What’s New in Sibelius July 2025

GREATER EDITORIAL ACCURACY, NEW STATUS BAR, AND MORE

We’re delighted to announce the immediate release of our July update to Sibelius (2025.7). This is our fourth release of the year, and it’s available now to all on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android^TM devices.

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.

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 has to offer.

A smoother scoring experience

In this release, we’re focusing our efforts to simply make Sibelius easier to work with. We’ve embarked on a journey that’ll likely span several releases to simplify how you discover, download, install, license, and ultimately use Sibelius.

The Ribbon interface along the top of Sibelius First and Artist is now different to previous versions. It displays all the features of Sibelius—even those that aren’t included with your tier. We’ve included them to make it easier for new composers to discover new features, and whether they’re included in the Artist or Ultimate tiers.

To reduce the Ribbon back down to only show the features you’re entitled to, go to File > Preferences and uncheck “Show all features.”

Also, in this release we’ve improved the feature differentiation in Sibelius First and Artist. We want to thank those users who have helped advocate for these changes over the years.

Now supporting up to 24 staves, Sibelius Artist is a perfect place to start writing for Big Band scores.

New Status Bar

The status bar in Sibelius has been a stalwart of the Sibelius user interface for many years, and in this release we’ve given it a facelift with new icons and new customizability, along with the ability to hide it completely.

The most obvious change to those familiar is the reassurance of the licensing status of Sibelius, along with the feature set Sibelius is running in (First, Artist or Ultimate). The status of the license can be a green tick indicating all’s good, an amber sign suggesting your trial is expiring or your license needs renewing, or a red circle when your license needs reactivating.

In both Sibelius Artist and Ultimate, you can switch to a lower tier by clicking the name and choosing from the available list. This is particularly useful when sharing scores with Sibelius First and Artist users, where you can use this feature to see how they can interact with your score. As you do this, you’ll see the features in the Ribbon disable and enable, showing you which are available:

The Status bar has also become customizable with this release, allowing you to choose to show individual elements, all the way to hiding the Status bar completely.

You can show and hide the Status bar entirely via the new command “Show / Hide Status Bar” command or, in Sibelius Ultimate, in the new File > Preferences > Status Bar page, where you can choose which elements are shown:

Simply check or uncheck the elements you’d like to toggle and click OK. As these are Sibelius-wide preferences, they will apply to every score you open.

Pairing back the items on the Status bar can produce a clear, concise and clutter-free appearance to help you focus on the task at hand:

When hidden entirely, and when combined with hiding the Ribbon (by double clicking on the tabs) and going into Full Screen mode, you get a very clear wall-to-wall view of your music.

New: Toggle Auto-Respacing for advanced music engraving

Now for a feature that provides great control to enhance the music engraving workflow. Sibelius will always do a great job laying out music, whether it’s a simple worksheet for teaching or a complex film score for the big screen. Given any sized score of any complexity, Sibelius will cope with anything you throw at it. It does this by constantly and meticulously adjusting the vertical and horizontal spacing and layout of the music as you create your score.

For a number of years, we’ve allowed users to be in control of the automatic optimization of staff spacing and our patented collision avoidance feature called Magnetic Layout. However brilliant these features are, advanced users will get to the stage in their workflow where they won’t want anything to move around and adjust automatically, so for these scenarios, we allow users to turn these time-saving features off.

Now we’re bringing the same control to the way Sibelius adjusts horizontal note spacing. In particular, any manual adjustments to note spacing, either by hand, using shortcuts (Shift + Alt + Left/Right arrow keys), or by adjusting values in the Inspector, will be retained. For example, if you’ve carefully positioned grace notes to be at the end of the previous bar, these will stay in place when Auto-Respace is turned off.

The new control can be found in Appearance > Reset Notes > Auto-Respace:

This feature is on by default. Sibelius will automatically adjust spacing for you unless you turn it off by either clicking it in the Ribbon or toggling it in Command Search. To turn it off on mobile, search for “Toggle Auto-Respace”.

When this is off, it doesn’t turn all music spacing off entirely. In addition to retaining horizontal adjustments you’ve made in the score, adding accidentals, lyrics, lines, or adding and removing notes from a chord now will not adjust note spacing (ee list below). However, larger changes will continue to perform a reset of the horizontal space for the objects you’re entering, including when inputting notes, changing note duration, deleting music, etc.

