Sibelius Blog

Singer-songwriter Alexa Weber Morales on arranging with Sibelius First

Daniel Spreadbury — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:48:43 +0000

Alexa Weber Morales in her grandmother's cloak in front of a church door

Alexa Weber Morales is a singer-songwriter from Oakland, CA whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person, but with whom I have conversed a great deal on Twitter (find her @AlexaMorales). Recently she got in touch to tell me about her experience of using Sibelius First, our entry-level music notation software designed for people just like Alexa, in writing songs and arrangements for her new album, I Wanna Work For You, which was fan-funded through Kickstarter.

Alexa wrote about her experience of using Sibelius First when she was arranging The Names of the Winds, one of the songs on her album, on her blog. It’s a great insight into the creative process, and how software can help you experiment and go in new directions. She describes an unsatisfactory collaboration with the pianist in her band whom she had asked to help arrange the song based on her melodies, and how the experience led to a new resolve:

I knew my lyrics, inspired by the Master and Commander series by Patrick O’Brien, were some of the best work I’d ever done. I could see he totally understood that hunger to compose a great song to match them. “You can do it yourself,” said my co-producer. “You’ve got it.”

So I began to pound away at the song, in a way I’ve never done before. After sitting for hours at the piano and playing it, reshaping some of the lines and considering how composers I admire set their melodies (Satie, Joplin, Chopin, Gounod, Bach, Guinga), I took a few good melody lines and switched to composing it exclusively on the computer in Sibelius (music notation software by Avid). I spent days on it, locked in my room. My boys left me alone. “Where’s Mommy?” I heard one ask behind the door. “She’s still working on her song,” the other replied.

I discovered that it was interesting to write orchestral string lines in Sibelius and see how they interacted — even though the piece would be recorded with just piano and bass. When I wrote the song back in the mid-2000s, it had a key change in the song from verse to bridge/chorus. I kept that. A new development was a time signature change that occurs at the end of each chorus. I was especially proud of this. The song goes from lilting waltz as I sing “Tell me all the names of the winds, whisper all the ways I’ll never know,” to inexorable 4/4 with eight-note arpeggios under the sad lyric, “Which one will blow me to my love?”

A sleepless week passed, and I emerged from my home office, triumphant — or at least, “done.” We were about to rehearse the whole band the day before our two days in the recording studio. My co-producer, Sam Bevan, still hadn’t seen the song. No one had. Was it any good? After rehearsal, he and I sat down and he played it on the piano. I could see he liked it. “Where did you get these voicings?” he asked nonchalantly. Victory! The next day, Jonathan Alford, my pianist on the album, played it in the recording studio and loved it. “Is it better than the original demo?” I asked. “Did you listen to it?” “Yep, kiddo, this is much better. Those descending lines in the chorus are great.” Another jolt of artistic pride — I explained they’d come from my playing with string lines in Sibelius.

Read the rest of the post for the full story. Using the video export feature in the new Sibelius First, Alexa has also created a video to accompany the song, which she talks about on her blog, and has uploaded to YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can check out Alexa’s album, I Wanna Work For You, on Bandcamp, and buy a digital copy for just $10.

London Olympics mascots movie Rainbow to the Games scored in Sibelius

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:23:40 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

With just 73 days to go until the opening ceremony of the London Olympic and Paralympic games, the anticipation around the UK, and indeed the world, is building. One of the key ways in which LOCOG, who are staging the games, are getting young people excited about the games is through the mascots for the Olympics and Paralympics respectively, Wenlock and Mandeville. Although many UK residents (and long-time readers of this blog) will be familiar with this dynamic duo already, some readers may be interested to know that Wenlock is named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock where the mid-19th century Wenlock Games, which served as inspiration for the whole Olympic movement, were staged, and Mandeville is named after the Buckinghamshire town of Stoke Mandeville, where pioneering spinal specialist Dr Ludwig Guttmann set up the Stoke Mandeville Games in the 1940s, a forerunner of the modern Paralympics.

The story goes that Wenlock and Mandeville were created from the last drops of British steel used to make beams for the new Olympic Stadium, and since their unveiling two years ago they have had a number of adventures in animated form in a series of films based on a story by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo. The last of these films, Rainbow to the Games, has just started airing in more than 100 Odeon cinemas around the UK before selected films.

