Why Upgrade? Here’s Five New Features Since Sibelius 6
by Justin Tokke, Senior Product Designer for Sibelius
If you have been using an older versions of Sibelius, such as Sibelius 6, Sibelius 7.1.3, Sibelius 7.5 or Sibelius 8, you have been missing out on a huge number of features that will make your workflow a lot better and more efficient.
Since Sibelius 6 was launched in 2009, the software has been through many changes to improve the lives of musicians around the world. This includes the user interface, underlying infrastructure, brand new features and workflows, accessibility for those with visual impairment, new pricing and offerings making Sibelius more affordable than ever, increased frequency of releases, and the expansion to the web and mobile devices. Sibelius is now available on more devices than any other platform and works alongside Cloud Sharing to provide Sibelius users with the most fluid sheet music experience available.
If you haven’t upgraded to Sibelius Ultimate since the days of yore, you can still take advantage of these features by upgrading to the latest version at any time. Legacy Sibelius users can get a new perpetual license of Sibelius Ultimate here:
A copy of Sibelius Ultimate gives you all this in one convenient license:
- Windows desktop app
- MacOS desktop app
- iPad app
- iPhone app
- Android tablet app
- Android phone app
- Chromebook app
- Sibelius Cloud Sharing for sharing and embedding scores online
- Multiple feature updates every year
- Continued support for the latest operating systems into the future
Version Numbers
A quick note about version numbers, since the labels have changed since Sibelius 6.
Many years ago, it was fashionable to use “major.minor.patch” version numbers. You saw this with older Sibelius versions, such as Sibelius 3.1.3 from 2004. Since 2018, Sibelius now uses a date-based versioning system: “year.month” so the version from October 2024 is called Sibelius 2024.10. You may see an occasional patch version as a third number, such as Sibelius 2024.6.1. Note that Avid Link and other Avid applications use this same system.
Let’s get into these new features!
Importing and Exporting MusicXML
Amazingly, when Sibelius 6 was released, it did not have native MusicXML export. This was introduced in Sibelius 7. MusicXML, then as now, is an essential tool for converting your scores between different music notation applications. It can be especially useful when working with colleagues on different platforms to bring simple ideas started in other applications into Sibelius for orchestration and final engraving.
In Sibelius 2020.6, Intelligent MusicXML Import was introduced, automating many of the manual steps previously required to transfer music from another music notation application into Sibelius. With just a few clicks, you can import a MusicXML file directly into your preexisting templates and Sibelius will automatically arrange your music for you.
Additionally, in Sibelius 2024.10, the native MusicXML Importer was significantly improved with support for instrument mapping and staff group names, better handling of engraving rules, rehearsal mark and multirest styles, and several bug fixes. Learn more about that release here: What’s New in Sibelius 2024.10
Fixes to Multi-voice Note Spacing
One of the more engraving-focused changes in recent years has been a new set of note positioning rules, called “Voice position rule, version 3.” This was introduced in Sibelius 2018.4 and improved further in Sibelius 2018.6.
The most significant changes here involve spacing when multiple voices occur simultaneously, especially when overlapping. This saves a ton of work fiddling with the X values in the Inspector window (or Properties panel, as it was known in Sibelius 6). Here’s an example I wrote up to show how overlapping voices and unisons are treated much better by default.
Text Frames
Text handing in Sibelius 6 and older was rather primitive and left much to be desired. Sibelius 7, released in 2011, overhauled much of the text handling and added the concept of “text frames.” This is a concept borrowed from Desktop Publishing (such as Adobe’s InDesign) where blocks of text are contained within a single box or “frame” and the text flows within those boundaries. This is very useful in Sibelius, for example, in making introductory notes for your score. Footnotes are also much easier to control, especially if they move around while you work on the layout of your score.
Here’s a silly example of using these frames for a program note. Not only can you adjust the frame size with ease, but you can also use the “justified” alignment which spreads the words out to fill the entire frame, as commonly seen in properly typeset prose. Doing this in Sibelius 6 isn’t possible.
Timeline
One of the most useful features since Sibelius 6 is a successor panel to the old “Navigator,” called the Timeline panel, introduced in Sibelius 7.5. Reminiscent of non-linear audio/video editors such as Avid’s Media Composer and Pro Tools, this panel gives you a bird’s-eye view of the open score. It offers useful information such as:
- Filled and empty bars for each staff
- Important landmarks such as tempo markings, time and key signatures, and other system objects
- A highlighted box showing your current view within the timeline
- Timecode and bar numbers throughout
This gives you a much better way to get around your score with ease.
Custom Staff Sizes
Sibelius has had two staff sizes since the early days, but users became frustrated that further sizes were not possible. It also wasn’t possible to change staff sizes on a specific page or system like you could in Finale. This changed in Sibelius 8.5, which now gives users the power to set four distinct staff sizes. These can be applied to single staves for the whole score, or on a system-by-system basis. This is extremely useful when doing “French Scoring” orchestral pieces where lots of empty staves are hidden on a particular page. It’s also very useful to “cheat” in some scores to squeeze a little bit more music onto a page if you slightly reduce the staff size for a single page.
Here’s a little ditty I wrote where the solo instrument has a couple of alternates available. All four staff sizes are used in one score here.
Here’s an orchestral part which has the left page at a slightly smaller size than the right to fit the density of notes better on the page, all in a dynamic part so it doesn’t affect the full score or any other part! Before this feature, this would have to be split into separate extracted part files and stitched together as a PDF at the end—a lot of work for a rather subtle effect.
We Welcome Your Feedback
There is no greater asset to the Sibelius community than its legacy users who have been with us for years. We are so grateful for your continued support over the years and hope to continue to improve Sibelius as the best notation software in the world.
If you ever have suggestions for improvements, feature requests, or bug reports, please get in touch with our feedback form: