We’ll be publishing coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. The show has events running from January 20-24, 2026, and floor exhibits active from January 22 through January 24. 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 2026 coverage at Scoring Notes.
Listen to the podcast episode
On the Scoring Notes podcast, Avid’s Sam Butler and Joe Plazak discuss Sibelius’s development philosophy, how user feedback shapes priorities, where users should feel progress since last year, plus automation/AI, cross-platform realities, and Avid’s long-term commitment..
At the 2026 NAMM Show, I sat down once again with Sam Butler, Avid’s vice president of product management, and Joe Plazak, Sibelius product owner and senior principal software developer at Avid, to continue a conversation about Sibelius that has become increasingly defined not by headline features, but by intent.
When Sam and I spoke at NAMM last year, much of the discussion centered on what it meant to “decondense” Sibelius, which was a bit of a double-entendre, referring both to the decondensing parts workflow added in the 2025.2 update, as well as making Sibelius — a mature, deeply capable notation application — feel more approachable, more transparent, and more responsive to the ways musicians actually work today. In the year since, Sibelius has continued to evolve through a steady cadence of updates that emphasize workflow refinement, reliability, and under-the-hood modernization rather than huge splashy announcements (and you can find them all in our Scoring Notes Product Guide).
That steady rhythm raises important questions for long-time users and newcomers alike. What does progress look like when a product is already widely trusted? How do you modernize a codebase and architecture without disrupting the stability that professionals depend on? And how does a notation application like Sibelius define its role within an increasingly interconnected ecosystem of audio, production, and educational tools?
In this conversation, Joe and Sam reflect on the philosophy behind Sibelius’s recent development approach, how user feedback shapes prioritization, and where they believe users should most clearly feel progress compared to a year ago. We also talk about automation and AI in notation, the realities of cross-platform and mobile workflows, and what Avid wants musicians to understand about its long-term commitment to Sibelius.
As with previous interviews, the goal here is not to run down a feature checklist, but to surface the thinking behind the software — and to better understand how decisions made quietly, incrementally, and sometimes invisibly add up to meaningful change over time.
A transcript of the conversation follows, edited for clarity.
Scoring Notes interview with Sam Butler and Joe Plazak at NAMM 2026
Philip Rothman: Hey everybody, I’m Philip, and once again, I’m here with the Scoring Notes website and podcast at the 2026 NAMM Show. It’s my great pleasure to welcome, in a more quiet and peaceful environment today, my colleagues in the music notation software and related technology world. You probably know them from past NAMM interviews. Certainly, you know Sam Butler, and we also have joining us for the first time on camera—excepting last night—Joe Plazak from Avid. Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.
Joe Plazak: Thank you, Philip.
Sam Butler: Thank you, Philip. Good to be here. Good to see you again.
Philip: It’s great to see you, Sam and Joe, together here at the NAMM Show. Listen, obviously we’re here to talk about Sibelius and what Sibelius has been doing over the past year. A lot of our audience already is familiar with it, and a lot of people tune in periodically—maybe they don’t read Scoring Notes as religiously as some people do. So we’re here to catch them all up.
This year, I feel, has been really a steady cadence of features that have been rolled out. They have been coming out with regularity every couple of months or so. I think nine releases, if I’m not mistaken. I was just wondering, from your perspective, how intentional has that approach been, and what do you think it signals to users about where Sibelius is headed in the coming year?
Sam: It’s hugely intentional. When we introduced regular releases back in 2015, we knew that the cadence of people buying upgrades yearly—buying subscriptions could be monthly—we need to match that. We really need to be producing content and features every month if possible. It doesn’t always come out monthly; what we’ll try and do is a larger feature and then maybe follow that up with a smaller improvement to fine-tune that based on customer feedback.