Wenlock and Mandeville at the Olympic Stadium (copyright LOCOG)

Author Morpurgo said, “The London 2012 Mascots were created for children in order to inspire them to choose sport and connect with the magic of the Games. I wanted to write a story full of adventure and heroism, so that children could experience the wonder of Wenlock and Mandeville as they make their journey across the UK towards the London 2012 Games, and Rainbow to the Games is the thrilling conclusion to this journey.”

The music for the 15-minute film was written by British composer Thomas Hewitt Jones, and naturally he scored it in Sibelius, before it was recorded under the baton of Barnaby Smith with the British Film Orchestra and VOCES8 at Angel Studios and Abbey Road in London. Thomas told me that it was a very exciting project, and as always, he couldn’t have done it without Sibelius.

Rainbow to the Games is playing now at selected Odeon cinemas, and is also playing on British Airways flights in and out of the UK.

Film composer John Powell: “Without Sibelius, we couldn’t meet our deadlines”

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:30:21 +0000

Composer John Powell in the control room (photo by Melinda Lerner)

John Powell is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand composers, his music having graced more than 50 feature films. British-born, John has called the United States his home for the past fifteen years, during which time he has scored many top films, in addition to collaborating with fellow celebrated composers Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams. He was nominated for an Oscar in 2011 for his score to Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon, and among the many other animated features to which he has provided the score are Ice Age 2 and Ice Age 3, and Kung Fu Panda (with Hans Zimmer).

Powell has also worked on some of the most explosive action movies of the past several years, including all three of the Bourne movies (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) and duelling-assassins caper Mr and Mrs Smith. This year, Powell has scored Happy Feet 2 and Doctor Seuss’s The Lorax, and is currently working on the score for Ice Age 4: Continental Drift, which is expected to be one of the huge hits of the summer.

Photo by Melinda Lerner

Naturally, John uses Sibelius for all of his movie projects.

“Given the extraordinary lateness of which I produce the music and the immense amount of work needed by essentially a small team of orchestrators, were it not for Sibelius’ simplicity, logic, and deftness, we would not be able to make our scoring deadlines,” he says. “Sibelius 7 is easy to use.”

For more information about John Powell and to check out his filmography, visit his Wikipedia page. Doctor Seuss’s The Lorax will open in the UK on 27 July 2012 (it played in the US in March), and Ice Age 4 will also be released this coming summer.

Introducing the new Sibelius First

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:27:49 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re very pleased to announce that a new version of Sibelius’s little brother, Sibelius First, is available from today, with some great new features never before seen in music notation software (including Sibelius 7!). Sibelius First is designed for home users, students, instrumental teachers, songwriters, choir masters – anybody who needs to quickly and easily produce beautiful sheet music, but who doesn’t need all the power and flexibility of the full Sibelius 7 product.

The new Sibelius First replaces the existing versions of both Sibelius First and Sibelius Student, which were separate entry-level products with similar feature sets, though there were some key differences, such as the inclusion of dynamic parts in Sibelius First but not Sibelius Student, and the inclusion of Panorama in Sibelius Student but not Sibelius First. With the new Sibelius First, we’ve combined the feature sets of both products to produce an even more powerful and comprehensive music notation package, at a pretty amazing price.

Some of the highlights of the new version include:

Exclusive, professional-quality 10GB sound library
Simplified, task-orientated user interface
Export a video of your score
Send your score, in Sibelius or PDF format, by email
Publish directly to ScoreExchange.com
Publish directly to Facebook, YouTube and Soundcloud
Format your score for Avid Scorch for iPad

These features are exclusive to Sibelius First and are not included even in the full Sibelius 7 product. They are (if you will excuse the pun) firsts for music notation software! Read on for more details.

Social sharing

The new Sibelius First allows you to export a digital video of your score. It’s super easy: choose File > Export > Video, and choose which resolution you want to export (all the way up to full HD 1080p!), choose which staves you want to include, and hit Export. A video file (.mov on Mac, .wmv on Windows) is exported to your chosen folder, ready for you to play in any media player.

But that’s only half the story: you can publish your video directly to YouTube or Facebook by choosing File > Share > Publish to YouTube or Publish to Facebook. You don’t need to figure out what format to use, or how to upload the video on each site: just click Publish, and Sibelius exports the video file and uploads it automatically, allowing you to get on with crafting your next masterpiece, a handy progress indicator in the status bar at the bottom of the window letting you know when the upload is complete and the video is available to view.

