Effortlessly glide through music with Magnetic Glissando—just added

Create beautiful glissando and portamento lines easily with new Magnetic Glissando automatically attaching and optimally positioning lines between the start and end notes. Should you need to move a note, the glissandi or portamento line will automatically follow the notehead it's attached to as you move it. This saves you tons of time from manually positioning lines when you create a slide or edit notes.

See what else is new in Sibelius 8.6

Collaborate more easily with MusicXML—just added

Working with other composers who use different notation software? Or maybe you prefer to start composing in a different app before moving your score to Sibelius for arranging, orchestrating, and engraving. With improvements to MusicXML import and export that preserve the integrity and layout of the original notation, it's easier than ever to work on music coming from or going to other programs.

Work faster with the updated Inspector

With the new, improved, and enhanced Inspector window, accessing, editing, and controlling elements in your score is easier than ever. You can now dock the Inspector window to the left of your score, or have it float freely, for always-available access. Plus, you can now style and align text right from the Inspector's Text pane.

Change staff sizes by system

Nee more flexible and precise control when engraving your score? You can now set the staff size of individual instruments, a set of staves, or an entire page to be any of the four sizes available in Sibelius. You can change the size of a staff throughout your score, or resize smaller portions. Plus, with new features in the Inspector, you can take full control of the layout of your score. 

Create custom staff sizes in your score

Thanks to a popular suggestion from our Sibelius users, you can now change the individual staff sizes of independent instruments and groups of instruments. This gives you more flexible composition possibilities to get the best layout for your score. You’ll also find new Engraving Rules options, providing you with fine precision control over the layout.

Make music easier to learn

Music doesn't have to be so black and white. With the latest Sibelius, you can now color individual notes and/or chords, giving students a more enhanced and visual way of learning to read and write music notation.

Share your music more easily

Want to let your client, colleague, or friends hear your latest composition? You now have the option of exporting your score as an MP3 audio file, making it faster and easier to send your music through email or over Skype, or even posting it across all of your social network channels. Not only do you have control over the bit depth and sample rate, Sibelius will automatically generate ID3 tags from your Score Info dialog.

Give it a rest

Inserting rests into your music just got a whole lot easier. Now any time you add one to a measure, the newly enhanced Magnetic Layout tool automatically repositions the rest to align optimally with the phrasing of your preceding notes. Rests in multi-voice staves also automatically reposition to avoid collisions. Not only does this eliminate having to manually fix note and rest bump-ups, it makes your score much easier to read. You can also move rests and notes horizontally with new keyboard shortcuts, eliminating cutting and pasting music.

Get All Access with Sibelius

With the latest version of Sibelius, creating beautiful, accurate, easy-to-read scores is more effortless than ever. Whether you choose to own, upgrade, or subscribe to Sibelius, your purchase comes with an All Access plan, giving you access to all future releases and expert help for the duration of your plan or subscription. Write at the speed of your creativity with the tools used most in live performance, music publishing, and film composition.

See details for All Access Plans

Get perfect repeated endings

If you've ever written music with first, second, and third time bars, you may have spent some time fixing lines that Sibelius created a bit too long. That's not the case anymore. With the layout improvements, you can now create multiple time ending bars that appear and play back just the way you expect them to. And, by default, time signature changes now appear after the barline but before repeating barlines.

Create with unrivaled compositional tools

Whether you’re well versed in writing music notation or prefer to use a keyboard, guitar, or your voice to enter notes, creating scores has never been easier. Save tons of time with unique tools such as Magnetic Layout, which takes care of almost every layout detail, and Dynamic Parts, which automatically creates and updates separate instrumental parts.

Get more expressive playback

Add more expressive and realistic “feel” to any individual part in your score and customize your own rhythmic feels for swing with the completely revamped Espressivo feature. With its exquisite interpretation of notation distinctions, you can hear every nuance of your score play back the way you intended it to be heard.

Compose quickly with an advanced user interface

We built Sibelius from the ground up for accelerated navigation and performance, so you can create scores more quickly than ever before. A task-based front-end leads you through the entire score creation workflow, and the Timeline window displays the entire structure of even the largest, most complex scores—at a glance.

Composers and Arrangers Choose Avid Sibelius

Write music with a pen on a Surface Pro

Sibelius has been optimized for the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet, enabling you to add and edit notes quickly with just a tap of the pen, as well as play music in real time using the tablet’s onscreen keyboard and fretboard. Use the Surface Pen’s buttons to select, erase and edit your music. You can even drag the score around and resize objects while inputting notes.

Integrate with Pro Tools

Integrate Pro Tools into your workflow and take your compositions even further. Using ReWire, included in Sibelius and Pro Tools, you can record instrument parts from Sibelius scores to the DAW for further recording, editing, and mixing. And you can directly send Pro Tools tracks from its Score Editor to Sibelius for further notation refinement.

Easy collaboration and sharing

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.

Compose with every instrument

Play back and hear every nuance of your composition in stunningly realistic detail with Sibelius Sounds. You get 36 GB of professional content, including a specially recorded symphony orchestra, rock, pop, and jazz instrumentation, world-class licensed sounds, and much more.

Create with full desktop publishing tools

Create beautiful, professional-looking scores using a full set of typography and layout tools. Polish text with tracking, leading, scaling, text frame, and alignment tools. Change fonts and add emphasis using hierarchical styles. Drag and drop graphics in any major format. And export publisher-quality scores as PDFs with just one click.

Transcribe and scan music

Transcribe and scan music directly into Sibelius with Neuratron AudioScore Lite and PhotoScore & NotateMe Lite. With AudioScore Lite, you can input notes into Sibelius by singing or playing an instrument, or importing music from a CD. With PhotoScore & NotateMe Lite, you can scan printed music and send to Sibelius for playback, transposing, and editing. You can even write music on a tablet or laptop and convert your handwriting into professional scores.

Need more comprehensive features? Get (or upgrade to) the Sibelius + Ultimate Bundle, which features PhotoScore & NotateMe Ultimate and AudioScore Ultimate.

Add notes directly on the score

With the Annotate feature, you can create reminders for yourself about music changes as you’re composing, or communicate edits and feedback to collaborators. Draw directly on the score using a mouse, trackpad, USB tablet, or Surface Pro 3 Pen. Circle items and write or type comments or instructions to arrangers, players, or students.

Enhance online score purchasing

For professional engravers and publishers, publish your work for sale online thanks to groundbreaking Sibelius | Cloud Publishing technology. Customers can view, play, change instruments, and transpose your music on any device before buying—and then print a high-quality version of your score once they do.

Import and export graphics

Import graphics in all major formats, then manipulate them to build complex layouts for publishing, creating teaching materials, instructional books, and more. It’s never been faster or easier to export your full scores with publication-quality graphics.