Among several announcements made at NAMM today was a press release from Avid describing a new cloud publishing technology for Sibelius.
According to the release, the technology is called Sibelius | Cloud Publishing. Avid says that the new technology is based on Avid Everywhere and built upon the Avid MediaCentral Platform.
The service is targeted at music publishers. One of the main differences between Sibelius | Cloud Publishing and current technology based on the Scorch browser plug-in appear to be that, in fact, installation of a browser plug-in is not required in order for visitors to experience and purchase the music.
Other reported improvements are cross-platform capability, including on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, or Linux; all updates to the Cloud Publishing server playback engine and samples are presumably pushed by Avid instantly available to all publishers and customers; and the technology handles PDF files in addition to Sibelius files.
Transactions occur on the publisher’s web site. There is no word yet if the service will be limited to a handful of major publishers, as was the case with Sibelius Internet Edition, or if any user with a storefront would be eligible to take advantage of the service. No information regarding initial or recurring costs was provided in the release.
Cloud-based music notation products have been gaining traction, especially with Hal Leonard’s acquisition of Noteflight, a leading product in the space, almost a year ago.
In April of last year, Avid’s segment marketing manager Andrew Wild told this blog that Avid would be “taking the overall Avid Everywhere vision and applying it to future development of Sibelius, the Scorch browser plug-in and the Sibelius | Reader.”
It was known that the development of Scorch and related technologies was a priority for the Sibelius development team after the release of Sibelius 7.5.1.
Other Avid announcements today included Pro Tools 12 with flexible licensing options and cloud collaboration, and a free version of Pro Tools called Pro Tools | First.
We spoke with Avid’s Sam Butler and Joe Pearson about the technology, The substance of that conversation can be read in this follow-up article.
Updated January 27 with a link to an extensive interview with Avid’s Sam Butler and Joe Pearson.
Steve
“The link provided in the press release was broken at the time of this writing”
That sounds like the Avid way.
Philip Rothman
We found a working link: http://www.avid.com/US/partners/sibelius-cloud-publishing#
Fraser sims
Avid everywhere was announced april 2014 with promises about scorch. Scorch ios 1.2 is 18 months old now, and before that was released, we had to live with the previous unworkable buggy verion for nearly 2 years. The ios scorch forum does not appear to be monitored by anyone from avid for over a year with users continuing to report issues about not being able to download scores they have bought on line.
Personally i want to see some tangible movement with more frequent bug fixes and new features from them rather than vapourware announcements of future which i have little expectation of actually being delivered and to a certain extent, competitive products have been advanced that i cant see avid ever actually catching up.
Adrian Holovaty
Great to see they’re bringing Scorch into the modern era. I wish the demo were working, though — it appears to be broken or nonexistent…?
Also curious to see how this compares to Soundslice.
Adrian
Justin Tokke
I don’t get it, where’s the demo? All I see is a picture of a screenshot.
Interesting development but I want to see it in action!
Adrian Holovaty
They confirmed to me on Twitter that the demo isn’t working yet:
https://twitter.com/adrianholovaty/status/558441804308033537
Eric
It seems their Sibelius trial version system isn’t working either. I signed up days ago and nothing has shown up in my email or my spam file. I contacted sales about this–no response. I’ve always been baffled by the ‘we don’t care if you buy from us or not’ attitude.
Justin Tokke
I have a feeling they just rushed the announcement to get it in time for NAMM. Doesn’t matter how *finished* the actual software is, am I right?!
Philip Rothman
Justin: We’ve got more information here.