Using the brand new 10GB Sibelius 7 First Sounds library, your videos look and sound great:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Publishing your music directly to YouTube or Facebook is a great alternative to publishing using Scorch on your own web site. All desktop web browsers and most smartphones can access YouTube videos, so anybody on any computer or mobile device can see and hear your music. Share your song online with your bandmates, or the singers in your choir, and they can rehearse along with the video, or just leave you a friendly comment!

You can also export audio directly to Soundcloud, again with a single click, in File > Share > Publish to SoundCloud.

If you want to publish digital sheet music and sell it online, you can publish directly to ScoreExchange.com, the world’s largest catalogue of user-created digital sheet music, with around 75,000 titles created by musicians from all over the world. ScoreExchange.com uses Scorch, so you can view, play back, transpose sheet music in your web browser, then purchase a copy to print on your own printer at home. Publishing your music on ScoreExchange.com also allows you to make it available for sale in the Scorch Store in the Avid Scorch app for iPad, allowing anybody with an iPad to download your score and add it to their library. You can receive a royalty for every score sold via ScoreExchange.com or via the Scorch Store!

Export for Avid Scorch

The Avid Scorch app for iPad allows you to view, transpose, play back and interact with scores created in Sibelius. The new File > Export > Avid Scorch feature in the new Sibelius First automatically adjusts the formatting of your score to optimize it for display on the iPad’s screen, allowing you to shrink the page margins and adjust the staff size to make the music as legible as possible on the iPad.

Then simply drag the exported score into iTunes and sync your iPad to add it to your Avid Scorch library, or put it in your Dropbox and open it in Avid Scorch from there.

Share by email

The new Sibelius First makes it super easy to share your scores by email. Simply choose File > Export > Send Using Email, enter your own email address (so that the recipient knows who’s sending them music), the recipient’s email address, and then choose whether to send a Sibelius score (including, optionally, a version suitable for opening in any earlier version of Sibelius) or a beautiful, publication-quality PDF.

It couldn’t be easier or quicker to share your music with anybody with an email address, whether or not they have Sibelius or Sibelius First themselves!

High-quality sounds

The new Sibelius First includes a high-quality 10GB sound library, called Sibelius 7 First Sounds, which takes sounds from the amazing Sibelius 7 Sounds library included with the full Sibelius 7 and makes them available to users of our entry-level notation software. Beautiful sampled wind, strings, brass, percussion, keyboards, guitars and organs are included, making the new Sibelius First sound amazing. And you get all of the power of Sibelius 7′s Mixer, plus the ability to use any VST or Audio Unit virtual instrument or effect, as well as allowing you to connect to any ReWire host.

Try the new Sibelius First today

The new Sibelius First is available today, with a recommended price of $119 in the US, £99 inc. VAT in the UK, and €119 inc. VAT in Europe. A five-user license is also available for $299 in the US, £239 inc. VAT in the UK, and €289 inc. VAT in Europe. If you have a previous version of Sibelius First, Sibelius Student (or even G7 or Sibelius Instrumental Teacher Edition), you can upgrade to the new Sibelius First for $39.95 / £29.95 / €39.

If you’d like to try Sibelius First for yourself, a 30-day trial version including all features (apart from the 10GB Sibelius 7 First Sounds library, PhotoScore Lite and AudioScore Lite) is available for download now. If you already have a version of Sibelius, Sibelius First or Sibelius Student installed on your computer, don’t worry: the trial of the new Sibelius First won’t interfere with your existing software at all.

To find out even more about the new Sibelius First, head on over to the Sibelius web site.

How to make plug-ins appear in any ribbon tab in Sibelius 7

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:46:19 +0000

A plug, yesterday (courtesy Samuel Livingstone on Flickr)

In this guest post, plug-ins maven Bob Zawalich shares his tips on how to make plug-ins in Sibelius appear on any ribbon tab. Bob has written more than 300 plug-ins for Sibelius, and nearly all of his creations are either included in Sibelius by default or available for download from the Sibelius web site.

In Sibelius 7, plug-ins are distributed among different tabs on the ribbon. Thus, playback-related plug-ins are on the Play tab, text-related plug-ins on the Text tab, and so on. Most downloadable plug-ins install into folders that are on the Home tab, but you can set things up so that a plug-in can reside on any tab, even those (such as Parts) that usually have no plug-in menu. Read on to find out how.

