If you happen to have missed some of our news, tips, tutorials, and reviews from the last several months, don’t worry — we’ve got you covered with this post with a summary of what’s been happening so that you can take it to the beach.
Written By Philip Rothman
Free Sibelius First now available; other improvements in 2018.6 release
Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.6, the latest version of its notation software. While the 2018.6 release is mostly geared toward unifying the different Sibelius tiers into one installer and the availability of the free tier for the first time, a few improvements made their way into this release in the areas of note spacing, grace notes, multi-text entry, tied notes, and more.
Audio interview with Daniel Spreadbury in New York
Steinberg product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury has been in New York City this week promoting Dorico. We caught up with Daniel before his demo at Yamaha Artist Services. Listen to our engaging 40-minute conversation, in which we discuss his time in New York, the new features in Dorico 2, the development process, and much more.
News-in-brief: Sibelius First, and two iOS keypad apps
Here’s a quick take on a few developments of late regarding the upcoming free Sibelius First software, and two keypad apps for iOS that offer notation software support: Sibelius KeyPad for Mac and NumPad.
NotePerformer 3 for Sibelius released; beta support for Finale and Dorico added
Wallander Instruments has released NotePerformer 3, a major update to its plug-and-play sound library for Sibelius. The update is the first major update since the release of NotePerformer 2 in March 2017. The update is free for all existing users, and the price for new users continues to be $129. For the first time, NotePerformer 3 has opened its doors to Finale and Dorico users as well, with a few caveats.
Graphical MIDI Tools plug-in brings sequencer-like capabilities to Sibelius
Graphical MIDI Tools (GMT) is a Sibelius plug-in by Santiago Barx that cleverly and ingeniously takes full advantage of Sibelius’s extended features such as colored objects, custom text, hidden MIDI messages, and more. It uses those features to superimpose a temporary sequencer-like frame on any given selection, and then gives the user the ability to draw in automations to manipulate the data in a way never before seen in a Sibelius tool. Moreover, there are additional windows to adjust velocity and note duration in piano roll-like fashion.
Sibelius 2018.5 released with one fix pertaining to plug-ins
Avid today released Sibelius 2018.5 to fix an issue in Sibelius where running some plug-ins would cause a memory leak that slowed Sibelius down until you restarted it. This most notably affected the Dolet MusicXML export plug-in, and only on Windows, not on Mac.
Find redundant arco and pizzicato markings in Sibelius
The Check Pizzicatos plug-in ships with Sibelius and it has saved me many minutes of work on many scores, and saved many minutes of rehearsal time. Its sole purpose is to locate suspect arco and pizz. markings in your score.
When preparing Stravinsky for Link Up, the engraver is also a student
We prepare all of the orchestral music for Carnegie Hall’s Link Up educational program, for students in grades 3 through 5. It’s deeply satisfying taking a masterwork by a great composer like Stravinsky and revisiting it by setting the notes anew. It wasn’t just the grade school students who were educated during this process!
Sibelius 2018.4.1 released with bug fixes
Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.4.1, a maintenance release to the substantial 2018.4 release from earlier this month. A few bugs hitched their way along for the ride on that release, and those have now been fixed in the latest update.