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.
Events have begun at the 2025 NAMM Show, with this year’s show offering five days of events running through January 25. Although the exhibitions themselves don’t begin until tomorrow, Avid has a history of getting a jump on NAMM with product previews, and this year is no exception. Avid has just announced updates planned for Sibelius and Pro Tools that users can expect to see soon.
Scoring Notes readers will be most interested in Sibelius’s new decondensing parts feature, which Avid plans to show off at its NAMM booth (ACC North Level 1, booth 15000 / 15102 if you’re planning on attending the show).
Meanwhile, Steinberg is getting in on the action with its NAMM Deals. Beginning today, products such as Dorico 5, Cubase 14, and WaveLab 12 will be offered for up to 40% off their usual prices. The promotion runs through February 5.
Decondensing parts in Sibelius
A press release from Avid says that “Sibelius will preview its new Decondensing Parts feature, which allows a user to create individual Dynamic Parts for each player from a single stave, with just one click, as well as techniques for migrating from MakeMusic Finale.”
Building upon the updates over the last couple of years, and most notably the 2023.5 update, the next update of Sibelius will feature options for showing a condensed two-player staff in the score, while having the parts appear “decondensed”. This will be done by the application of Staff Filters, which, like the more conventional filters in Sibelius, will offer options to filter voices 1 through 4, and Player 1 or Player 2.
In the latter instance of using players, these will be contextually aware of text directives such as “1.”, “solo”, “tutti”, “unis.”, etc. The filter can be moved back and forth and expanded or contracted. When all content of a bar is filtered out, it collapses into a full bar rest and will combine into a multirest if needed.
To help automate the process of decondensing, a new command will be added, called Decondense into Parts for Two Players. The command will be in the Ribbon as well as available through Command Search. When selecting a condensed staff and triggering the command, Sibelius will create two new Dynamic Parts for the selected staff, apply Staff Filters for Player 1 and Player 2 (respectively), and then rename each part as the instrument name appended with a 1 or 2. There may still be further work involved; if Sibelius doesn’t automatically filter the players exactly as you had expected, you can use a combination of other Staff Filters or individually hidden items to display the score data in any way that you like. So, while this doesn’t appear to be a fully automated solution at this juncture, it does allow the user to exercise control over any one of the seemingly infinite ways that condensed music can be pried into separate parts.
In taking this approach to decondensing, Avid is saying that there is no noticeable performance impact when using this new feature, so there’s no need for it to be switched on or off to improve the responsiveness of the software.
From the Pro Tools side of the business, Avid says that they will be previewing “speech-to-text AI technology which speeds navigation or finding specific vocal takes. Audio files in a session can be scanned for speech/lyric information which then displays as text directly in context with the associated clips on the tracks.”
We’ll take note of the previews Avid will be giving at their booth, 15102, in ACC North Level 1, so if you’re at the show, stop by and see what you think!
Steinberg sale
Steinberg has climbed aboard the NAMM tram with some sizable promotions.
From today through February 5, Dorico 5 is 40% off the usual price in your region. This offer extends to new licenses, updates, upgrades, and crossgrades from Sibelius and Capella. (The heavily discounted special crossgrade from Finale to Dorico is not included in this offer, as it is already 50% off the price of the usual competitive crossgrade.)
The lifetime unlock in-app-purchase option in Dorico for iPad is also included; usually $120, at 40% off it brings the price down to only $72.
WaveLab 12 is also 40% off.
Cubase 14 is on sale at 25% off; of particular interest to notation users is the recent Cubase update which brought a Dorico-powered score editor to that digital audio workstation.
All of these products, and more, will be displayed and demonstrated at NAMM. You can find them as part of Yamaha’s footprint on Level 3 (300DE) — come and spend some time visiting with the software and enjoying the larger universe of Yamaha instruments as well.
Where else to roam the floor
I’ll do by best to provide coverage from around the exhibits as they pertain to the Scoring Notes audience. Here are the spots I’ve got my eye on so far, sorted roughly by location. If there’s anything you’d like to call my attention to, please leave a comment.
- Qualcomm (Moises) (Hall A: 11410)
- Native Instruments (Hall A: 12110)
- Alfred Music / MakeMusic (Hall B: 8902)
- Muse Group / Hal Leonard (Hall B: 9114)
- ILIO (Hall B: 9310)
- United States Postal Service (Hall C: 7807)
- Yamaha (Level 3: 300DE)
- Avid (ACC North Level 1: 15000 / 15102)
- Dreamtonics (ACC North Level 1: 15623)
- PreSonus (ACC North Level 1: 15304)
Decondensing Parts in Sibelius !? This I gotta see… Extracting parts from my .Sib orch. scores is almost as time-consuming as the composing time-frame. Conductors rightfully object to scores with e.g. individual staves for each woodwind instrument, brass instrument, etc., resulting in scores the size of window curtains. Consequently, making 2 individual parts from a 2 player stave (e.g. horns 1+3, clarinets 1+2) often leads to errors -notes-dynamics-text left out. Yup, decondensing parts, this I gotta see…
Decondensing is a powerful tool. Looks to me like Dorico is the best thing that ever happened to Sibelius ;-)
It would be fantastic to be able to write into an already condensed staff in Dorico. Fingers crossed that the feature battle escalates for both products!
Decondesing is a really useful feature but it will always require manual overrides. This is because part directions can be unintentionally ambigious. The advantage of condensing, as in Dorico, is that there is never any doubt as to which notes belong to each part. This would be particularly problematic if more than two players were allocated to a single staff.
I would be interested to know if each note and other object could by assigned Player 1/2/3 etc properties. These could be calculated from the directions on the score, or alternatively, these properties could be assigned manually in the GUI and there could be a number of options about how they are displayed in the score. The second option appear to me to be more logical and consistent.
Very interested to see how decondensing works in Sibelius. That could be a real game changer