Choosing where plug-ins appear

The simplest way to get a plug-in onto a tab other than Home is to install the plug-in into a folder that is on a different tab. (The one exception to this rule is that you cannot put user plug-ins into the existing Transformations folder. If you put user plug-ins into the Transformations folder they will not show up at all, so be sure to choose a different folder name).

If you have never created any plug-in subfolders, this is the tab assignment for the default folders:

Accidentals – Note Input
Analysis – Review
Batch Processing – Home
Chord Symbols – Text
Composing Tools – Note Input
Notes and rests – Note Input
Other – Home
Playback – Play
Proof-reading – Review
Simplify Notation – Note Input
Text – Text
Transformations – Omit from ribbon
Tuplets – Note Input

(I found this out by going to File > Plug-ins > Edit Plug-ins, and looking at the folders and their Location on ribbon).

If you go to File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins and install, for example, Respell Uncommon Accidentals from the download page Accidentals category, its location is by default in the Accidentals category, which lives on the Note Input tab.

So after you install the plug-in, go to the Note Input tab and in the plug-ins menu you will find Respell Uncommon Accidentals under Accidentals.

What is also very cool is that you can redefine the tab where a plug-in folder resides. If you wanted to put all the plug-ins on a single tab – for example, to emulate the single Plug-ins menu from Sibelius 6 and earlier – you can go to File > Plug-ins > Edit Plug-ins, and for each category, click on the Location on ribbon field, which turns into a drop down list box, and you can change all the locations to be Home. You will then have a huge Home list (but see Finding plug-ins, below).

What is also cool is that you can add plug-ins to a tab that does not even have a plug-ins menu, like Parts. This is a little bit more complicated, but not all that bad.

What you need to do is:

1. Create a new plug-ins folder when you install a plug-in, and install into that folder.
2. Change the location of the new folder to the desired tab.

Say that we wanted to have the Open Selected Parts plug-in appear on the Parts tab. Go to File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins and find and click on Open Selected Parts in the Other category. This plug-in will, by default, install into the Other category; instead, click on the Other checkbox below the Location list, and type in a new folder name. In my example, I called it Parts plug-ins. Click Install, and then Close.

You will find the Parts plug-ins folder and the plug-in on the Home tab Plug-ins gallery, which is where new folders go by default.

Now go to File > Plug-ins > Edit Plug-ins and find Parts plug-ins in the list of folders. Click on the Location in Ribbon entry and change it from Home to Parts. Now if you go to the Parts tab, it will have a Plug-ins menu, and it will include the Parts plug-ins folder and its contents. Is that cool or what?

Finding plug-ins

In a way, it is harder to find where a plug-in is in Sibelius 7 compared to Sibelius 6, because they are not in a single menu any more. There are a few ways to make it easier:

1. If you know the tab the plug-in is in, and there are a lot of plug-in folders on that tab, click on the first entry in the menu and it will give you a list of categories (folders). You can choose the one category you know is home to the plug-in, and it is a smaller list to search.

2. Generally, you can use Find in Ribbon to locate a plug-ins and it is very fast. Type in the name (you may have to keep typing until you have typed in almost the whole name if there are several similarly-named plug-ins), and then hit Enter and you will be led to the menu where the plug-in lives.

3. I tend to use many different plug-ins for a short amount of time. If I will be using one often, I might assign a keyboard shortcut to it (File > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts, then choose from the Plug-ins category). But I mostly use the Run Plug-ins By Name plug-in (install from category Other). I have a keyboard shortcut set up to Run Plug-ins by Name, and when I run it, I get a list of plug-ins sorted by name, and the plug-ins I have most recently invoked with Run Plug-ins by Name are at the top of the list. I find the plug-in I want in the list, then hit OK to run it. That plug-in will be at the top of the list next time, and will be easy to find.

That’s all, folks!

