time coming, and we’re really proud of how much has been achieved. Upgrading architecture is no mean feat, and much of the original implementation of Qt has been refactored or rewritten to bring the improved support for accessibility, high-DPI screens and so on.

New in Avid Sibelius 2018.6 (Jul 20, 2018)

Today, we’re pleased to announce and release improvements to Sibelius that reach as far as installer and licensing, note spacing, workflow and a host of bug fixes.
This is a free update to all Sibelius and Sibelius | Ultimate customers with a current subscription or software update plan. To download the new installer, head to your Avid Master Account.
In conjunction, we’re also releasing our first ever free version of Sibelius: Sibelius | First. This completes our suite of “First” products alongside Pro Tools | First and Media Composer | First, perfect if you’re entering the world of music recording, production and video editing.
Sibelius 2018.6 not only delivers on improvements to long standing issues, but also simplifies our approach to developing and producing several applications and solutions to a huge variety of musicians. With the release of Sibelius | First today, we now have a complete desktop range of music software, an iOS app, an iOS SDK, and a whole ecosystem that lives on the Avid MediaCentral Platform in the cloud for running music publishing solutions that are delivering millions of scores around the world each month. Whether you’re a beginner, student, educator, professional musician, engraver or publisher, we now have something geared towards your musical need.
Sibelius – A New Single Installer:
We now have a single application called “Sibelius” that will run with the features based on the license you have activated. In the past, we’ve had separate applications for all the different flavours of Sibelius that would run with different features based on the version you had installed. The three tiers are:
Sibelius | First – will run when you have no license of either Sibelius or Sibelius Ultimate
Sibelius – will run only when you have a Sibelius license activated
Sibelius | Ultimate – will run when you have an Ultimate license activated
This allows a new customer to come in, try Sibelius | First, unlock more features by subscribing to Sibelius, then need the Ultimate features as their music and career develops etc.. On the practical side, it also allows us to reduce the number of installers we have to maintain, and simplify the activation process by consolidating the separate activation processes into one.
On a new computer, Sibelius will now only install a single application. On a computer that already has either Sibelius or Sibelius | Ultimate, or even Sibelius | First 2018.1 or earlier, these will get replaced by the new application, called “Sibelius”.

New in Avid Sibelius 8.7.2 (Nov 18, 2017)

