Sibelius for Mac

What's new in this version:

Sibelius 2024.3
- Sibelius 2024.3 releases breakthroughs in MIDI workflows between Sibelius and Pro Tools, allowing you to copy and paste MIDI between the applications. This groundbreaking feature streamlines music production, making it an industry first.
- The Keypad continues to evolve to be resizable and display custom articulations. Also introducing Sibelius Connect, a brand new way to automate workflows and enable apps to remotely control Sibelius.


Sibelius 2022.12
- 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


Sibelius 2022.10
- We’re pleased to announce the immediate release of our November update to Sibelius for mobile. This includes the much-requested feature to import MusicXML files into Sibelius, allowing you to transfer music from other notation applications from your desktop computer, or directly from other apps on your iPhone or iPad. There are a small number of stability improvements too.
- MusicXML is a standard interchange file format used by hundreds of notation apps. Sibelius on desktop has been able to import and export these for several years, so we’re pleased to be able to introduce the ability to import MusicXML files into Sibelius on mobile.
- The process to import a MusicXML file is simple using the Files app on iOS, or by browsing the files on your device from within Sibelius, where you can use iCloud or Dropbox to transfer your music from other devices. You can open either .musicxml or .mxl compressed files, or the older .xml files in Sibelius.
- The scores will quickly open up and take the layout, formatting, and musical objects from the MusicXML file. As on desktop, Sibelius then does some tidying up to improve the notation where it can, but as this is real Sibelius on mobile, you can now go to town changing the music and layout as you see fit.
- A .sib file is created and saved in the same folder you opened the MusicXML file from, or will be saved in the Sibelius folder on your iPad if you opened the file directly from another app on your device.
- Transferring music from a third-party app is really easy. There are several apps out there that allow you to create music in various ways, either by handwriting using the Apple Pencil or by taking a photograph of the sheet music. Two popular apps for this are Neuratron’s NotateMe, and Organum’s PlayScore 2.


Sibelius 2020.9
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.


Sibelius 2020.6
- Change log not available for this version


Sibelius 2019.9
- Change log not available for this version


Sibelius 2019.4
Keep scores safe in Review mode:
- With the new locked-down, read-only Review mode, copyists, engravers, orchestrators, publishers, and teachers can have peace of mind knowing that you can’t accidentally edit or move anything out of place as you review a score. Freely navigate compositions and add comments to communicate rehearsal notes, feedback, or directions to an editor, engraver, or student. You can even annotate parts directly with a stylus or Surface Pro pen.

Spark ideas with loop playback:
- When composing, sometimes the best way to come up with parts is to improvise different melody lines, riffs, and chords over a section of music. Sibelius now enables you to select any part of your score for loop playback, so you can quickly experiment. You can even slow down the tempo during loop playback for easier rehearsal and lesson practice—ideal for students and teachers.

Find plugins fast:
- Sibelius makes composing, arranging, and engraving scores even easier through a variety of available plugins (most are free!) that can add functionality to the software or perform complex tasks for you. And now it’s easier to find the plugins you need with new search capabilities built into the Install Plug-ins dialog.

Notate and play back parts in unison:
- Got multiple instruments playing the same notes and melody lines in your score, such as an ensemble of violin or trumpet players? Instead of hearing only one voice play, Sibelius now supports playback for n players with Sibelius Sounds, NotePerformer, and other compatible sound libraries, enabling you to hear all of the richness and distinct nuances of having multiples of the same instrument part play together in unison.


Sibelius for Mac 2018.11
- 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 S- ibelius 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


Sibelius for Mac 2018.6

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.