Here's a complete list of actions you can perform while Auto-Respace is off, and Sibelius will not adjust the note spacing:

• Sliding notes left and right
• Transposing
• Moving a tied set of notes chromatically
• Using Pitch Correction Tool on the Keypad
• Respelling accidentals
• Changing notehead styles
• Adjusting accidental X position in the Inspector
• Adding / Removing any of the following:
  • Chord Symbols
  • Lyrics
  • Notes in a chord
  • Accidentals
  • Ties & Tie Into objects
  • Scoops & Falls
  • Arpeggios
  • Accidental brackets
  • Notehead brackets

This now makes creating scores like this, a breeze:

“The new feature is an incredibly exciting and important step forward. It not only gives the user far more control over horizontal spacing, but also the confidence to make editorial changes and know that careful manual adjustments and offsets will remain rather than be stripped out by an unwanted auto-respace.”

Andrew Jones, Music Typesetter

For those who write ManuScript plug-ins to automate workflows in Sibelius, we've added read/write access to the new Auto-Respace option. This new variable "AutoRespaceEnabled" belongs to the score object. When creating quick plug-ins, you’ll find the commandID is "toggle_auto_respace".

Voice colors

This release includes an enhancement to the Voice Colors feature, which for years has allowed you to see which voice the notes are in without selecting them. This is found in View > Note Colors > Voice Colors.

Now, when turning this on, staff objects will also light up to show the voice they are in. As before, objects in voices 1 and 2 will appear in blue and green, where objects in more than one voice will be colored light blue:

You can customize these colors in the Accessibility section of the Sibelius Preferences:

This addition to the visualization of the voices particularly helps when creating parts that are split out into individual players on decondensed staves. When doing this, the Staff Filters in the parts will show through notes, rests, and staff objects based on the voice they are in. Now, it’s particularly useful to see the voices of each object, so you can easily see which part they will appear in.

Easier ways of working with files on Android

Sibelius on Android recently received huge improvements in a new file browser, making it quicker to create new files and bringing it more in-line with Sibelius on iOS. The following improvements are in this release:

• Create a new score in the folder you wish using the + icon (no more ‘Save As’ flow).
• Choose from many of the manuscript papers and example scores and start writing your music
• The score is created and saved in the folder you created it in (eliminating the previous ‘Save As’ workflow)

This release also includes enhanced file permissions to choose which folder you'd like to use. In addition, we've fixed your top-reported crashes so the app is even more stable and widely available on Chromebooks.

Avid Link

In the full installers on Windows and Mac, we’ve included the latest version of Avid Link (v2025.5.1). This includes a number of improvements and optimizations to several areas of the app.

More improvements and bug fixes

As ever, we’ve managed to squeeze in a number of smaller improvements and bug fixes in this release. They are:

• Dashed lines that show where staves are hidden in a system now also appear above and below the top or bottom staff in the system. You'll find these lines if you are using either Focus on Staves or Hide Empty Staves, and you've hidden the top-most or bottom-most staves.
• When copying nested tuplets, Sibelius now automatically copies the immediate parent tuplet as well. This results in better results when pasting certain types of passages with nested tuplets.
• Single-stem notes hidden by staff filters no longer stay visible when "Note Colors" are set to "Voice Colors." This bug was first introduced in version 2023.5 but became more starkly apparent when using Staff Filters.
• It is once again possible to trigger Notate Glissando from filter-selected notes crossing a barline.
• Following user feedback, we reintroduced the legacy logic for the former "W" command. The older logic retains the command name of: "Switch Between Full Score and Part," but it is no longer the default shortcut assigned to the "W" key. The newer logic is now called "Switch between Full Score, Score Subsets, and Parts" and remains the default logic associated with the "W" shortcut in all shipping feature sets. Users who prefer the legacy logic will need to make a custom keyboard shortcut to remap the functionality of the "W" key.
• To better support VST plug-in developers, we've fixed a bug related to playback position data. When Sibelius is not in playback mode, we no longer send a running clock signal.
• While cleaning up the status bar, we fixed the dash in the timecode display.

• Sibelius no longer crashes when playing back grace notes with tremolo.
• Notate Glissando plug-ins no longer crash on Windows
• We’ve fixed a hang during playback when a two-note tremolo preceded by a pre-bend grace note which has been dragged before the barline. The tremolo no longer plays forever when using a 1-note tremolo in this scenario too.
• We also fixed a bug which prevented extracted parts with TAB staves from being reopened.

And that’s it! We look forward to hearing how you get on with the new features across Sibelius on desktop and mobile, and we can’t wait to show you what else we have in store for the rest of 2025.