Summer is here again! At NYC Music Services and Scoring Notes, we’ll be recharging after a very full first half of 2026. Don’t worry — things won’t go totally dark around here, and we’ve got some exciting things that we’ll be rolling out very soon.
For now, there’s plenty to catch up on. Summer reading beckons, and there are the many news articles, reviews, tips, and tutorials we’ve produced to get you all caught up as we begin the second half of the year.
For your (re)-listening pleasure, there’s the Scoring Notes podcast, with many episodes where we talk all about our favorite topics: music notation software and related technology.
And over at Notation Central, our marketplace for music notation technology, the summer sale is on, with price reductions across the board to help you make the most of the software you use.
So, it’s time to summer-ize! Wishing you a very happy holiday and summer season, from all of us at NYC Music Services and Scoring Notes!
Reading
Notation software
If you use music notation software, the first place to start your summer reading list is our Product Guide, where we keep current with every major release of Dorico, MuseScore, and Sibelius, and most of the intermediate updates in between.
Dorico has had a remarkably steady year. Following Dorico 6 and its proofreading-focused 6.1 “Select More” update late last year, Dorico 6.2 arrived in March with smarter handling of repeats, expanded guitar tablature, improved harmonic notation, and a raft of engraving refinements. The point releases that followed were anything but minor: 6.2.10 brought further tablature work and paragraph-level smart quotes; 6.2.20 introduced support for Cantai, the new vocal synthesis plug-in (more on that below); and 6.2.30 deepened that Cantai integration with independent voice playback, added glissando options, and continued a steady run of MusicXML export improvements.
Sibelius has matched that pace with three major updates of its own in 2026. Sibelius 2026.2 cleansed the palette, bringing dark mode to the desktop, refreshed UI icons, and early cross-staff engraving improvements. Sibelius 2026.5 added VST3 support and expanded Sibelius Cloud Sharing to individual parts and score subsets. And just last week, Sibelius 2026.6 finally fixed one of the program’s longest-standing irritations — accidentals on cross-staff notes now behave the way they should — along with auto-save on mobile, proper banjo tab, the return of macOS Quick Look, and Cantai support.
MuseScore Studio rounded out its 4.x line in fine form. Version 4.6 added full SMuFL support along with other engraving and playback updates, 4.6.4 became one of the first applications to support Cantai, and MuseScore Studio 4.7 — the final 4.x release — added arrowheads on lines, chord brackets, guitar dives, ASIO support on Windows, and a number of workflow improvements.
And there’s a new name in the field — or rather, a familiar one in new clothes. Notion has become Fender Notion, as Fender unified its PreSonus software under a single brand and repositioned Notion within a broader scoring-to-production ecosystem. We caught up with Fender’s Chris Swaffer at NAMM to hear where it’s all headed.
Related tech
Cantai and vocal synthesis
The biggest new arrival of the year sits right at the intersection of notation and audio. Cantai, the vocal synthesis plug-in from the Turing Opera Workshop and Edge Audio Labs, lets your score actually sing — expressive synthesized voices driven directly from your notation, complete with lyrics. David MacDonald reviewed it in depth, walking through how to get started, where it shines, and where it still has room to grow. It now works directly in Dorico, and has support in MuseScore Studio and on the way elsewhere.
Transcription and interactivity
Two adjacent corners of the field drew our attention at NAMM. klang.io’s Sebastian Murgul made the case for why AI-driven music transcription has finally become practical — and where the hardest musical problems still remain. And Piascore’s Hiroyuki Koike showed how his company is transforming digital sheet music through MusicXML-based interactivity and AI-driven tools that respond to musicians in real time.
NotePerformer
The widely loved playback engine continued its incremental march, with NotePerformer 5.1.2 delivering bug fixes and refinements to its core sounds.
Closer to home
There’s been no shortage of activity at NYC Music Services and on the Notation Central marketplace, either.
We’re especially pleased that LS Iris, Luís Salgueiro’s distinctive handwritten music font, has been revived and is available again after several years off the market — newly overhauled, significantly expanded, and now offered in four SMuFL variants with the Caveat text font bundled alongside. It joins the Music Type Foundry fonts, which themselves saw new and updated releases late last year.
Notation Express for Dorico 6 was a major rebuild this spring, introducing real-time bidirectional feedback and chainable Note Tools — a genuine shift in how Dorico is controlled, not just how fast. A follow-up update brought the same idea to dynamics, with the new Dynamic Chain collapsing the multi-step business of entering a hairpin and its surrounding dynamics into a single, order-free gesture.
