What’s new in Sibelius June 2026

The Sibelius team is pleased to announce that Sibelius 2026.6 is now available on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android^TM devices.

Coming just weeks after our previous release, this release is packed with incredible improvements. If you’ve been waiting for proper cross-staff accidentals, auto-save on Sibelius for mobile, a dynamic “concert pitch” wildcard, proper banjo TAB, tie UX improvements, the return of macOS Quick Look support, Cantai support, accessible touch screen navigation on mobile, or all of the above, your wait is over.

Let’s dive into all the improvements in our third major update of 2026.

Cross-staff Accidentals

In a continuation of our ongoing efforts to improve cross-staff notation, Sibelius is now fully aware of all accidentals within cross-staff contexts and notates these passages appropriately. This new cross-staff accidental logic is “on” by default within new scores and “off” in legacy scores (to ensure that nothing changes when loading existing projects).

If you’d like to use the new logic in an existing score, the new option “Rules for accidentals apply to cross-staff notes” can be found near the bottom of the “Accidentals and Dots” Engraving Rules.

When changing the new engraving rule, Sibelius will ask if you want to respace the score to clean up any item collisions. Note: Respacing the score will remove any custom spacings that have been applied.

You can also turn on the new engraving rule without triggering a respace, but you’ll want to carefully review the score for any undesirable spacings.

With the new engraving rule turned on, Sibelius analyzes instruments with multiple staves to find cross-staff notes and ensures that accidentals are drawn according to the staff that they appear on. The new logic also extends to grace notes.

Here are a few examples of these long-awaited improvements:

It is important to note that while it’s possible to open 2026.6 scores within previous versions of Sibelius all the way back to 2025.2 (i.e. without exporting to a previous version), the new cross-staff improvements will not render in earlier builds. If you’re collaborating with other musicians who are still on an older version, it’s a great time to remind them they that can upgrade their existing perpetual license to the latest version of Sibelius for just $99 USD.

Mobile Auto-Save

Sibelius for mobile now contains the much-requested option to Auto-Save your work. The new option is off by default. To turn on Auto-Save, simply long-press the "Back" button and tap the Auto-Save toggle. The "Back" button icon will then change appearance so you always know when Auto-Save is engaged, and all other save options will be disabled.

When Auto-Save is on, every change to your score is instantly saved, so you never need to worry about capturing your latest changes if your phone rings!

If you prefer to experiment with ideas without saving every change, simply turn auto-save off. You have full control over the setting; Sibelius works the way you want rather than the other way around. Note: When Auto-Save is on, a single tap of the "Back" button will immediately return you to the file browser, as all of your changes are already safely stored.

Concert Pitch Wildcard

By popular demand, we’ve introduced a very useful new wildcard: \$concertpitch\.

This is a dynamic wildcard that changes depending on the transposition state of the current view. For example, if viewing the score in concert pitch, the \$concertpitch\ wildcard renders by default as “Concert Pitch.” If viewing the score as a Transposing Score, the same \$concertpitch\ wildcard renders as “Transposing Score.”

You can add the new wildcard into any text item in your score, and you can find it within the “Wildcards” Word Menu associated with certain text styles. If you’d like to customize the text for the \$concertpitch\ wildcard, you can do so via: 1) the File tab (Backstage), or 2) by editing the text object in-place using the following syntax: \$concertpitch=Sounding Pitch;Written Pitch\ (Note the semi-colon between the two options.)

macOS Quick Look

After a lengthy hiatus, 2026.6 reintroduces support for macOS Quick Look, with more functionality on the way.

When navigating files on your desktop or in the Finder window, select any .sib file and hit the Spacebar to see a one-page preview of the score. Quick Look is an extremely useful way to search for particular scores or worksheets in your files, as it eliminates the need to individually open Sibelius projects to see their contents. Additional support for Spotlight will be added in an upcoming release.

Tie UX improvements

The Sibelius team has long been working on improvements to ties, and now we’re pleased to share that we’ve added handles to ties to better indicate their draggability. Previously, with no visible handles, many users may have been unaware that the height of ties could be flattened via click and drag (or via the Inspector).

Sibelius now also has a new "selection" filter for ties, so all ties within a passage selection can be quickly isolated and tweaked en masse.

Banjo TAB

Sibelius now contains completely revamped Banjo instrument definitions. One unique banjo feature is that the fifth string (a.k.a. thumb string, short string, drone string, etc.) begins halfway up the fretboard, which poses the question: Should the initial fret number be “1” or “6” for tablature?

In previous versions of Sibelius, there was no way to deal with this case, especially while using Dynamic Guitar Staves (introduced in Sibelius 2022.7). Now in Sibelius 2026.6, the default banjo tab instrument definitions assume an initial fret number of “6” for the fifth string, and alongside these new instruments, you can still find the “legacy” banjo definitions that used an initial starting fret of “1.”

Under the hood, this all works via a new property that can be set for tablature staves, making it possible to define the "initial fret number" for each string on a tablature staff.

