What’s new in Sibelius August 2026

By Joe Plazak, Sr. Principal Product Manager

Our team is excited to announce the fourth Sibelius release of 2026, available now on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices.

2026.8 brings a substantial set of improvements for customizing Line Styles, adds proper support for cross-staff ties, brings the return of our macOS Spotlight search plug-in (which works in tandem with Quick Look), and fixes a number of critical issues. Let's dig in and take a look at everything that's new in the August release.

Line Style Improvements

Driven by feedback from our film music and professional engraving communities, Sibelius 2026.8 brings substantial improvements for customizing line styles.

It's now possible to define separate text items for the “continuation” and “end” portions of a line. This is critical for using line styles that normally span multiple systems (e.g. cue lines, etc.), and ensures these lines always appear correctly in both the score and parts, regardless of the number of bars in each system.

We’ve also taken this opportunity to improve and refine the “Edit Lines” dialog. Previously, the "Centered Text" toggle button was placed in the Continuation Line area of the dialog despite only applying to start text. That button has been replaced with a new “Centered Text” checkbox found within the “Edit Text” sub-dialog, and the centering functionality now works independently for “start,” “continuation,” and “end” text. This gives you fine-grained control over text centering for each segment of custom lines.

Further, the offset fields for positioning line text are now shared with the symbol positioning controls and are visible directly in the main dialog. Changes to text position are now immediately reflected in the line preview window without needing to open and close a secondary dialog!

Cross-staff Ties

Following our work on cross-staff beaming (2026.2) and cross-staff accidentals (2026.6), Sibelius 2026.8 brings proper support for cross-staff notation ties. Previously, ties on cross-staff notes were drawn without applying the usual tie position rules. Further, ties within cross-staff tuplets previously required a manual drag to fix. In this release, Sibelius correctly applies your tie position rules to all cross-staff notes and tuplets.

These improvements are controlled via a new engraving rule within the Ties 2 tab: "Rules for ties apply to cross-staff notes." When enabled, Sibelius applies tie position rules consistently to all cross-staff notes, including those within tuplets.

As with our previous cross-staff improvements, the new logic introduces a minor file bump. For new scores, the cross-staff tie rule is enabled by default. For legacy scores, it is disabled by default, ensuring that existing engraving is preserved when opening older files in the new version. If you are collaborating with someone on an older version of Sibelius, they will not see the latest improvements in older versions. It’s a great time to remind such collaborators that upgrading their existing perpetual license of Sibelius to the latest version costs only $99 USD, and ensures that they have access to all of the many cross-staff improvements that have been made throughout 2026.

macOS Spotlight Support

Building on the return of Quick Look support (2026.6), which lets you preview any Sibelius file by selecting it in Finder and pressing the Spacebar, Sibelius 2026.8 adds a new Spotlight integration that unlocks searching within Sibelius files. Further, you can search for a score by name in Spotlight, and the first page of your score will appear in the preview panel without ever opening Sibelius. Both Quick Look and Spotlight together to make it much faster to track down the right file from anywhere on your Mac.

Other fixes & improvements

The 2026.8 release also includes critical fixes for legacy issues, and issues that were reported within our last release. These fixes include:

• Changing the pitch of tied notes via the arrow keys no longer adds unwanted symbols when the "Rules for accidentals apply to cross-staff notes" engraving rule is enabled
• In some scores, ties in parts no longer falsely appear in orange color as if they had been edited
• Manually adjusting the height of a tie in a part via dragging is now properly persistent
• The keyboard shortcut for changing notehead types (Shift+Option+number) now works correctly for notehead values above 39
• When exporting to MusicXML, MIDI, or Previous Versions, Sibelius now remember the last-used save folder for the duration of the session
• The Rehearsal Marks "Start at" field is now case-insensitive, and the dialog now properly validates input based on the active scheme
• We fixed a crash reported related to using the Worksheet Creator
• The "Reduce" and "Explode" plug-ins (amongst several other workflows) are no longer unexpectedly slow
• The "Make into Bar" command has been added to the "Layout" tab (near the other "Make" commands)
• We fixed an issue that caused too much vertical spacing between staves when optimizing cross-staff notation
• On Windows, we addressed a gallery scroll bar issue that occurred in Dark Theme

And that's everything new in Sibelius 2026.8! A special thank you to the members of our beta community for their invaluable feedback in addressing some of these critical issues. The team will be back soon with our next update (which is well underway) that continues to address several long-standing notation issues.

As a reminder, if you have a perpetual license with an active Upgrade Plan or an active subscription, you can download the update now from your Avid account through the Products page. If you have an older version of Sibelius, you can upgrade to the latest version (via our new simplified upgrade process) through the Upgrade page.

If you’re new to music notation software or coming from another notation program, you can begin composing today with a completely free 30-day trial of Sibelius Ultimate. Visit the Sibelius homepage to get started, find resources, check out the latest innovative features, and explore everything Sibelius has to offer.

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