Our PDF Batch Utilities got a major rebuild and a brand-new app — PDF-Counter — followed by updates that preserve annotations and improve page counts and a PDF-Counter 1.1.0 release that adds a flexible Columns dialog with ten selectable data fields.
On the plug-in side, ScoringWorld updated the Graphical MIDI Tools plug-in for Sibelius to version 2026.5 and spun off three new standalone custom tools: a harp tool, a walking bass tool, and a Native American Flute fingering tool.
And our Scoring Express templates continue to evolve, having been updated for Dorico 6 and expanded with choral and vocal collections.
Special coverage and tips
NAMM 2026
Scoring Notes once again provided coverage of the NAMM Show, with no shortage of opportunities to meet the interesting people behind the products in our world. After getting on the scene, we sat down for a series of conversations, offered as web, video, and podcast content:
- NAMM 2026: John Barron opens the door to Dorico’s future
- NAMM 2026: Sounding out the inputs with klang.io’s Sebastian Murgul
- NAMM 2026: Getting into a Fender-bender with Chris Swaffer
- NAMM 2026: An avid Sibelius discussion with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak
- NAMM 2026: Piascore’s bet on interactivity
MOLA 2027
Although much smaller than NAMM, the MOLA Conference is equally important to the Scoring Notes audience, both for the issues it tackles and the people it brings together. This year’s conference was hosted by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and we have some big news about where it’s headed next: the 2027 conference will take place in San Francisco, April 30 – May 3, with a reimagined Tech Fair — call it Tech Fair 2.0 — which I’m honored to be producing and programming from the ground up.
Useful stuff
Scoring Notes continues to feature content you won’t find in quite the same way anywhere else.
We dug into calibrating a printer — and your workflow, where specific lessons about fine-tuning a Ricoh for music printing turn into general advice worth doing for the benefit of your future self.
We also published a pair of companion pieces on the small, fast commands hiding in plain sight: Dorico’s Jump Bar, summoned with a single press of J, and Sibelius’s Command Search, summoned with a single press of the comma key. Both are habits worth forming.
And we revisited the score preparation and production notes — a checklist-driven look at what the software has solved, what it hasn’t, and what wasn’t even on the original list.
Of course, there’s much more where that came from on our tips and tutorials pages.
Re-listening
We know everyone reading here is already subscribed to the Scoring Notes podcast! But if you’re not yet, here’s where you can follow us: Amazon | Apple Podcasts | Pandora | PocketCasts | Podchaser | RSS | Spotify | TuneIn
Alongside all of the NAMM coverage above, we sat down with Richard deCosta, founder of Cantai and the Turing Opera Workshop, to talk about what happens when your notation software can sing.
On Freshly pressed, we got delightfully nerdy about the Notation Express and PDF Batch Utilities updates — and the notation software tools hiding in plain sight, and where they could go next.
And in Score preparation and production: a double-checklist, David and I revisited the checklist that launched the podcast, working through it section by section to see how the years — and the software — have changed it.
If you’ve got a question, comment, or topic you’d like us to take up on a future episode, we’d love to hear it — drop us a line at podcast@scoringnotes.com.
Reduction (in prices)
At Notation Central, you can chill out this summer with some cool deals.
This is the first general sale of the year, with 20% off nearly everything in the store, from now through Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Just use the code SUMMER at checkout to see the discount applied.
This is also a great moment to pick up the new and newly updated items we’ve released over the past year:
- 20% off LS Iris, the freshly revived handwritten SMuFL font — four music variants plus the bundled Caveat text family
- 20% off Notation Express for Dorico, now rebuilt for Dorico 6 with bidirectional feedback and the new Dynamic Chain tools, and Notation Express for Sibelius
- 20% off all Scoring Express templates for Sibelius, Dorico, and Finale — including the bundles, which already save you $60 or more
- 20% off all music and text fonts, including the Music Type Foundry collection
- 20% off the Graphical MIDI Tools plug-in for Sibelius and its new ScoringWorld custom tools
- …and much more!
There are some stackable savings for even more discounts:
- MTF25 for 25% off 2 or more MTF SMuFL fonts
- SMUFLME for 25% off 2 or more NorFonts SMuFL fonts
- SEDOR25 for 25% off 3 or more Scoring Express Dorico templates
- SESIB25 for 25% off 3 or more Scoring Express Sibelius templates
- NEDOR25 for 25% off 2 or more Notation Express for Dorico Stream Deck profiles
Future updates to Notation Express, Scoring Express, and the PDF Batch Utilities remain on the road map. Now is a great time to lock in your savings, thanks to the Notation Central summer sale, which runs through July 15, 2026.
Don’t forget to use the code SUMMER at checkout to see the 20% discount applied. Happy summer!