Key Signatures and Instrument Changes:
This is an area we spent a lot of time on getting right. We’d like to thank our tireless beta testers for their feedback while we worked on improving this area of the program. Many of you will know that entering Instrument Changes would always come with a level of cleanup. Any change in key signature would be too close to the barline, and on the wrong side too. In the part, they would split the multirest and it would take a number of steps to get this right. In addition to this, if a Key Signature change would happen at the same time, you’d get two key signatures appearing at the same time. With Sibelius 8.7.2, this is now all handled for you.
Barlines:
Special barlines, which are accessed from Notations > Common > Barline, each have special properties. In previous versions, they would all split multirests, which was OK if you knew that was going to happen. However, many a Sibelius user has been confused to see a multirest split and not known why. In Sibelius 8.7.2 we have changed the behavior of some of these barlines:
Start repeat – split barlines
End Repeat – split barlines
Double – split barlines
Dashed – split barlines
Final – split barlines
Invisible – do not split barlines
Normal – do not split barlines
Tick – do not split barlines
Short – do not split barlines
Between Staves – do not split barlines
When opening older scores
Opening older scores in 8.7.2 that contain any of the barlines in the second list above now open with a ‘Split multirest’ above them in each part. This retains the layout of the score, and also gives you a useful visual indicator to show why the multirest is splitting. To snap this back into a single multirest, simply select the split multirest and tap delete.
Sibelius | Cloud Sharing
Accepting the Terms and Conditions for the first time now knows if you’ve just opened the Dashboard or clicked ‘Share’—if the latter, it no longer just opens the Dashboard but continues to share the score.
When sharing an unsaved score, the “Uploading Score” message only appears after you’ve saved the score.
When extracting parts, the files are now given their own FileID, allowing you to share these independently from the full score.
The Push button is now enabled and disabled more reliably.
General improvements in Sibelius:
Workflow:
Non-magnetic gliss and port lines are now red when they are selected—this matches the colour of non-magnetic slurs.
Text along lines is now horizontal once more. It can still follow the angle of the line when you specify a value to move the text up by a number of spaces (found in Edit Lines > Centered Text).
A long-standing issue, where you’d lose title pages and other blank pages when changing time signature at the beginning of the score, has been fixed.
Using the left/right arrow keys to navigate through the selection no longer causes the selection to skip into another voice when you pass an object in all voices, like a chord symbol, or staff-attached symbol.
In some cases, entering notes into a bar directly after an Instrument Change would add them in the next bar instead. This dates back a really long time but you’ll now find notes go into the bar that you intend them go into.
Adding Split Multirests are now added to the undo queue.
Sibelius would sometimes move the score when performing an undo action. This no longer happens.
UI and Documentation:
When exporting a PDF, the wildcards are now correct in French and German languages.
The Lines section of the Inspector is now localized.
Text is no longer cut off in the Quick Start > Learn tab for all languages except Japanese and Chinese (Mac only).
When importing Ideas, the import button was sometimes cut off—the dialog has been extended to show this button.
Several improvements to the Manuscript plug-in language documentation have been made.
General reliability:
When pasting Lyrics, the Undo/Redo queue no longer gets out of sync. Previously, it was possible to repeat a lyric rather than paste the next one in the clipboard.
Sibelius no longer crashes if you quit while still inputting text (Mac only).
A score that containing $NumPages wildcard, if exported and opened in Sibelius 7.5 will crash—we’ve found this happens due to a bug in Sibelius 7.5-8.5. We fixed this back in March as part of the Sibelius 8.6 and Cloud Publishing engine development (where we found the Cloud Publishing engine would hang on some scores).
Sibelius no longer starts up slowly when “Avid Application Manager Helper” is not running.
As part of our regular monitoring of crash reports that come in, we’ve found several reports where RoboForm would cause a crash due the way Sibelius handles text. We will address this in a future update but the advice for now is to disable RoboForm.
Music XML:
In response to any “Tempo Scale” effect, Sibelius now removes the metronome metric modulation but keeps the text indications. The XML output from Sibelius is now valid, and we’ll look into adding the tempo scale in the future.
Sibelius now opens the newer MusicXML 3.1 files with the .musicxml file extension.

New in Avid Sibelius 8.7.0 (Sep 29, 2017)