Sibelius makes light work of ETHEL’s new album Heavy

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:03:35 +0000

ETHEL in the studio

The New York-based experimental string quartet ETHEL (@ETHELCentral) are one of the most exciting chamber music groups performing today. Founded in 1998 by graduates of Juilliard and Eastman / SUNY Stony Brook, the group has built a reputation both as champions of contemporary and new music, but also music education through its Foundation for the Arts. ETHEL’s third studio album, Heavy, hits shelves and digital retailers tomorrow, 24 April, and I got in touch with founder member Ralph Farris, who is both the viola player and Artistic Director of the group, to find out how Sibelius was used in the production of the album.

One work in particular, a commission by New York-based composer Raz Mesinai (@RazMesinai) called La Citadelle, needed work in Sibelius to take it into the studio. Ralph picks up the tale:

“Raz Mesinai and I are dear old friends, and I was thrilled when ETHEL was able to commission him, with the generous support of the Jerome Foundation, to write La Citadelle. This extraordinary piece was inspired by the life of Antoine de Saint Exupéry, pilot and author of The Little Prince, a sonic meditation on Saint Exupéry’s mysterious last flight.”

Raz and ETHEL worked together closely in a number of sessions as they shaped the work together. “Raz sent me a MIDI file of his finished piece,” Ralph told me. “That’s where Sibelius came in. The world’s greatest notation program made short work of organizing the piece into a score – Keep track order? Yep! Adjust rhythms? Nope! Tenuto? Sure! – and, of course, part extraction was a piece of cake. Sibelius truly gave us access to Raz’s voice.”

Ralph says he couldn’t be happier with how the work turned out. “The finished piece is magnificent,” he says, “infusing cinematic soundscapes with the rolling rhythms and sung poetry of the bedouins of Algeria. We could not be more grateful to the good folks at Sibelius for making it possible to bring Raz’s vision to life!”

You can hear La Citadelle and other works by Don Byron, John Halle, Julia Wolfe, John King, David Lang, Kenzi Bunch and Marcelo Davos performed by ETHEL on Heavy, available on April 24 through Innova.

How to run Sibelius 7 without the Quick Start window

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:15:19 +0000

An empty Sibelius document window, yesterday.

Warning: this post gets a bit nerdy about software windowing models. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, try this instead. Likewise, if you’re a Mac user, you might find all this a bit parochial.

Like all good modern applications, Sibelius 7 uses the Single Document Interface (SDI) model, which means that each Sibelius score you open gets its own window, each with its own button on the Windows taskbar, and so on. Of course, you can also open further windows onto the same document if you wish (of which more later), but in the general run of things you’ll have a single window for each document, with multiple tabs open in that window to house the full score. Folks who have upgraded from previous versions of Sibelius, which used the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) model – where the Sibelius application itself has a parent window to house every score that is opened, and that window stays open until the application quits – have struggled a bit with the transition to SDI.

The chief sticking point is the expectation of what happens when you close a window. On Windows, typically an application quits once it no longer has any windows open (obviously there are exceptions, such as applications that put icons down in the system notification area, but those are normally utilities rather than full-blown productivity applications). Under the old MDI model, it was easy to close one score before opening a new one: the parent window would hang around, so you could simply choose File > Open from the menu, and a new score window would open within the parent window. Under an SDI model, however, if you close the last document window, the application quits (on Windows only, of course), so you never get the option to open another score. This is why, by default, we made the Quick Start window reappear after you close the last document window: it prevents Sibelius from quitting, and provides you with an easy way to open another score.

But what if you don’t want to see the Quick Start window? It was already possible to disable the Quick Start window when starting Sibelius, with the application opening a default blank score for you, so that you can open a new score from there, or indeed just add instruments to that default document and get cracking. But if you disable the Quick Start window when closing the last score window, Sibelius quits as soon as that window closes.

As of the latest Sibelius 7 update, version 7.1.2, Sibelius now behaves the same as other SDI applications that use ribbons, such as Microsoft Word. What this means is that if you close the last tab in the last window (e.g. by clicking its close button, or by typing Ctrl+W or Command-W, or by clicking Close in the File tab), the score disappears from the window, but the window remains, with the ribbon disabled above it. You can click the File tab, which now defaults to the Recent page, making it easy to choose a recent score to open, or you can click Open (or type Ctrl+O or Command-O) or New (Ctrl+N or Command-N) to open an existing score or start a new one. Once you have opened an existing score or started a new one, the empty window ends up with the newly-opened or created score in it, and away you go again.

Be warned: closing the last window by clicking the close button at the top right-hand corner of the window will still quit Sibelius altogether (unless you have set the Quick Start to open after the last window closes), but this is correct, and how SDI applications work.