But yes, because we’re now on mobile and desktop, we’ve got a really slick internal process of just building for any platform and then getting that out to customers wherever they are. And for that process itself, with little update notifications and so on—and on iOS and Android most people just have auto-update switched on—everybody just gets the new improvement. So, yes, it’s very intentional to do that so we don’t have features just waiting in the wings for six, nine months. When things are ready, they go out. And we want to get feedback as soon as possible so then we’ve got an opportunity to fix things. We’ll take bug fixes that come in one week, and we can release the next if we really want to, if they’re that important. The nine releases last year were a combination of larger features, but also the 2025.12.1 just had a fix in it, and that was it. But it was important enough, and we needed to push it. So there’s a mixed bag there. But yes, very intentional.
Philip: You know, here at NAMM, you’re hearing from a lot of people, and I know, Joe, I saw you at the booth interacting with a lot of customers, a lot of users. Are they coming to you with some of these requests? How do you decide which changes, especially some of those smaller ones that Sam mentioned, are worth prioritizing?
Joe: The triage process is complex. It’s just as complex as our user base, the needs of our user base. As you and I talked about yesterday, Philip, we have a wonderful small community. Music notation is this great little community with a lot of needs. Everybody’s doing something a little bit different. So I think it’s a mix of requests that we get at the booth. Sometimes it’s a workflow issue: “This takes five clicks, and I would save so much time if it was just one.” But sometimes, also, it’s just an idea, something that someone would really like to have usually specific to their workflow.
And so the triage process there is complicated. We’re trying constantly to identify what are the pain points for the customers? What can we do about them? What’s the quickest way to deliver value to as many users as possible? Sometimes when you’re looking at sort of the requests as they come in, there is a common root to all of them. You say, all of these things have to do with this. Let’s do a release based on making new parts, or let’s do one based on adding names next to the instrument names or staff names. And yeah, every now and then, in just sort of staring at that pile every day, these common themes come out and opportunities for us to deliver value.
Philip: Do you feel, or are you actually using… what type of tools and workflows are you using internally to manage those requests and prioritize them? So you said they all have a common theme or they all have a common thread. So is there a certain point where you are assigning them a score or you are assigning them some sort of metric that says, “Ah, yes, okay, this is bubbling up to the top and then we have to go with this?”
Sam: We use several tools. We’re trying to consolidate the tools—we’ve got a number of them—but it’s mainly around a hierarchy of a theme, and then a feature, and then you have user stories. So we can bunch user stories together. And then on the theme side, more recently we’re using a RICE score, which goes through things like Reach and Impact and so on, and you actually get a score at the end of it. And that helps us rank certain items, so you get a big score of 50,000 or whatever. And the whole principle of RICE is that you don’t really care too much about what the numbers are as long as you’re consistent with the inputs. So then you can rank things differently.
And that in itself allows us to have some sort of direction. But really, it’s talking to customers and getting their feedback and saying, “Well, would you like this thing or that thing?” And they might say, “You know what, that thing that you think might be a really big score, actually the biggest impact is going to be this because it allows us to do whatever.” So, yes, lots of internal tools, but it’s not just fingers in the air and a big list and a spreadsheet somewhere. It’s fairly scientific. But yeah, it really comes down to what we feel is right for customers and what they tell us.
Philip: The reason I wanted to ask that is because we were talking last night at our mixer with a lot of really pro and power users that have extended Sibelius in many, many ways. And there’s a whole range of people that use Sibelius. And a lot of them, I think, are comfortable with it, and they’re happy with it, and they know how to do what they need to do. And if they don’t, then they figure out one way or another to get where they’re going. I mean, certainly, we’ve all been there. We’ve all developed workarounds. We’ve all developed ways to get to the end result that we’re trying to achieve. And so Sibelius is a very mature and powerful application at this point.
So when these user stories come at you and you assign them the score and you run them through your metrics and so on, what are the biggest challenges that you find that you want to continue to modernize the software, keep it current, keep it up to date with best practices, and yet preserve that stability and that backward compatibility? I know that’s a big one for you—you never want to break an existing score, I know that’s kind of a core principle. So that always seems to me to be a challenge that you’re trying to address. And how do you do that?