Sharing Scores: New UI and workflow in Sibelius:
Sibelius 8.7 introduces a set of new buttons in the Ribbon interface that provides you with integrated controls for sharing and managing your scores. When you click Share, your score is sent to the cloud for processing and a link to your score is automatically copied to your clipboard—and that’s it! No more exporting separate .html and .sib files, installing a plug-in, restarting your browser or even finding a computer with a browser that’ll work. Scores shared using Sibelius | Cloud Sharing will work in any browser, on any device.
Sharing a score online:
How does it work? When you press Share, Sibelius sends the score to your cloud account on Avid’s MediaCentral Platform (running on Microsoft Azure), which then starts processing it. The first thing that comes back is the URL to be shared. By the time you go to that URL, there’ll be little or no wait until the score has been rendered by our Cloud Publishing engine. The larger and longer your score is, the longer you’ll have to wait for it to be processed. As you can see, the dropdown presents additional options to embed code into web pages and blogs (more on this later), and the option to quickly stop sharing the score. Clicking Stop sharing stops scores from being viewed online immediately. You can share the score again, but clicking Share again will generate a new sharing URL.
Updating changes to the score:
What if you want to make changes to the score and share those? No problem! Pushing changes is simple. Once you’re ready to update a score that has already been shared, simply make the edits and click the Push button. You will be asked if you want to save changes to the score and push up the latest version. There’s no need to re-share the score, as the existing URL will continue to be used for that score. To see the changes reflected in the Viewer, simply refresh the page in your browser and it will automatically display the updated score. This eliminates the cumbersome workflow of exporting new pdf’s and mp3’s every time you edit your score, and significantly streamlines essential reviewing and collaboration workflows that are the lifeblood of most composers and arrangers.
Managing your shared scores:
Sibelius | Cloud Sharing also includes a new Dashboard for managing your shared scores. The Dashboard lists all the scores you’ve previously shared, allowing you to sort, search for, and manage whether a score is shared or not. It’s also extremely useful for getting a score’s shared URL without having to open it again in Sibelius.
Viewing and using shared scores:
The URLs are a link to your scores in your cloud account. You can freely share these with your friends, colleagues, students, teachers—anyone. How people view your shared scores on different platforms and devices will vary:
In a web browser:
The Cloud Publishing engine renders the scores using modern web technology (JavaScript and HTML5). Anyone you send the URL to (via email, text, etc.) can easily view and play your your score using any web browser.
Via social media and chat apps:
To share a score on a social media site, you simply paste in the sharing URL you are given by Sibelius. When posting into Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, and other media sites and chat apps, you’ll see a nice preview of the music embedded directly in the post. This is drawn from the metadata from the Score Info dialog in Sibelius which we’ve made available as part of the Viewer.
Embedded into web pages:
Sharing URL’s is obviously a great way to share your music, but for those of you who’d like to showcase your music on websites, or even build interactive learning resources, Sibelius helps you do this as well. Either from the Dashboard or from the Share dropdown, Sibelius provides you with embed code that you can use to easily add your score for these applications. It looks something like this: <iframe src=”https://sibl.pub/SHfG7-D” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe> Simply insert this code into your html page and the music appears when the page is rendered. We’ve tested several sites including WordPress, Canvas, and Atlassian, and they all work as expected.
The Sibelius Viewer:
The Viewer, which you may have seen before if you frequent the many sheet music publisher websites that use Sibelius | Cloud Publishing (including greatscores.com, musichorizon.com, virtualsheetmusic.com, musicroom.com, and others), is made up of individual SVGs for the pages of music, plus an MP3 for playback and a lot of metadata to tell the viewer where to place the playback line etc. All this, combined with some clever Javascript gives you an elegant Viewer that allows you to view, play back, and paginate through the score.
The sound:
The sounds you hear are an MP3 we generate in the cloud when processing the score. Our Cloud Publishing engine is a “headless” version of Sibelius that processes and renders the score, much like the one you have in Sibelius, along with an optimized version of the Sibelius Sounds library. As we need to quickly load this library in the cloud, these are the exact same sounds that are used in Sibelius, but with stripped down velocity layers and samples spread across multiple notes. The good news it that this optimized sound library retains nearly all the instruments and playing articulations, resulting in a very close rendition of what you’d hear with the full Sibelius Sounds library in Sibelius. This is a significant improvement over the Scorch plug-in, which relied on local onboard MIDI sounds.
The look:
What you’ll also notice is that your shared scores look just like they do in Sibelius thanks again to the Cloud Publishing engine. This means that anyone reviewing your score will see it just as you intended, with superior resolution as you zoom in and out.
How do I get Sibelius | Cloud Sharing:
Sibelius | Cloud Sharing is part of the Version 8.7 software update and available at no charge to anyone with a current Sibelius or Sibelius | First subscription or upgrade plan (as well as all new customers) .
Note that Sibelius and Sibelius | First have slightly different sharing entitlements. Sibelius | First enables you to share up to 20 scores at any one time, while Sibelius allows you to share an unlimited number of scores up to 1GB of storage on our cloud platform. All the assets we store are compressed, so you’ll need to share a good number of large scores before reaching this limit.
If your subscription or upgrade plan lapses, the scores that you’ve shared will remain available online where they have been posted, but you will not be able to share any new scores until you renew your support contract or subscription. The Dashboard will be available regardless, so you would still be able to share your URLs and retrieve embed code. As soon as the subscription or upgrade plan is renewed, you will again be able to share new scores.
Other updates included in Sibelius 8.7:
In addition to the new Sibelius | Cloud Sharing features, the Sibelius 8.7 software update also includes a good set of useful improvements, including:
Finding and filtering:
When filtering for articulations in Advanced Filter, the filter now applies to just those you had intended to be selected or deselected
When using Find/Find Next, the notehead type search works correctly
Color function now works when noteheads are selected by pitch using Advanced Filter
Gliss lines and slides:
Slides now work properly in all non-English localizations
The Lines section of the Inspector is now correctly localized
When exporting to previous versions of Sibelius, gliss lines are now positioned in the same place vertically—Magnetic Layout for these lines is switched off to allow them to stay close to notes and not get moved further away
General bug fixes and performance improvements:
Legato passages play back correctly once more
Score redraw is no longer slow to respond with jpegs at the start of a score
Making a change in one bar no longer resets the spacing in a bar on another system
Space after key sig warning is no longer too wide compared to Sibelius 8.3 and earlier
Sibelius no longer crashes after using user batch plug-ins from Edit Plug-ins window
When Sibelius starts for the first time, the Activate button now opens the Account page in Application Manager—this will prompt the user to log in, which will trigger an auto-activation of Sibelius, therefore removing the steps of finding license numbers and entering them in manually—it also ensures that you are logged in already to make the sharing of music go smoothly
In some cases, Sibelius would crash when using sample rates of 96kHz or 192kHz after exporting audio—this no longer happens
The borders around buttons in the Inspector are now easier on the eye
Checking the “Use on single notes” checkbox in Engraving Rules > Ties 2 now persists after closing the Engraving Rules dialog
“Change instrument names at start of system after instrument changes” in Engraving Rules > Instruments now has the correct German translation
Sibelius is now generally more snappy