Bug Fixes:
- Empty text boxes no longer remain after removing multiple items of text with undo
- Multiple cursors are now displayed when entering expression and technique text across multiple staves
- Keyboard focus is now brought back to a text object after changing the size of it in Text > Format > Size
- As well as several improvements to grace notes, Sibelius will now retain the spacing correctly when copy and pasting passages. This saves the extra step to reset the note spacing.
- When the Quick Start is disabled, the blank score that is automatically created used Version 2 voice spacing instead of Version 3
- Several rare problems entering lyrics and chord symbols have all been resolved. This even included a crash and issues with the Undo queue
- A lyrics extender line now no longer reappears after saving and reopening a score. This would only happen if there were empty bars between two lines of music that contained lyrics.
- In rare cases, Sibelius would crash when working with text
- You can now enter multiple pieces of text or lines using a very short lasso selection
- When entering multiple hairpins onto a minim followed by a minim rest, it no longer results in a hairpin under the rest
- Deleting the first bar of a score no longer deletes the time signature:
- Continuing the improvements from April’s release, where we added the ability to delete the first bar of the score without losing your Title page and other blank pages, title, composer and other text etc.. In today’s release, the Time Signature is no longer lost. This works in such a way that it retains the Time Signature that was in the first bar of the score, as you would expect, however Sibelius will now check to see if the next bar contains a Time Signature change, and places that in the new ‘bar 1’ after the deletion. For example, if you’re deleting bars 1 to 5, and there’s a Time Signature Change in Bar 6, Sibelius will now display the Time Signature that was in bar 6, rather than retaining the initial Time Signature that was in bar 1. If you’re used to being cautious of deleting bar 1, try it now – it’s really quite liberating!


Sibelius for Mac 8.7.2
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.

Sibelius for Mac 8.7
- Sibelius | Cloud Sharing is now available with the new Version 8.7 Sibelius and Sibelius | First software update. Leveraging the power of Sibelius | Cloud Publishing and running on the Avid MediaCentral Platform, this groundbreaking technology enables you to send Sibelius scores to the cloud for rendering that can be displayed in any web browser, posted on social media, and embedded in webpages and blogs, to be viewed by anyone, on any device.

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

Sibelius for Mac 8.6.1
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

Sibelius for Mac 8.6.0
MAGNETIC GLISSANDI:
- Sibelius automatically places your glissandi lines as you enter them into the score, positioning them between the two notes. As you compose, Sibelius automatically updates the positioning of the glissandi lines, saving you the manual steps of positioning the lines on creation, and subsequently when editing the notes too
- When entering Glissandi lines (Gliss, Port, or Wavy) in your score, you will now find these position themselves between the two notes, and will attach themselves to these notes, following the notehead as you move it. This saves you the manual steps to reposition the lines when creating them, and subsequently with editing the notes too

The method for entering these lines has changed slightly, but it should feel familiar enough to experienced Sibelius users and is straightforward to grasp for new users. To enter the new gliss., port., or wavy lines, select the note with which you would like to start the line, and choose the line from the Lines gallery. Sibelius will draw the line from the note you have selected, to the next note:
- You'll see the line is placed between the note you have selected and the next note
- Lines follow the direction of notes as you edit them
- Sibelius automatically provides more space for rhythm dots and accidentals
- Glissandi lines will even slope upwards or downwards between two notes on the same position on a staff to show the direction the gliss is going

CHANGING THE APPEARANCE:
- In Sibelius 8.5, we introduced the new Inspector, which brings relevant settings and features within easy reach and streamlines your workflow in Sibelius. With Sibelius 8.6, we’ve added new features to the Inspector to give you ultimate control over the new glissandi lines. In your score, select a new glissandi line, and open the Inspector (Ctrl+Shift+I/Cmd+Shift+I)

In the Lines section, you now have the following controls:
- Slide ends: This allows you to fine-tune the precise position of each end of the gliss line
- Slide style: Changes the type of line from a Glissando, Portamento, Wavy, or a Line
- Slide text: Allows you to toggle the “gliss.” or “port” text that runs along the line
- This will happen automatically when the lines get too short to display the text, but you can override this, which is useful in cases where you need to
- If you wish to place a gliss line freely and independently of a note, you may do so by first deselecting anything you have selected (by pressing Escape) and then adding the line from the Lines menu. Since the line you create this way is not attached to any notes, the Inspector controls that are available for magnetic gliss lines are not available.

CREATING MULTIPLE GLISSANDI LINES AT ONCE:
- Creating multiple gliss lines at once is fast and simple to achieve with Sibelius 8.6. In previous versions, you had to add the line manually, and then adjust each one by hand. If you then changed the notes, the line would then need to be manually positioned again. Now it’s really easy
- Select the notes you’d like to add the lines to, go to Lines, and choose the type of line you need
- You can then use the Inspector to toggle the text off

