We begin the year to report on two notable personnel changes at MakeMusic and Avid, one for each company: Grégory Dell’Era has left his position as president at Alfred Music and MakeMusic, and Justin Tokke‘s position at Avid as senior product designer for Sibelius has been eliminated.
Although it is beyond the scope of Scoring Notes to cover every personnel change in the music notation field, these two are notable given their particular visibility to customers of the products they represented.
Grégory Dell’Era leaves MakeMusic
Grégory Dell’Era has left his position as president at Alfred Music and MakeMusic. At the time that this article was published, the company has not announced his departure or publicly named a successor.
Greg co-founded Weezic, a web-based interactive learning music software which MakeMusic acquired in July 2015. In retrospect, that acquisition was the second of three major moves that MakeMusic made in the mid-2010s that effectively charted its current course. The first move was becoming part of Peaksware in 2014 (after being taken private a year earlier by Andy Stephens’s LaunchEquity Partners) — a literal move that took the company from its Minnesota-based HQ to Colorado. Soon after the Weezic acquisition, in 2016 Peaksware acquired Alfred Music, securing a direct relationship to much of the content provided on the SmartMusic platform.
In the coming years, Weezic’s web-based technology completely replaced the Finale-based version of SmartMusic, eventually becoming MakeMusic Cloud. Greg’s position at MakeMusic reflected the centrality of this product to the company. After being named vice president of product development in 2018, he became president in January 2021.
More recently, Greg communicated directly with Finale users in August 2024, when the company announced that it would cease development of Finale, which since the company’s inception had been its flagship desktop application for music notation, and that it was endorsing a discounted crossgrade path for its users to switch to Dorico Pro. “Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry — a reality after 35 years, and I want to be candid about this,” Greg said in a statement, which was also accompanied by a letter to Finale users.
Justin Tokke’s position eliminated amidst Avid downsizing
Justin Tokke, who had been Avid’s senior product designer for Sibelius since 2021, announced on posts on social media that the company eliminated his position, and that he had left the Sibelius team as of December 31, 2024.
“Through all the ups and downs: new features, bug fixes, new platforms, endless discussions about licensing, whatever it may be, I’m so glad I got to spend these last three and a half years working on the platform I hold most dear,” Justin wrote on LinkedIn and Facebook. “Last year I reached 20 years of using Sibelius, with most of that time professionally as a composer and music engraver. It is an essential tool for musicians all around the world and I’m glad was able to help shepherd it’s future. It’s been a great honor to be the customers’ voice for change in Sibelius, truly a dream job for me. I’ll continue to use Sibelius in my other projects, which I still contend is the best notation software in the world.”
Justin is well-known to the Sibelius community, with a considerable following in his role as founder of Music Engraving Tips, a popular Facebook group with nearly 60,000 members, and has been a regular presence on Sibelius’s official Facebook group and forum.
Avid was acquired by the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) in an all-cash transaction that valued Avid at $1.4 billion, inclusive of Avid’s net debt. The deal was announced in the summer of 2023 and closed in November of that year. Since then, it has been reported that Avid has been eliminating positions, with the company confirming some of the layoffs directly.
Since April 2024, Wellford Dillard has served as Avid’s CEO, replacing Jeff Rosica, who retired from Avid last year after 11 years with the company and six as CEO.
History repeating itself. Remember the Save Sibelius campaign of 2012-13?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Williams_(musician)#'Save_Sibelius'_campaign
Alongside the ‘sunsetting’ of Finale and another downsizing of the Sibelius team, Dorico is already firmly established as scorewriter market leader. Dorico is the creation of the Sibelius Development Team fired by Avid in 2012. Perhaps Justin Tokke could seek employment there?
Depending on the lineups you normally work with, Sibelius may be all you need, but if, like me, you work with large orchestral and operatic scores, there are three flagship features that put Dorico right at the front of the market. No other scorewriter comes close in my view:
1. Ability to export a complete Dorico score from Steinberg’s sister DAWs, Cubase and Nuendo and fine tune it in Dorico.
2. Condensing Score, meaning instruments such as Flutes 1-3, Oboes 1-3, Bassoons 1-3 Horns 1-4 etc that start out on separate staves can be merged on to condensed staves with a single key stroke that with very little subsequent editing allows you to have your Conductor’s cake and eat it too. With Sibelius, you need to maintain two copies of a symphonic score: one for the Conductor and the other for the Musicians’ Parts – a massive inconvenience if you plan to do any subsequent editing. No other scorewriter but Dorico offers the condensing score feature within the same score file.
3. Built-in MIDI GUI, showing notes as MIDI events in a piano roll Key Editor. No other scorewriter but Dorico offers this.
It was these three features that made switching to Dorico for large orchestral lineups a no-brainer for me. Needless to say, Dorico will do a perfectly good job for smaller lineups too! Once you get the hang of it, built-ins like popovers make it significantly faster to work with.
Dorico will also import MusicXML and MIDI pretty well, so you can open your Finale, Sibelius and Musescore files without losing your core notation.
On the negative side, Dorico is for even the most seasoned users of existing scorewriters a very steep learning curve, and for my own part, I decided to start from scratch and not try to make it behave like Sibelius. Expect to spend about 20 hours and watch as many videos. For me, totally worth it.
Derek – nice to see you comment on this topic again. I can assure you, this is not “history repeating itself”. As I replied to Peter below, the development team are still in place in our two locations, and we’re releasing regularly across Win, Mac, iOS, Android and the web. In case you didn’t see it, here’s a summary of what we achieved in 2024: https://x.com/AvidSibelius/status/1873727939101257944
The Sibelius codebase has never been in better shape either, allowing us to support the very latest operating systems and hardware with ease, whilst keeping up with the toughest demands from our customers. We have a lot planned for 2025, so do keep an eye out for news.
Good to hear from you, Sam, and many thanks for the update and for your reassurances!
Sibelius development slowed after Avid closed its UK office, leading to a decline in paid notation software users. Recent developments suggest Avid may be withdrawing from the market, potentially benefiting Dorico, which aligns with Yamaha’s vision.
Nor, while we did see a slow-down initially 12 years ago, we’ve shipped over 60 feature releases since then. We have a packed roadmap for 2025, with no intentions of slowing down.
Sam, thanks for your response. Please I have a question: will the upcoming version of Sibelius support SMuFL?
Hi Nordine – it’s on the list! No timeframe at the moment.
Avid will never learn, it’s 2012 all over again.
Peter – I can reassure you, this is not “2012 all over again”. The development team remains strong and capable across our two locations, and we’re releasing like never before across Win, Mac, iOS, Android and the web. In case you didn’t see it, here’s a summary: https://x.com/AvidSibelius/status/1873727939101257944
That’s reassuring for sure! I was waiting for such comment form someone form the Dev team. Sibelius is wonderful and I recently started using it after Finale’s end of development, which I was using for almost 20 years. I really like Sibelius more than Dorico especially for is flexibility for contemporary notation. I have one question though, If you can you can answer it or at least leave maybe a hint: Although there are many features added recently, the user interface is dated, looking exactly the same as 10 or more years ago. Are there any plans for a total UI revamp or at least some kind of dark mode support? Thank you.
Glad you’re enjoying Sibelius. The interface in Sibelius, including how your interact with it, has change in a number of ways. For instance, you can now touch-type around the program using , (comma) to access Command Search. Our mobile apps are a nod to a complete new interface for Sibelius too. We have great plans to modernise the look of Sibelius on desktop, including dark mode, and I’m hoping we can achieve some of this in 2025.