New in Avid Sibelius 8.1.0 Build 91 (Jul 21, 2017)

This small update follows the recent 8.6 release, where we introduced Magnetic Glissandi lines, allowing you to quickly and easily draw gliss lines and slides that attach themselves to notes. If you often use these lines in your compositions or orchestrations, this feature alone will save you precious time. 8.6 also included a number of improvements ranging from settings in the Inspector to Music XML improvements to now being more than 10% faster at starting up!
Sibelius 8.6.1 builds on all these, fixing a good handful of bugs along the way. In summary:
Playback:
Guitar slides from the Keypad now respond to changes in playback, which are set in the Inspector and the Edit Instruments dialog. The choices are Chromatic, White Notes, Black Keys, Continuous or None.
Trills that trigger soundID changes of +trill.half and +trill.whole now play back more reliably
The option to enable MP3 surround encoding has been removed from the Audio Export options
Exporting scores to previous versions of Sibelius:
When exporting to previous versions of Sibelius, gliss lines are, in most cases, now positioned in the same place vertically. Sibelius does this best when exporting to 8.1-8.5 but some shift may occur when exporting to 8.0 and earlier.
Engraving improvements:
Sibelius now positions accidentals correctly when engraving rules set to “prefer top accidental at right”.
Spacing between clef and the first note has been improved. It’s worth noting that scores created in Sibelius 8.4 to 8.6.0 will have had a small amount of extra space allocated to key signatures in some cases. This has now fixed in 8.6.1 but if you’ve manually adjusted the spacing in scores using 8.4-8.6.0, you’ll need to check this spacing for any adverse affects. The change is so small that we expect this has largely gone unnoticed.
The gap after a double barline in an unpitched instrument part can now be reset once more—there’s no need to delete the hidden key signature marking as a workaround.
The positions of Glissandi lines and Slides (LX, RX, LY) are now retained when opening an old score in 8.6. This means scores with Slides that had their ends manually adjusted in a previous version of Sibelius, now appear exactly the same when opened in 8.6.1. However, if old scores have been saved in 8.6, their Slides will continue to be offset. To fix this up, you can filter out all regular ‘Lines’, being careful to deselect any lines in the score that aren’t slides, and reset their position.
General stability:
Sibelius no longer crashes when rapidly creating a new score from the Quick Start.
Revoice Chord Diagram now works as expected once more.
It’s possible once again to be able to delete a user-created Guitar Scale Diagram.
When in note input mode, the color of the mouse pointer is now the same as on keypad.
Sibelius no longer crashes when recording Live Tempo if the playback line is at the end of the score.
Staff size change of a system is no longer lost after deletion and undo action, if it’s not the first system.
Avid Scorch:
In addition to these two releases, we have a new version of our Avid Scorch iOS app that includes compatibility with files created in Sibelius and Sibelius | First 8.6.1, as well as improvements to playing back to connected external MIDI devices.