CUSTOMIZING LINES:
- If you need to move the ends of the lines, you can manually reposition them by dragging one using your mouse or selecting it and making fine adjustments using your keyboard. As you make further edits to the notes, the line will retain its relative position to the notehead to which it is attached. This is useful when indicating the gliss should go to a different note in the chord, say, or even when writing passages across a grand staff with cross-staff beaming. Once this has been done, you’ll see the lines move relative to the notes as you edit them. To reset the line’s ends to their default position, select the line and go to Appearance > Design and Position > Reset Position.
- Creating your own lines in Sibelius is easy as well. You simply go to Notations > Lines > Edit Lines, and then choose the line you’d like to edit or to create a new line from. In the cases of the Gliss or Port lines, you can change the text that runs along the line, to whatever you need.
- Any custom lines that you have created based on gliss lines receive the same treatment from the Inspector allowing you to edit them in the same manner as the ones that Sibelius provides by default

ADDITIONAL TWEAKS FOR WRITING FOR GUITAR NOTATION:
Slides, up until now, have always been able to play back a continuous slide (that is, if you slid your finger up a fretless guitar), but from Sibelius 8.6, you’ll be able to change the way these play back from the Inspector:
- Opening old scores in Sibelius 8.6
- Sibelius will open any score from Sibelius v1 all the way through to Sibelius 8. These will open up in exactly the same way as before and will not move or convert any gliss. lines. This is important to retain the same careful layout you’ve spent so much time on. However, adding further glissandi to your score in Sibelius 8.6 will now create the new style of line

OPENING SCORES FROM 8.6 IN OLDER VERSIONS OF SIBELIUS:
- As ever, Sibelius has a way to convert a score into an older version, allowing you to work with someone who hasn’t upgraded to Sibelius 8.6 yet. This is simply done by going to File > Export > Previous Version and choosing the version of Sibelius you need to export to.
- When doing this, Sibelius will convert what it can into the equivalent object that was supported by the previous version. In the case of the new glissandi lines, these are all converted into the old style gliss. line and their positions are retained.

NEW MANUSCRIPT SUPPORT FOR MAGNETIC LINES:
- In Sibelius’ built-in scripting language, called ManuScript, Line objects now have a new SlideStyleId variable representing the Line style state of the note. This read/write variable lets you attach or detach glissandi as well as other lines to a note.
- You can also define and assign additional custom Line styles that are not based on the available default Line styles (see Line styles in the ManuScript Language Guide for more information).

MUSICXML IMPROVEMENTS:
- The new Magnetic Glissandi lines feature was borne out of an overall improvement and better support for MusicXML. It’s a long term project that we will chip away at for a while. When we started to work on adding support for importing glissandi lines, we needed a way to position these nicely to notes. As such, we rewrote how these lines are handled, so there is now very minimal cleanup to do after importing MusicXML files.
- Here’s a summary for the changes to MusicXML that are included in Sibelius 8.6:Better support for small staves (improvements on support added into Sibelius 8.5)Sibelius now imports page margin values correctly (in previous versions, margins form odd pages were applied onto even pages, and vice versa)Ties are now no longer missing in chords over bar lines, and the direction of ties are respected (over or under)
- We’ve also made several improvements to the way MusicXML files are parsed in general. As we all know, not all MusicXML files are created equally, so Sibelius 8.6 is now less prone to crashing or failing in some way when opening malformed MusicXML files.

IMPROVEMENTS TO MANY LONG-STANDING ISSUES:
- As well as introducing new features and new ways to work in Sibelius, we are working on some old and hard-to-crack issues to improve Sibelius’ stability and overall performance. Some of these may be small niggling bugs and others will be larger scale issues that may have been getting in the way. Here’s the list of what’s included under the hood in the 8.6 upgrade.

GENERAL:
- Sibelius is now over 10% faster starting up
- Auto-save now works much more reliably. This is the feature where Sibelius will periodically save a copy of your score. If Sibelius unexpectedly quits, Sibelius will now recover the most recent version of the file, and hopefully won’t have lost too much work. To set how often Sibelius auto-saves, go to File > Preferences > Saving and Exporting.
- When opening older scores in Sibelius 8.6, rests in parts are now where you expect them to be positioned
- Sibelius no longer crashes when doing ‘Paste as Cue’ followed by ‘Undo’. This only occurred when pasting across different time signatures
- When sliding notes from one page to the next, your selection is now followed so it’s clearer to see what’s happening
- Annotating when the Inspector the is open is now muchsmoother
- Improvements to the licensing engine, which should result in fewer “Error Initializing License Engine” messages
- Editing values and navigating fields in the Inspector is now easier
- The Inspector now resizes vertically when undocked