Joe: I think the age of Sibelius is actually one of our advantages. We saw it this week as we were visiting customers in LA and looking at some of the tools that they use. Many of our users are using legacy tools that I was surprised are still around. When I look at the code, when I look at the codebase of Sibelius, I see copyrights from the end of the 1980s. And in the 1980s, programming was not like it is today. Not everything was by default a 64-point floating point type. Sibelius was built to be fast. We store a lot of things in bitmaps because that’s the way it was done in the late ’80s. And so when you look at these older programs, when we ask the pros, “Why do you still use that tool?” they say, “It is the fastest tool. It just works for us. It does exactly what we need.”
So Sibelius, I think our age is actually an advantage in that way. We’ve kept Sibelius fast, and that’s our job. But at the same time—and users may not see this—Sibelius is also a modern codebase. I think that surprises a lot of people because we don’t announce these things often when we make changes underneath the hood in order to be using the latest cross-platform programming languages that we use. We don’t talk about the modernization. We don’t talk about the refactoring because they’re not user-facing. But we’re doing this work all the time. So being both a mature program and a modern program is a real advantage for us.
Philip: It’s interesting because a lot of people are using Sibelius, like you said, precisely because of that speed. That does go back really all the way to the early days of Sibelius when Jonathan and Ben Finn wrote it in assembly language, which at the time—you would know better than I—but I understand that to be very fast in terms of executing commands on a computer. So that has persisted throughout.
You talk about the users and where they were last year and where they are here. Talking about that performance, the reliability… is there anything that you can point to to say, okay, maybe you didn’t realize 2025.2 or 2025.4 had this, that, or the other thing, but how would you maybe put it in a way that users can feel the progress that’s been made?
Joe: I’ve got one that’s a bit tangential, but I often give talks on Sibelius, often in education. And at the end of my talks, there’s always one question that I get, and I sense it coming and I used to dread this moment. A student would raise their hand and they would say, “So, how much does Sibelius cost?” And it was painful for me because there are many ways to buy the software, many price points depending on whether education or not. And I would often proceed on a game of 21 questions to try to find out their cost for this.
And I had mentioned this to Sam, who is always spot on what the user needs. And Sam had the vision to simplify this structure. So it’s progress that maybe our existing users wouldn’t feel, but new users certainly feel. When you want to access Sibelius, you go to a webpage, it’s a one-click download, no sign-up required. And then you use the software. You just use it until you hit a limitation; it offers you a free trial or it offers you the opportunity to buy it. But the greatest simplification we had, which you had coverage on on Scoring Notes, is that we’ve merged upgrades and renewals. So if you’ve ever had Sibelius, if you’ve ever had a perpetual license of Sibelius in the past and you want to come on board now, it’s $99. So when that question comes up in a presentation, it’s so nice to just say, “It’s $99.” You were on Sib 2? $99.
Philip: That is actually really big when you think about what the contortions were that people had to go through to get Sibelius and figure out what was their entitlement, what were they on—a subscription? Were they on a perpetual license? What version? How far back did it go? And speaking of not just features and modernizing for the modern codebase, but you have to modernize for the times.
Sam: Yeah, people don’t have patience to click through a 12-step signup process and wait for an email with a link to download it. And we ran some experiments, and they came out really well mainly in the last quarter of ’25. And we’ve seen huge adoption numbers, much more. And we realized that people were getting to the sign-up page, getting halfway through and thinking, “Really?” And then they just get fatigue and they either drop off or they come back another time.
Now it’s before they even realize what’s happening, they’re running the app. And they don’t get welcomed with a dialogue with six different options. They get welcomed with “Welcome,” and here’s some music so they can go straight into it. And we did a lot of learnings from our iOS app and Android app where that’s really the progress… really the success of the App Stores really, that you do all the setup upfront so they’ve already got your credit card and that sort of thing. But it means that any app you can get is a single tap on the App Store. And that’s what we’ve introduced on the web as well.
