What's New in Sibelius April 2025
We're pleased to announce the immediate availability of our third release of 2025. This April release is packed with another batch of improvements and fixes. Everyone with a current subscription or up to date upgrade plan on their perpetual license can get the update immediately.
Head to your account at https://my.avid.com/products to find the downloads for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
If you have a perpetual license of Sibelius and are not up to date, you can buy an upgrade to get current, which also includes the next year of upgrades, as well as the ability to unlock features in our mobile app, and to share scores online using Sibelius Cloud Sharing. To upgrade, visit: https://www.avid.com/sibelius/upgrades-and-renewals
Score Subsets and Dynamic Parts
Score Subsets are becoming more popular with Sibelius users who need different ways of working with a large number of staves, or when creating short scores for rehearsals. We’ve made a number of improvements since their introduction in 2022 and based on your feedback, we’ve now added the useful ability to independently toggle the transposing score state in each Score Subset and the full score. We’ve also improved the way text is handled when you’re using absolute text sizes.
Our 2025.2 release introduced the ability to create two Dynamic Parts from a single stave and automatically decondense the music for each part. It’s now more common to have multiple parts per stave. As such, the 'W' shortcut now cycles through each Dynamic Part and the full score of the selected stave.
Staff text is now assigned into all voices when entered using a passage or system selection to help each Dynamic Part display dynamics and technique text in each part. This is consistent to the way staff lines function (like hairpins), bringing long awaited consistency:
When using a single object selection, text will continue to go into the voice of the object you have selected (as before).
Stability and usability
We thank those of you who send in crash reports and bugs when they happen. We’re commited to providing you a smooth experience and address any issues with each release.
In 2025.4, Sibelius will now no longer crash when applying a rhythm dot to a passage selection, playing back scores over four years old, or when exporting scores to PDF.
There are a few other improvements worth noting that will make your experience even smoother:
- When selecting a passage that only contains hidden objects, the visibility buttons in the Inspector no longer disappear.
- Sibelius now more reliably ensures what you select with Alt+Click is what’s copied and pasted into your score
- Sibelius will no longer automatically respace music of very old scores
- Tab numbers now no longer disappear when copying from notation staff.
- When changing the font of text on a blank page, Sibelius no longer jumps to the top of the score.
- Triplets with tremolos now play back correctly in Sibelius:
Kontakt 8 Player
We’ve continued our work to improve compatibility with Native Instruments Kontakt 8 and Kontakt Player 8. Both Sibelius 2025.3 and Kontakt 8.2 (and earlier), could only load sounds from very old libraries (those with numerical library IDs). From Sibelius 2025.4, and together with the recently released Kontakt 8.3, you can now create a sound set for a newer sound library, for example the ‘Spitfire Symphony Orchestra’, the ‘Jacob Collier Audience Choir’ and so on, and Sibelius will now automatically load the sounds for you.
The music
We fixed an issue with grace note respacing that was introduced in 2025.2. If you notice anything unusual with grace notes in your scores, simply respace those passages in the new version.
Beams are no longer broken when changing the voice of a passage of music.
And that’s it for now! We hope you enjoy these improvements, and we’ll be back soon with news on our next releases.
In the meantime, please check out all our releases on our What’s New page.