MAC:
- Characters created with Shift + Option + shortcuts are no longer doubled
- When editing text with Shift + Option + Left/Right Arrow no longer deletes the text you’re editing
- Editing text in the Backstage (Score Info, dialog boxes etc.) with Shift + Option + Left/Right Arrow no longer deletes text as you do it
- Sibelius will no longer hang when attempting to play back to a disconnected audio device

APPLICATION MANAGER:
- Application Manager 17.5 is now included with Sibelius, which introduces a new Open button enables you to open Sibelius directly from the Apps tab. The Open button only appears if you have an active Avid Upgrade and Support plan or subscription, and Sibelius is up to date.
- The following improvements have also been included:
- Application Manager no longer randomly opens a terminal window on Mac
- Choosing to restart App Man Helper in the Preferences tab is now nice and quick

Sibelius for Mac 8.5.0
Inspector:
- Part of the overall vision we have for the way you work in Sibelius, looks at minimizing features being hidden away in menus and dialogs, and presenting them in a clean and feature-packed Inspector panel. This will allow you to select an object in the score and see all the properties and possibilities for editing that object. Sibelius 8.5 is our first foray into this, by adding the new Staff size options, and we’ve smartened up the Inspector to give it a clean and modern look
- The main area we’ve improved on is the Text section. To help explain and guide the user, there are now useful graphics to indicate the sorts of things you’re capable of doing to any given piece of text. The other sections have been smartened up to align tick boxes, feature labels and controls to give the Inspector the professional look you have come to expect
- The Inspector now also behaves like other panels. You can invoke it from the Home tab, as before, but also from the View > Panels section of the Ribbon
- The Inspector will appear docked on the left of your main Sibelius window. You can pull this off and dock to on the right, or if you prefer, you can leave it floating; useful if you have a second monitor. When undocked, you can resize the Inspector by dragging out the bottom edge. Sibelius will populate the Inspector with features and controls that are only relevant for the item or items you have selected. For example, the Scale % only appears when you have a Chord diagram selected. The contents of the Inspector will sometimes be too tall for it to contain all the controls, so a scrollbar will appear on the right hand side to allow you to find what you need easily. Each section can be collapsed up too, so you can hide controls you aren’t using at that time

Multiple staff sizes on breaks:
- One such example of driving features and workflows to the Inspector is our new Multiple Staff Sizes feature
- The new control of the staff sizes allows you to change individual bars, whole systems of one or more instruments, large passages of music, or entire pages at a time

Improvements since Sibelius 8.4:
- It’s now possible to change Normal staff size to a smaller value then Medium staff size value in Engraving Rules. Smaller staff sizes all decrease so you can no longer get these out of order
- We’ve made dialog appearance improvements to Engraving Rules > Staves with 200% DPI scaling on Windows with high pixel density displays
- Making a change to a staff size in Engraving rules, and then clicking OK (without having unfocused the staff size spin box) now makes the change in your score
- Tuplet brackets and numbers now scale neatly when working with smaller staff sizes
- Instrument changes from unpitched to pitched instruments now create key signatures automatically
- MIDI input works once more after changing from an unpitched to pitched instrument
- Cancelling out of Document Setup now cancels the unit selection you may have made
- On Retina displays, some text fields in several dialogs are no longer too short, for example in the File tab > Score info dialog
- In Sibelius’ Manuscript plug-in language, note.Deselect() deselects entire parent NoteRest when it should just deselect that note

Further general improvements:
- The version number now briefly appears on the splash screen once more as it did previously in 7.5, so you can quickly verify the version of Sibelius you’re launching on startup
- The Save As dialog on macOS now correctly remembers the current file name and last path saved, so that you don’t have to navigate to the correct location every time
- Sibelius no longer hangs or crashes in rare cases when clicking ‘Music Fonts’ in Edit Symbols
- The Inspector and Timeline panel sizes and positions are now saved along with the other panels. See File > Preferences > Files in the “Windows Sizes and Positions” section. This means that it is now possible to hide the timeline by default just like you can with other panels, which has been a longstanding request since it appeared in Sibelius 7.5.0
- A problem has been fixed where some keyboard shortcuts didn’t work correctly on macOS Sierra
- Sibelius Sounds and Sibelius | First Sounds now correctly install on macOS Sierra
- Application Manager 2.5.11 is now included in the Sibelius and First 8.5 installers