New in Avid Sibelius 8.1.0 Build 91 (Mar 11, 2016)

New in Avid Sibelius 7.5.1 Build 209 (Jul 7, 2014)

Highlights:
Sibelius 7.5 Reference and What’s New Guide have been fully translated into all 9 languages
Audio and video export now occurs faster than real-time
It’s now possible to have both Sibelius 7 and Sibelius 7.5 activated on the same computer (within the terms of the license)
Better support for high resolution displays on Windows; specifically, the QuickStart now displays properly
An old problem going back several versions of Sibelius has been fixed where Sibelius would crash after the computer was woken from sleep
A problem where the breath mark “comma” produces staccato playback has been fixed
Sibelius and the Sibelius License Server will now run correctly once more on Mac OS 10.6 and 10.7
Resolved a crash that could happen if a score has more than 128 instruments
We’ve fixed a problem where some Rhythmic feels may have been missing from the Performance dialog
Sibelius 7.5 no longer crashes if using a ‘Jump to’ and ‘Marker’ repeat structure
Mordents and Inverted Mordents now play back correctly
Ties now play back correctly again when using Repeat Bars
Preferences stored by plugins are now correctly saved
Video export and sharing to Facebook and YouTube have been improved
Playback line is no longer a beat behind (this accuracy varies depending on your playback device)
Problems posting to Facebook have been resolved
The tempo in the score is correctly reflected in the video
Further fixes to make the connection with Sibelius and Pro Tools more reliable when using ReWire
It’s possible, once again, to install Sibelius silently on Windows.
Timeline:
Long instrument names are now clipped to show more of the Timeline
Focus on Staves is now reflected in the Timeline
More musical symbols are displayed in the lanes (Repeats and Metric Modulations, for example)
Text and symbols are displayed on more appropriate lanes
It’s now possible to click+drag around the Timeline to navigate the score, similar to how the Navigator works
Hidden objects are now reflected in the Timeline and honor the option in View > Invisibles > Hidden Objects
F# Minor now shows as F# Minor on the Key Signatures lane
Comments are now shown in the Timeline with the same color they appear in the score
Various performance optimizations
Accessibility:
We’ve improved the way objects, menus and dialogs in Sibelius are read by screen readers, specifically when using NVDA on Windows. We also have some brand new plug-ins for Sibelius 7.5.1 that aid navigation of staff and system objects in the score. Many thanks to Kevin Gibbs, Gordon Kent and Bob Zawalich for their assistance. These plug-ins and supporting documentation for the improvements will be published soon.

New in Avid Sibelius 7.5 (Jul 7, 2014)

What's new in Sibelius 7.5:
Sibelius is the world’s best-selling music notation software, trusted by top composers, publishers, and students alike. With Sibelius 7.5, you can express, accelerate, and promote your creativity in more ways than ever before, enabling you to deliver beautiful, professional scores faster and share audio and video versions of your work—with stunningly realistic musical phrasing—to make your talent stand out from the crowd. It’s the fastest, smartest, easiest way to write music for live performance, film and television, media entertainment, or in the classroom.
Unrivalled expressiveness and feel:
With the unique and fully redesigned Espressivo 2.0 feature, Sibelius gives you complete control over and customization of the rhythmic feel of any individual part to produce more expressive and realistic musical phrasings. And because the software can now better interpret such notation distinctions as tempo markings, metric emphasis, grace notes, mordents, caesuras, and breath marks on playback, you can hear every nuance of your score—the way you intended it to be heard.
Accelerated navigation:
With the new Timeline window, you get a quick view of the entire structure of your score—no matter how large or complex—enabling you to navigate to any part fast for editing or playback. Simply click on any bar, in the timecode ruler, or on any landmark—the important objects that make up your score, including rehearsal marks, repeat structures, comments, key signatures, tempo, and more—to jump immediately to that section.
Easy collaboration and sharing:
Get all of the score sharing and social media features of Sibelius | First in Sibelius, enabling you to collaborate more easily with others and distribute your compositions for the world to hear. Share scores through email, upload and publish them as sheet music on ScoreExchange.com, and even share your composition as a video or audio file on YouTube, Facebook, and SoundCloud.
Export video of your composition:
Save a video file of your score to share your work with others on a DVD or online. Sibelius can export in a variety of resolutions—up to 1080p—in QuickTime format (.mov) on Mac or Windows Media Video (.wmv) on Windows, enabling others to see and hear your work without requiring Sibelius.
Full Scorch app integration:
Export Sibelius scores directly to Avid Scorch on your iPad (available on iTunes) for fully interactive playback, practice, performance, and publishing. Sibelius automatically optimizes your score for iPad display, paying special consideration to page orientation, number of staves, margin sizes, and more.
Localized for Brazil and Russia:
If Brazilian Portuguese or Russian is your native tongue, Sibelius 7.5 offers new native support for these languages in addition to English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.

New in Avid Sibelius 7.0.3 Build 63 (Nov 18, 2011)

Task-oriented user interface:
The brand-new Sibelius 7 user interface provides task-focused tabs that lead you through the process of creating a score from start to finish. Every feature has both an icon and a text description—which you can access via a button or a keyboard shortcut—with full contextual help available when you need it.
Professional sound library—only in Sibelius:
You finesse every detail of your score—you want to hear every nuance during playback. Sibelius 7 includes more than 38 GB of professional content, including a specially recorded symphony orchestra, rock and pop instruments, and much more. This exclusive content is only available in Sibelius 7.
Native 64-bit support—only in Sibelius:
Today’s 64-bit capable hardware and operating systems provide big speed and memory advantages. Sibelius 7 is the world’s first 64-bit notation software, enabling you to unlock the full power of your 64-bit system—and work more quickly, with more virtual instruments and effects, than ever before.
Optimized for single monitor use—only in Sibelius:
We understand that many of our customers favor laptops or other single-display systems. That’s why we designed the Sibelius 7 interface to allow you to focus on the music at all times—and easily hide information that you only need to see occasionally.
Switch to Sibelius from Finale:
There’s never been a better time to switch from Finale® to Sibelius. Sibelius now features a step-time note input method that is very similar to Finale software’s Speedy Entry method—right down to using many of the same keystrokes. So if you know how to input notes in Finale, you know Sibelius too. And because today’s workflows include a wide variety of software applications, Sibelius 7 now includes full MusicXML export capability, so you can exchange files with hundreds of other applications, including Finale.
Text and typography enhancements:
Take advantage of the latest OpenType fonts, including advanced features like ligatures, and employ them in text frames with full DTP-level capabilities. There’s no need to export projects to a separate DTP application—now you can complete many of them within Sibelius 7.
Graphics import and export:
Sibelius 7 makes it easy to import graphics in all major formats, then manipulate them to build complex layouts for publishing, creating teaching materials, instructional books, and more. You can export the full score as publication-quality graphics in PDF format, plus individual pages or smaller sections in EPS, PNG, and SVG formats. It’s never been faster or easier to finish the job to the highest standards.

