As another year comes to a close, it’s time once again to reflect on the past year on Scoring Notes and in the world of music notation software and related technology — and to look forward to what’s ahead.

As another year comes to a close, it’s time once again to reflect on the past year on Scoring Notes and in the world of music notation software and related technology — and to look forward to what’s ahead.
Bob Zawalich, Sibelius guru and plug-in developer extraordinaire, gives us a personal tour of how many new and updated plug-ins came to be over the past few months, meeting friends along the way.
Avid has released Sibelius 2018.12. Coming less than three weeks after the release of Sibelius 2018.11, today’s release is largely intended to fix bugs that appeared in last month’s release, and it also addresses several other issues.
A review of Stream Deck, a customizable control surface with 15 keys that connects to your computer. If you have dozens of key commands in Dorico, Sibelius, Finale, or other programs, Stream Deck can operate all of those commands with style.
NotePerformer 3.2 is out with improvements to its plug-and-play sound library. Most significantly, for Dorico users, multiple articulations will now work with any new scores. The update also includes a number of performance fixes for all users.
There are plenty of holiday shopping guides — but none, I assure you, with this unique list of recommendations. I’ve assembled a list of some of my favorite products that I think you will enjoy as well, and relate to the task of creating music notation (more or less!).
At NYC Music Services, we’ve released seven new free chord symbol fonts for Sibelius. Four of the fonts are part of the Norfolk family. The other three fonts are the inaugural members of a new font family called Pori. Pori is a derivative of Petaluma, the handwritten font that first appeared in Dorico 2.0. One of the Pori fonts is something very special.
MuseScore has announced the beta release of MuseScore 3.0. This new version of MuseScore is a separate application from MuseScore 2.x and will be the first major release of MuseScore since it was acquired by Ultimate Guitar earlier in 2018.