Philip: Is that the same with Pro Tools? Does Pro Tools offer that?
Sam: It will be. So my new remit, as Joe is now spearheading Sibelius, I’m now looking after Pro Tools and Sibelius as well. And we’re going to look into bringing all of those. It’s not as simple because of the licensing, copy protection—we use a completely different thing for Pro Tools. But the idea will be that people can just get the tool and they can run it. And then as they hit a feature limitation for Sibelius, it just unlocks. There’s no “Well, now sign up, now go through your 12-step process.” It just gives you the feature straight there and then.
So we did a lot of work to dynamically switch from one tier to the other. And it allows someone to try Sibelius first, the free version, and then unlock the feature that they would like, try it, and they can try it for a month. And at the end of that, they have a choice. They can either keep using the free features—and we increased the limitations for these free for the free version as well, so it’s now eight staves not four, and Sibelius Artist is 24 not 16. So you can always open your huge score. So if you’re a first user and you’ve enjoyed the trial and you write a symphony, you never lose that symphony. You can always open that in the free version. And you can always print it, and you can always copy some things into an eight-stave score if you want to stay in First. So nobody loses any work in that either.
Philip: It just unlocked it for me a little bit. If I understand correctly, what you’re giving people when they download Sibelius for the first time really is a trial version of Sibelius Ultimate? Is that what I understand?
Sam: Yes, it’s the same app. Yeah, yeah.
Philip: Right. So from a strategy standpoint, you’re kind of hooking them into some of those core features that you hope that they will then pay to access afterwards. In the way that a lot of software is going now where they offer some sort of a trial so you can get acquainted with the app and see if it works for you, and then if you find that it is useful, then you convert them to a paying customer. I didn’t make the connection until you said that just now.
Sam: Well yeah, it’s… so we still have two different paths. So you can still sign up for a trial on the website, go through a 12-step process that needs fixing up. But yeah, what you download is the same installer that someone who’s on a paying subscription or has a perpetual license is valid for. It’s the same app. So there’s only one thing to download. And that can just run. It just checks your entitlements or whatever license you have. So if you’ve got a license for that version, it’ll run. And if you don’t, it’ll run in First.
Joe: There’s one thing I wanted to add to that conversation too, which is I wanted to talk about the “S-word,” which in music software is “Subscription.” And Sibelius, of course, has subscription. And it’s sort of a unique offering that we have, and it’s really nice. If you are a student and you’d like to get Sibelius Ultimate, you can do that for $9.99 a month. That’s easy. But we’ve always had perpetual as well. And perpetual sales continue to do very well, especially as Finale users are looking for a new home and they come to discover, “Does Sibelius have perpetual? We used to hide this.” It used to be almost in the fine print. But we’ve done our best to just once again repeat: You can buy Sibelius. You can own this version of Sibelius. It’s there. It’s now alongside the subscription. So it’s up to users to choose what they need.
Philip: I think that’s very important for people to understand. And it’s something for a long time, as you know, was a very difficult concept for people to get their head around. Do I own it? Do I not? Do I have to pay yearly? And so on and so forth.
So if you wanted to convince somebody watching today to buy Sibelius and download that one-click installer and then convert them to a paying customer—subscription or perpetual licenses as they wish—is there a particular feature that either of you are particularly proud of, or if you want to think of it another way, that you wish more users, more readers and listeners of Scoring Notes were aware of?
Joe: I have three.
Same: Oh wow. Okay. I’ve got all of them. Or really sort of not any in particular. I think it’s because with Sibelius, it’s so easy to go in any direction. It’s a very complex problem to solve programmatically that anybody could be looking at a piece of music and they can go in any direction. They could want to print, they could want to change a setting, they could want to input notes or whatever. And we allow them to do that. So there’s no modes to go into. You don’t need to choose the right thing to be able to interact with the score in a particular way. You can just do it.