New in Avid Sibelius 6.1.0 Build 3 (Nov 2, 2009)

Power tools:
Shift-drag moves objects horizontally/vertically
Alt+drag or Option-drag moves object without moving attachment position
Ctrl+drag or Command-drag suspends Magnetic Layout while moving
Tab advances to next bar when inputting chord symbols
New Keypad button to stop note input or deselect (for smartboards)
View handles – makes ends of lines etc. easier to select
Playback:
Set duration of and silence after fermatas (pauses), individually or throughout
Double-click fader in Mixer resets it to default position (new since v5.0)
Shift or Ctrl/Command when opening instrument strip opens all similar/all other strips (new since v5.0)
Omit muted staves when exporting MIDI file (option)
Look & feel:
Hide particular toolbar buttons
Auto-hide toolbar buttons if insufficient room
Move around Symbol and Edit Symbols dialogs with arrow keys, and see symbol names
Smoother zoom with Ctrl+mouse wheel
Set paper & desk texture of versions
Many other look & feel improvements
Engraving & notations:
Dynamics automatically above vocal staves
Lines split between systems more controllable - e.g. two halves have independent vertical positions and slur/tie shape
Line ends easier to select
Chord symbols appear by default as diagrams on guitar notation staves, chord text on other staves
Tie thickness adjustable
Tuplets always above notes on vocal staves (option)
Accidentals persist after mid-bar clef changes
Width of empty bar varies with bar length (option)
Automatic breve bar rests in 4/2
Special staff spacing for multi-staff instruments (e.g. keyboards, divided winds)
Move rehearsal marks & tempo text up/down without affecting ones on other staves in same place
Better default positions of many text styles and lines
Cross-staff beams improved
Ossia staves improved
Plug-ins:
Check Redundancies - hides/deletes unnecessary clef/key/time signature changes etc.
Export Each Staff as Audio - for importing into a sequencer
Convert Folder of Scores to Earlier Version
Other plug-ins improved
Network licenses:
Easier network installation
Client copies can connect from any IP address
Largest network license now unlimited (previously 255 computers)
Use same preferences for all users of a computer
Other improvements:
Many editing operations faster, particularly on large selected passages
Reminds you to save a version when you close a score
Improved manuscript papers for new scores
Auto-select US or European paper sizes for new scores or imported files
Imports octave lines in MusicXML files
Various bugs fixed

New in Avid Sibelius 5.0.0 Build 20 (Jun 8, 2007)

Universal Binary
As usual, Sibelius 5 supports the very latest technologies. It�s now a Universal Binary application, so it runs at top speed on Intel-based Macs. You can use it on the new Leopard operating system (Mac OS X 10.5), and it also has improved tab, mouse and scroll wheel support.
Power tools
Clefs change where necessary if you switch between sounding pitch and transposing score
Transpose to specified key (rather than by interval)
Add blank pages up to next left/right-hand page (for page turns in complex parts)
Go To Bar steps through each occurrence of the bar number if it recurs in several movements or songs
Select & delete system/page breaks & other layout marks
Export graphics in PNG format, plus BMP on Mac too
Cue-sized graphics
Graphics scale on small staves
400 different instruments
Delete Bar menu item
Plug-ins
Make Piano Four Hands Layout splits the music between left- and right-hand pages
Add Capo Chord Symbols: for guitars with capos
Add Continuous Controller Changes: produce special MIDI effects for sample libraries
Groovy Music Mark-Up: for exporting music to Groovy Music educational software
Improvements to: Accidentals plug-ins, Calculate Statistics, Pitch Mapping, Scales & Arpeggios
Engraving
Edit aperture of either end of hairpins individually
Hairpins no longer cross system breaks unnecessarily, and always point the right way after a system/page break
Hidden music no longer affects visible note stems and rest positions
Hide empty staves even if they have hidden objects (e.g. cues) on them
Accidentals now at correct size when normal and cue-sized voices coincide
Text
Plain & boxed system text styles (for instructions to appear in score & parts)
Text styles for composer, title etc. on title pages
You can make text cue-sized
Correctly number bars split between two systems
Select all bar numbers on a system using Select More
Bar number changes automatically centered in the bar when bar numbers are
Various new & improved characters in various fonts
Align page-aligned text to margin of first page or current page
Look & Feel
Fit Page Height zoom level (useful with Panorama)
Extra tutorial videos covering main new features
On-screen Reference is now in PDF format � opens faster and easier to read
Improved dialogs, e.g. Edit Text Style, playback dictionary
Extra keyboard shortcuts
New desk textures
Use different textures when editing ideas
Texture preview
Playback & MIDI
Show/hide empty staves when importing a MIDI file
Export Type 0 MIDI files
Set tick resolution (PPQ) of exported MIDI files
Choose which sound set to export a MIDI file for
Multiple input devices � no need to choose which one you�re using
Alternate pitched & unpitched percussion playback on same staff
Other improvements
Easier network installation using standard Windows Installer (.msi) package
Scorch now fully Firefox-compatible on Windows and Mac
Sibelius files much smaller � about 20K plus typically just 1K per page
Export in Sibelius 4 format
Various bugs fixed

