All this week, we’ll be publishing posts from the 2025 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. It’s a huge exhibition, so we’ll focus on what we do best: covering the field of music notation software and related technology. Follow all of our NAMM 2025 coverage at Scoring Notes, and on our social media accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
It’s been a busy year in Sibelius-land since I last visited with Sam Butler, Avid’s director of product management, at the NAMM Show last year.
In the spring of last year, Avid released the long-awaited version of Sibelius Mobile for Android and Chromebook, which was also previewed at last year’s NAMM Show.
That application was the recipient of a NAMM TEC (Technical Excellence and Creativity) award on the first night of this year’s show, in the category of “Audio Apps & Hardware / Peripherals for Smartphones & Tablets”, a high honor which Sam was rightly proud of. “It was very unexpected, very exciting,” Sam said, adding that he and his team were “completely honored to get this tech award.”
“It’s very validating to get this publicly-voted award for Sibelius on mobile,” Sam said.” We specifically entered the Android app, and it’s been very well received. The app is now on over a million devices, and we’re pretty pleased with the growth that we’ve had since releasing Sibelius on iOS in 2021… it was a great testament to the to the team’s work.”
There’s new stuff coming down the pike, but let’s first take a moment to take stock of last year. Many of the 2024 releases seemed to focus on the Sibelius “support structure” around Sibelius, particularly a few major highlights. At last year’s NAMM Show, in addition to the Android app, Avid previewed what was eventually released as Sibelius 2024.3: copy and paste of MIDI between Sibelius and Pro Tools (or any application that supports the MIDI clipboard).
We also saw a mobile- and cloud-only release later in the year that focused on bringing more desktop features to the mobile app.
There were also the tasks of finally making Sibelius Apple silicon-native and adding better MusicXML support in the program. But the way of working in Sibelius hasn’t changed too much in the past year.
This year, though — at least if the NAMM preview is any guide, we’re in for some feature updates to the core Sibelius music preparation experience.
As I visited with Sam at this year’s show, I asked him if that was a fair assessment.
“It is,” he said. “ We always try and have a balance of keeping everything going to making sure that it supports the latest hardware on both Windows and Mac and now mobile as well.”
The marquee feature for the next Sibelius release, on display here at the 2025 NAMM Show, is a new decondensing parts feature. This appears to be part of a long trajectory, building upon a number of features introduced in 2023.5 and other Sibelius versions along the way. Many users have been clamoring for such a feature for years.
Sam broke it down — or perhaps broke it out (like a condensed staff) by telling us how it works and why it’s different from approaches that other software takes to this common scenario.
“We wanted to tackle this problem in a way that didn’t affect any of the performance as in the way you use the application,” Sam said. “You still use Sibelius it’s in exactly the same way. If you want to use the feature, you turn it on, and then most of the time, it’s done, but then we give you complete control over everything.”
Surely there is always more room for refinement. It has often been customary to see Sibelius features introduced in a “phase 1” (or “MVP“-like) with later phases rolled out in subsequent updates.
“This is very much a solid feature that is complete and it’s to spec. And we finished all the stories yesterday — and it was all a bit much! — but yeah, this evolves,” Sam said. “This doesn’t support everything that you might want to do in a part. It doesn’t allow you to split out a single stave into two staves. So even if in a full score, if you try and do SATB combined, and then you split them out individually. And making that all work and filter, that’s going to be something that we need to build on later, hopefully later this year.”
The news of MakeMusic sunsetting Finale was a jolt to the field. Avid responded by further discounting its crossgrade offer for Finale users, and also went on a listening tour in the fall specifically reaching out to Finale users. I asked Sam (as I did with other software representatives) what he was seeing from customers.
“We’ve gained thousands of users that we didn’t have before,” he said. “We’re really pleased with the response of efforts that we made in our October release to improve MusicXML imports. So that wasn’t on the roadmap for then. We brought that forward and managed to pivot; our development practices allow for that. We are trying to be as agile as we can.”
More generally, I asked Sam about where he thought music notation software is headed in the next year.
“We’re at a bit of funny junction,” he said. “There’s been changes across the whole board. We were not, none of us, I don’t think we’re the same as where we were a year or two ago. We’re certainly keeping our head down and, and cracking on with our roadmap and listening to customers.
“And one of the impacts from Finale users coming on board is they’ve now got a bunch of feature requests for us that we didn’t necessarily have on the roadmap before,” Sam continued. We obviously still want to concentrate on the first time UX, as in what you see when you first run Sibelius, or what you see when you need to reactivate Sibelius. That whole activation flow is going to get changed, even down to the Quick Start, and reviewing that workflow. Our mobile app has actually has been our test bed for UI redesign.”
Sam reminded us that “all of us have got small teams, at the various different notation companies. We’re not hundreds of people,so we can’t do everything, but we want to make sure that we’re doing the important things that are going to make people get the best out of our applications and the ecosystem that we’ve built.
“And,” he added, it’s still really fun after all these years!”
Speaking of fun, you can watch my complete interview with Sam Butler on the NYC Music Services YouTube channel.
Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2025 NAMM Show, and follow us on our social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
As a daily user I would love to see some attention paid to (for example) cross-staff notation. Beaming is ugly or wrong (in the case of partial beams) , slurs are a total mess and accidentals are frequently wrong unless you go through them individually and use a plug-in to adjust them. These are problems that have existed for a decade or more and are, in my opinion, much more important than a mobile UI redesign. I personally would like to get some indication that updates and feature roadmaps are actually being driven by user needs and not the marketing department.
Whole heartedly agree on this. Transparency on road maps also builds excitement. It creates trust.
I, for one, have been waiting on a new playback system to rival Dorico’s, getting rid of the maddening and archaic sound sets & the Sound Set Editor, and implementing the kind of articulation sets that Dorico is doing. As a film/game scorer who uses samples daily, this would be an absolute game changer for me. it could potentially allow me to export from Sibelius into logic and have it sound exactly the same, so that tweaking CCs and articulations is not a full restart. (Noteperformer using 3rd party libraries doesn’t work this way). I’ve been waiting 10+ years on this. Even if I knew this was on the road map one or two years from now, it would let me know that they ARE listening and care about what users care about.