Sibelius

What's new in this version:

Sibelius 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:
- 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

Sibelius 8.7.0
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: 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

Sibelius 8.6.1
- Change log not available for this version

Sibelius 8.5.0
- Change log not available for this version