Sibelius

Sibelius is the world's best-selling music notation software for Mac. It is as intuitive to use as a pen, yet so powerful that it does most things in less than the blink of an eye. The demo includes example scores and a demo user guide summarizing the main features of the program.

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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.

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.

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.

Sibelius on High Sierra:

• Sibelius and Sibelius First 8.7.2 is now supported on macOS High Sierra. Although I’m sure earlier versions of Sibelius 8 will likely work, we haven’t tested anything other than the latest versions.

Note On Compatibility:

• Sibelius will only run when the hard drive is formatted in non-case-sensitive formatting. This is the default, so in general everyone will be safe. If you have purposely reformatted your hard drive to be case sensitive, which you need to have tried quite hard to do, then Sibelius’ playback and other features won’t work well at all.