What’s new in Sibelius February 2025
by Sam Butler, Director of Product Management for Sibelius
What’s New in Sibelius 2025.2
It's an absolute pleasure to announce the immediate availability of our February release of Sibelius. This introduces new features across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android that enhance the way parts are prepared. This comes after a successful previewing at the NAMM show in Anaheim, California, where Sibelius for Android and Chromebook won a TEC Award in the “Audio Apps & Hardware / Peripherals for Smartphones and Tablets” category! We want to thank the countless customers who voted for us, and we couldn’t be more proud!
If you have a perpetual license with an active Updates + Support plan or a 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 through the Upgrade + Renew page.
While the majority of the new features in this release apply only to Sibelius Ultimate, we recommend everyone with Sibelius First and Artist update to this version to take advantage of a number of other improvements in the release (mentioned down below) and to be compatible with files sent to you from users using Sibelius Ultimate.
If you’re new to Sibelius, you can begin composing today with a 30-day trial for Sibelius Ultimate. Visit the Sibelius homepage to start and find resources, check out the latest innovative features, and explore everything Sibelius.
Automatic Decondensing Parts in Sibelius
Part preparation has been somewhat automated since we released Dynamic Parts back in Sibelius 4. However, what hasn’t been possible until now is the ability to decondense a combined stave in the score into two separate parts. This release builds on the work we introduced in mid-2023 which allows users to manually create two parts, rename them, filter a player's notes and hide them, and repeat the process. Even then, there were several steps to take to hide solos from parts and tidy up cues. But now, this is all automatic.
Here's the new workflow:- Select a stave in the score, such as Clarinet 1/2.
- Go to Parts > Decondense > Two Players
Sibelius will create two new Dynamic Parts, rename them for you, and show only the music relevant to each player. This is all possible with a new feature called “Staff Filters.”
Sibelius will now keep both parts up to date with changes in the full score and in each part. And crucially, this feature has no noticeable impact on the performance of your device, so there’s no need to switch it on and off to avoid slowing your device down (like with other notation applications). Dynamic Parts in Sibelius are as fast as they always have been.
Staff Filters
In each of the two new parts in the example, Sibelius has placed a Staff Filter. These can be seen by selecting a bar and clicking on the grey line that appears above:
The one above is from the second player and is green to help indicate the filter's properties. Blue is used for player 1. These Staff Filters are letting through just the notes needed for this part, so in the above, it's filtering out player 1 notes and anything in voices 3 and 4.
It’s important to note that Sibelius keeps you in complete control. If you find that the filter allows too much through, you can hide the objects you don't want to see. If you find that something has been hidden and needs to be allowed through, you can add further Staff Filters to just a portion of the score:
In the above example, the part has bar rests in voice 2, which are not automatically brought through in a Player 1 filter, so here we've added an extra filter to show the bar rests in voice 2.
To add a second filter:- Select the passage in the part
- Go to Home > Instruments > Add Staff Filter and choose Show Voice 2
You'll see the new filter will stack on top of the first filter we applied, allowing you to easily access it. Staff Filters can be moved, copied, and resized, and the music underneath will automatically readjust:
Note: These new features and commands are all available on mobile, too. You’ll find the new “Decondense Into Parts for Two Players” command and the Staff Filters commands are available via Command Search, allowing you to take full advantage of this new feature.
Text Directives
Combined staves in a score will often have directions to indicate which player is playing. By default, a single note in the full score is given to both players, but you'll often need 1. or 2. in the score indicating the following notes will be played by a specific player. Sibelius now recognizes several of these as Text Directives and will ensure only the player's notes are shown by the filters.
Using text directives in your score is very natural—you won’t need to do anything differently than marking up indications for players 1 and 2. However, these will stay in place until another text directive instructs Sibelius to change player or reset. To reset, you can write tutti or play in your score, but if you don’t need these to be shown, simply hide them or add a tilde before the text, and Sibelius will hide the text (e.g., ~tutti or ~play).
Cues
Writing cues in Sibelius is very easy to do in the full score. Simply select and copy the music you’d like to copy across, select the instrument you’d like to see the cue in, and go to Home > Clipboard > Paste as Cue. Sibelius will paste-in the notes (and other objects specified in File > Preferences > Paste as Cue), hide them, and make them cue sized.