So to run Sibelius without the Quick Start, first ensure you’ve updated to Sibelius 7.1.2, then switch off Show Quick Start dialog and Show Quick Start again after closing last score on the Other page of Preferences. Enjoy!

Everything old is new again: Sibelius 7 now supports Windows XP

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:14:30 +0000

A computer running Windows XP, yesterday (courtesy Federica Testani on Flickr)

When we released Sibelius 7 last summer, the minimum system requirements jumped significantly: on Mac, we dropped support for Macs with PowerPC processors, and specified Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as the minimum supported operating system; and on Windows, we dropped support for Windows XP. The changes in requirements on Mac didn’t have much of an impact on our customers: Apple have trained Mac users to expect that new applications won’t support many, if any, previous versions of the operating system, and the writing had been on the wall for PowerPC Macs since Apple introduced the first Intel-powered Macs way back in 2006.

But for Windows users, the lack of Windows XP support caused a good deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. It wasn’t a decision we took lightly: we looked at the product activation statistics and compared them year over year, and saw that Windows XP accounted for less than 10% of the total of product activations, and that proportion was halving roughly every 12 months. So when we were making the decision about which operating systems to support early in Sibelius 7′s development, and we were weighing up features that would require technology not present in Windows XP, we eventually decided that now was the time for a break with the past, and that we would be cutting off only a small number of potential new customers or upgraders. We expected the noise to die down after a little while, and expected that we would pick up some of those customers again once they had the opportunity to upgrade their systems.

Perhaps the group of customers most inconvenienced by this jump in system requirements has been schools. Typically a school can only afford to upgrade its hardware and operating systems once every three or four years. Even if the school could afford to upgrade to Windows 7 itself, chances are the hardware would need upgrading too. So we ended up cutting off quite a few schools.

So for all of those people still running Windows XP, either by choice or of necessity, we have some good news: the latest Sibelius 7 update, version 7.1.2, now runs on Windows XP. (And the Sibelius Licence Server will also run on Windows Server 2003 once more, too.)

Windows XP users won’t get absolutely the same experience as customers running modern operating systems: there is no DirectWrite text measurement and display, so some of the impact of the powerful new text handling and typography features in Sibelius 7 is lost; there is no support for multi-core CPUs in the playback engine, so performance when running multiple virtual instruments on a multi-core system will be comparable with Sibelius 6, which didn’t have explicit multi-core CPU support; and the Quick Access Toolbar, which normally draws embedded in the document title bar on Aero-based versions of Windows, draws in a strip below the document title bar and above the ribbon.

Finally, Windows XP users should beware the full Sibelius 7 Sounds library, which ideally requires a 64-bit system with at least 4GB RAM to get the most out of it. You can still use Sibelius 7 Sounds on Windows XP, but I would recommend using the Sibelius 7 Sounds (Lite) playback configuration, and sticking to modest-sized ensembles.

If you want to try Sibelius 7 out on Windows XP for yourself, go and grab the updated fully-functional 30-day trial from the Sibelius web site.

Sibelius 7.1.2 update now available

Daniel Spreadbury — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:00:04 +0000

A new Sibelius 7 update is available from today, bringing the program to version 7.1.2. This update is free for existing Sibelius 7 users, and includes more than 150 bug fixes and improvements.

Among the most significant improvements in this release are substantial performance improvements to both screen redraw and editing speed, improved support for 64-bit ReWire hosts, support for MusicXML 3.0 in both import and export, and changes in the way the single document interface works when closing score windows.

Read on for more information about the Sibelius 7.1 update, but if you want to get straight down to business, here are the links you need:

Alternatively, you can simply open any score in your copy of Sibelius 7, then click Check For Updates on the Help page of the File tab.

Performance improvements

Despite being rebuilt from the ground up as a 64-bit application, Sibelius 7 was often slower in operation on the same hardware than, say, Sibelius 6, in terms of editing speed (especially for text on Mac) and general screen redraw. We’ve made improvements in several areas in Sibelius 7.1.2 and the performance of the application is now directly comparable with Sibelius 6 – and in terms of pure screen redraw speed, in general Sibelius 7 is now faster than Sibelius 6.