This new property can be changed within the Edit Instruments → Edit Staff Type dialog, and via ManuScript plug-ins (see the ManuScript Language Guide for details). While the initial fret number option mainly applies to banjo instruments, the property is fully generic and can be used within any custom instrument definition.

iOS Mobile Accessibility Navigation Touch Gestures

For our visually impaired users working with VoiceOver in Sibelius on iOS, we've added an entirely new system of accessible touch gestures for score navigation. This new system of interacting with scores makes attaching a physical keyboard completely optional. Please note that our new accessible touch gestures are not designed to be used by sighted users.

Accessible gestures are “on” by default and can be accessed whenever VoiceOver is active. If you’re using VoiceOver and want to retain standard touch gestures, there is a new option in the iOS “Settings” app to turn off accessible gestures.

Once VoiceOver is on and focus has been moved to the score, users can swipe up and down to change the type of navigation (staff, bar, item, voice, fragment, etc.), and swipe left and right to move forward or backwards through the score. For hearing your score from the current selection (or the start of the score when nothing is selected), use a “two-finger double tap” to start and stop playback.

A diagram explaining the accessible touch gestures within Sibelius for mobile 2026.6. One-finger swipe gestures can be made up or down to change the granularity of the navigation commands, and swipe gestures left and right navigate forwards or backwards through the score. Note that when using staff navigation, a swipe right moves down a staff, and a swipe left moves up a staff.

There is much more work to do, and the team is actively working on designs for additional accessible score editing gestures. If you have ideas that you’d like to contribute, please get in touch!

Cantai support

Sibelius 2026.6 contains long-awaited support for Cantai’s high-fidelity singing synthesis VST3 plug-in (coming soon).

We’ve been working closely with the Cantai team over the past few months to bring your Sibelius vocal scores to life. For more information on Cantai, their beta program, and their release plans, please see their official website (Cantai). For documentation about installing and using Cantai within Sibelius, please see their dedicated Sibelius support page (Cantai for Sibelius — Quick Start Guide).

NotePerformer for Education: Get It for Free!

Before we wrap up this post, we do have one more exciting bit of news to share: NotePerformer 5, the incredible sample library from Wallander Instruments, is now available for FREE to all educational institutions with a Network Multi-Seat License of Sibelius.

If you use Sibelius in a school computer lab with the Sibelius License Server or you’ve checked out your Sibelius license from your license server, you can now download, install, and run a fully functional version of NotePerformer 5 at no cost. The downloads for NotePerformer for Education are available in your account at my.avid.com/products. To find them, click “Sibelius Ultimate Multi-Seat (Network)”, then “Software Download Links & Product Details”.

Note: This offer is currently only available for network multi-seat licenses. If you have an individual EDU, Team, or Standalone multi-seat license, NotePerfomer for Education won't be available in your account and won’t work in your version of Sibelius. We will continue working with Wallander Instruments in the coming months to explore adding this offer to additional types of education licenses.

Other fixes & improvements

Finally, no Sibelius release would be complete without fixes to your most critical reported issues. Here is a list of other improvements you’ll find in Sibelius 2026.6: 

• Fixed: On Mac, the ManuScript error window is no longer automatically dismissed when running certain plugins
• Fixed: A NotePerformer VST3 issue that could lead to false instrument assignments
• Fixed: An issue causing the mouse cursor to remain as a text input cursor after using Command Search
• Fixed: “Keep absolute” text styles no longer unnecessarily duplicate when copying and pasting between scores
• Fixed: Dynamic cue size scaling no longer breaks when “Keep Absolute” is enabled within the Edit Staff Type dialog
• Fixed: Scores opened on Sibelius for Mobile (especially smaller devices) now properly center on the page when opened (using the "Fit Page" zoom type)
• Fixed: Attached items (text, lines, etc.) are no longer lost when switching tuplets between voices
• Fixed: A crash that could occur while interacting with the Timeline color preferences
• Fixed: In the Sibelius Worksheet Creator, time signature changes at system breaks are now interpreted correctly
• Fixed: Sibelius First now respects the Concert Pitch / Transposed state of existing scores
• Fixed: The minimized Keypad squircle no longer spontaneously moves on Windows
• Fixed: A bug that prevented text changes from being undoable when the item was deleted character-by-character
• Fixed: The most common VST3-related crash (thank you for sending in those crash reports!)
• Added: ManuScript read and write access for the following cross-staff engraving rules: CrossStaffAccidentals, AvoidCrossStaffBeamCorners, CrossStaffHideBarRests
• Addressed: A few places where notes would be fretted as a “?” on tab staves (e.g., alt+click copy-paste)
• Improved: Tuplet copy and pasting on Dynamic Guitar Staves

And that wraps up the 2026.6 release! We hope that you’ll make the most of these long-requested improvements, and as we say on repeat: There is more to come! Future releases will continue leaning into engraving improvements, bug fixes, and workflow improvements to help you create without distractions.

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 the Upgrade page.

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

2026 has so far been a great year for Sibelius, and it’s all thanks to our ever-growing community of users. Thank you to everyone who has joined the Sibelius community this year! We’ve been blown away by the number of new users that are coming over to discover a music notation program that easily adapts to any workflow.

Our team has some exciting releases on the horizon for the second half of the year, so bookmark the What’s New in Sibelius page to keep posted on the latest improvements from our team.