Cues will appear in the Dynamic Part but not in the full score, and will now be shown regardless of the Staff Filter you’re using in the part. So, for simply cueing, you’re all set!
If you’d like different cues in each part, you can achieve that easily by simply hiding what you don’t need to see. In a part, anything that’s hidden there doesn’t get hidden elsewhere in either another part or in the full score, so you have full control of what’s shown.
Cueing one player in another’s part is simple too. Say you would like to cue the player 1 notes in player 2. To do that, select the player 1 notes in the player 2’s part and set them to be cue sized in the second Keypad layout. You can then add the instrument name’s abbreviation and hide it in the full score and the other part, and you’re done. (To be able to select player 1’s notes, you’ll need to display hidden objects, which you can turn on in View > Invisibles > Hidden Objects.)
Opening new files created in 2025.2 in older versions of Sibelius
As with every major feature added to Sibelius, we increase the internal file version of the .sib files. This is required because older versions of Sibelius don’t understand new features in Sibelius. As such, if you’re working with someone who hasn’t yet upgraded to Sibelius 2025.2, you will need to export the file as a previous version. To do this, go to File > Export > Previous Version and choose the version you need.
When exporting back to a 2023.5 and later, notes filtered out by Staff Filters will be hidden, so your scores and parts will look the same, but the functionality will be limited to the capabilities of the old version. If exporting to even earlier versions, individual notes will be hidden, but if a chord had one or more notes hidden, then the whole chord is shown. Bars with the whole contents hidden aren’t turned into full bar rests or multirests as those much older versions simply don’t have these newer capabilities.
What else?
You mean there’s more?! Of course. With every release of Sibelius, we take on a handful of bugs and smaller feature requests as they come in via our support cases, forums, research, and customer visits, and this release is no different.
As well as the great features mentioned above, you will also find:
Highlights no longer eek into the next bar, so they now don’t break multirests. You can therefore safely select a whole bar, add a highlight, and not have to think about retracting it to prevent the multirest from being broken.
The login to be able to use Sibelius Cloud Sharing has now been moved out of Avid Link and is done directly in the Cloud Sharing dashboard within Sibelius. This has been done due to a change coming soon within Avid Link that changes the way it logs in to your Avid Account. The workflow to use Sibelius Cloud Sharing remains the same, however, where you simply click “Share” or open the Dashboard from the Home tab, and it’ll prompt you to log in if you aren’t already.
To log out, open the Dashboard and you’ll notice a new “Logout” button in the lower-left corner:
Also in this release, you can now independently mute instruments in the Mixer in each Score Subset and the full score.
Instrument changes placed on a Dynamic Guitar tab stave for other Dynamic Guitar Staves will no longer be shown as notation. This is particularly useful for switching from acoustic to electric guitar, say.
Kontakt 8 now appears as a “Kontakt” device rather than an ordinary VST/AU plugin. This only applies to macOS, of course, since Kontakt 8 is a VST3 instrument only on Windows. However, if you have libraries on Mac that support auto-loading, you can now use Kontakt 8.
The standard Magnetic Layout commands have been ported to Mobile:- Turn off Magnetic Layout for item
- Turn on Magnetic Layout for item
- Use default Magnetic Layout settings
We’ve continued to tweak the drop-down menu in Sibelius for mobile. The cells in the drop-down menus have proper text wrapping (for localizations with long translations) and make better use of the available space.
Sibelius no longer crashes when setting any box in the page margins in Document Setup to a number larger than 10.
Last, but not least: Sibelius no longer crashes when receiving MIDI events while running plugins. If you’ve found Sibelius has been crashing when running plugins, it may have been caused by your MIDI device sending MIDI events (like a constant stream of MIDI timecode, say). Sibelius now ignores these when running a plugin, so it will no longer find Sibelius crashes.
…and that’s it! We’re really proud of this release, and I’d like to make a special thanks to the whole Sibelius team for putting everything into what will become a foundational set of features that has changed the way people create parts using Sibelius, all while ensuring Sibelius is as fast as ever.