Windows XP support

When Sibelius 7 was released, we dropped support for Windows XP so that we could concentrate our efforts on supporting the latest Windows technologies, such as DirectWrite and Aero, both of which are only available in Windows Vista or later. However, we have received lots of feedback from people who want to upgrade to or buy Sibelius 7, but are unable to because upgrading to Windows 7 isn’t feasible. For these people, we’ve restored Windows XP support to Sibelius 7.1.2. XP users won’t get the full Sibelius 7 experience (e.g. DirectWrite text measurement and rendering isn’t available, and the Quick Access Toolbar draws on a strip above the ribbon rather than directly on the window title bar as it does in Aero), and because there’s no 64-bit Windows XP support, use of the included Sibelius 7 Sounds library will be somewhat impractical, but they can now take advantage of all of the other great new features in Sibelius 7.

Improved MusicXML support

Sibelius 7 now exports MusicXML 3.0 files, including the latest additions to the format for describing the individual sounds and playback devices used by a score. We’ve also fixed a number of important bugs in MusicXML export, and we’ve spruced up MusicXML import as well, both allowing Sibelius to import MusicXML 3.0 files without throwing any errors (though Sibelius does not yet explicitly support any of the new MusicXML 3.0 features on import) and also taking care of some page layout problems for scores created by MusicXML import.

Improved locale support

Users running with non-English regional settings will be pleased to know that Sibelius now respects the number formats specified by your operating system’s regional settings throughout the application. For example, if you’re in France or Germany, Sibelius now correctly allows the use of comma (,) as the decimal mark, and a space as the thousands separator, making it much easier to read and type floating point numbers on the ribbon, in dialogs, and the Inspector. (Unfortunately, for deep-rooted technical reasons, this support does not extend to dialogs displayed by ManuScript plug-ins, but plug-ins that present floating point values to you are few and far between.)

Single document interface improvements

Document tabs in a Sibelius score window can now be re-ordered simply by dragging them left or right, and you can even “tear off” a tab to open the contents of that tab in an entirely new window, simply by dragging the tab up or down until the mouse pointer shows a Sibelius score icon under the grabber hand. Release the mouse somewhere else, and your chosen tab opens as a new window.

There are also improvements to how Sibelius behaves on Windows when you close the last tab in the last open document window: rather than quitting the application (if you have switched off the option to show the Quick Start window again after closing the last score), Sibelius disables all of the controls in the ribbon and allows you to open a score via the File > Recent tab, or indeed via File > Open, or to start a new one via File > New. This new mode of operation is very similar to how e.g. the most recent versions of Microsoft Word behave.

Get started

There are plenty of other improvements, too, some of which I’ll follow up in future posts. Don’t forget to check out the complete list of fixes and improvements.

If you’ve not yet upgraded to Sibelius 7, there’s never been a better time. Sibelius 7.1.2 has the benefit of hundreds of accumulated fixes and improvements in previous maintenance releases, and delivers substantial improvements in performance to boot. If you haven’t tried Sibelius 7 yet, the 30-day trial version has been updated to Sibelius 7.1.2 as well.

If you’re already using Sibelius 7, you should update as soon as you’ve finished your current project (never update in the middle of a project!). You can find the download in the Sibelius Help Center.

Sibelius 7 Essential Training on Lynda.com

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:13:24 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re looking for ways to learn Sibelius 7, you’re spoiled for choice. Not only is there comprehensive on-screen documentation provided with the software (which you can also download here), an optional printed version of the Sibelius 7 Reference Guide, an excellent book in the Avid Learning Series by James Humberstone, Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials, and in-person training and clinics, but you can also learn the software online at Lynda.com.

Instructor Jenny Amaya, who runs the Commercial Music Lab in Perris, CA, has completely revised and updated her existing Sibelius 6 Essential Training course, and the result is the new Sibelius 7 Essential Training course, comprising more than 20 hours of video tuition, and available only at Lynda.com. From the course description:

In Sibelius 7 Essential Training, author Jenny Amaya shows how to create professional-looking scores, beginning with the basics of note entry and playback. The course explains how to interface with a MIDI keyboard; edit note durations and pitches; and incorporate lyrics, tempo markings, and other text elements. Features specific to version 7, such as 64-bit support, improved sound library, and text and typography enhancements are also covered in detail.

The course is available only to Lynda.com subscribers, and subscriptions start at $25 per month.

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