New in Avid Sibelius 4.0.0 build 1 (Apr 18, 2007)

New Dynamic Parts: full score and all instrumental parts are in the same file, and any changes made in the score are automatically reflected in the part, and vice versa; no more part extraction!
New Worksheet Creator: more than 1700 ready-made worksheets, resources and other teaching and learning materials, covering a broad spectrum of music curricula, age ranges and levels of ability. Easily create your own worksheets and add them to the Worksheet Creator, or publish them online for your students to download at SibeliusEducation.com!
New video feature: add a digital video to your Sibelius score, and play it back in sync with your composition. New hit points and other improvements to timecode and playback controls make it simple to "compose to picture," opening up new possibilities both in education and for professional composers.
Copy and paste directly from Sibelius into other programs, e.g. Microsoft Word, to make the preparation of music examples a breeze
Fresh new look and feel, with a clean new look, redesigned playback controls, new functions for hiding and showing Sibelius's tool windows, improved zooming and navigation, streamlined menus and dialogs, and more
The complete text of the Sibelius Reference book is available on-screen in searchable, printable HTML format
New tutorial videos, presented by Sibelius co-founder Ben Finn, will help you learn the main features of Sibelius, especially the new ones
SibeliusEducation.com web site, to help the increasing number of schools, colleges and universities that are making use of the internet and virtual learning environments to help organize classes, teaching materials and homework. SibeliusEducation.com will make it easier for you to organize your teaching materials, will save you having to print out or photocopy lots of copies of worksheets, and will prevent your students losing work they have been set: you and they can access work from anywhere.
New Optical ties and Optical beam positions produce the best default appearance of any notation program, and offer many new options for customizing the defaults to match your own house style
Improved importing of files created in Finale and other music programs, with the addition of the ability to import MusicXML files
Many new music fonts, including a new music font family, Helsinki, which offers an elegant alternative to Opus, plus other new fonts for Roman numerals, figured bass, complex tempo markings, and more
11 new plug-ins, including Copy Articulations and Slurs (copies articulations without copying the notes), Add Simple Harmony (creates a simple accompaniment to a given melody for guitar or piano, with a variety of accompaniment styles), Strummer (creates realistic-sounding guitar strum patterns for playback), and Smarten Quotes (automatically converts straight quotes in text into "smart" curly ones). A number of existing plug-ins have also been improved.
Sophisticated new behavior prevents Sibelius from moving the score around on the screen unnecessarily during note input and editing
New "z on stem" symbol for percussion buzz rolls on the F10 Keypad layout
Sibelius can now print the current date and time at the footer of every page you print, making it simple to keep track of revisions as you work
Export files that can be opened directly by Sibelius 3 and Sibelius 2 - no need for third-party plug-ins to enable backwards compatibility
Improvements to supplied PhotoScore Lite scanning package, including the ability to read 2-, 3- and 4-line staves, up to four voices per staff, and more. Full PhotoScore Professional 4 package is also available separately