Joe: Add a note and then move a note.
Sam: Exactly. You’ve got that flexibility. And we’ve been able to hook in all these new different features.
I suppose the one “mode” we might have is Review Mode. But we can change the name. But that allows you to freely review a score, and you can annotate and you can put comments on and that sort of thing without fear of moving anything around. But yeah, you can do anything at any point. And that’s always the nice challenge that we give ourselves when a new feature comes along: “Well, how are we going to integrate this without stopping you doing all the other millions of other things?” It does an additional to it.
So I think that that’s the thing for a new user, it all depends where they’re coming from. Have they been orchestrating Hollywood scores for the last ten years in a different application? How do they want to get going? They probably want to go a thousand miles an hour. So we’re not going to say, “Well, this is a mouse and this is how you click in a note.” They’re there wanting Panorama. They want to import MIDI fast. They want to arrange. They want to use the Explode/Reduce plugins, and they just want to go.
Philip: Are you talking specifically about people coming from Finale?
Sam: Yeah, usually. A huge number of those coming over.
Joe: Our definition of a new user has radically changed. Where we used to take people from the beginning, now we’re finding, again, seasoned pros coming and trying Sibelius.
Philip: And so that’s what you’re talking about when you say the concept of Sibelius where you just go into the score and you’re able to manipulate without needing to switch a tool, needing to switch to a different mode, and everything is available.
Sam: Yeah, quite. And that would be sort of the first experience of it. You can just go anywhere. And then once you realize that you’ve been sort of doing this feature, then that one, then that one over and over again, you realize there’s a whole world of plugins and automation and you can just change that to a single click. So there’s huge flexibility and customizability within the app as well.
Philip: You said you had three.
Joe: Three. And I can go quick, but Sam has teed me up by saying that “new user” sort of means many things now. But there’s two features that I believe are not on the Ribbon, which is why many people don’t know about them. And then there’s a third that is but is I think underutilized.
So the first one would be Make into Bar, where you make a selection in the score—doesn’t matter how many notes are in there—it turns it into one single bar. Which is useful for pickup bars, or for something longer like a cadenza, or I think a lot of composers who are doing sort of free time type of things. It’s a great command.
Philip: Is that technically a plugin?
Joe: No. Make into Bar is native.
Philip: Oh, it’s native. Okay. I guess I didn’t realize that. Because I know that the Split and Join are technically plugins under the hood. Getting very technical here for a moment. But yeah, okay.
Joe: Number two would be Scrub Playback. So those are the square brackets. And it’s a great way to review harmonies for orchestrators to sit there and just sort of bask in that tonality, try to hear things that might be off or things that they might want to add. So I love that feature.
And then the third one would be Sibelius Cloud Publishing, which is a one-click button on the Ribbon, and it returns a URL where you can go and you can see your score in a web browser. You can hear it in a web browser. You can send it to your friends and family or your entire orchestra, and everybody can play from that score.
Philip: And remind us again, because I’ve lost count of exactly what is included and what isn’t, but do Sibelius users get some sort of storage capacity?
Sam: Yes. I think we’ve removed any limits on the storage now because we’ve moved to a different infrastructure and it’s just not worth restricting. Years ago when storage in the cloud was a thing, it would cost some money. And now it basically just doesn’t cost anything. So unlimited data plans. Right. Okay. But the number of scores that you can share is limited. So for First users it’s 10.
Philip: Speaking of your phone, can you publish from the phone app to the cloud?
Sam: Not yet.
Philip: Not yet. Okay.
Sam: Stay tuned. We’d love to do that. There’s an awful lot of… so at the moment from desktop, it’s easier to log people in so we know who you are and then you can just share. On mobile, we don’t have that login capability for all users. And that’s the thing for brand new users, it’s hard for them to create an account in-app.
Philip: Well, let’s talk about this a little more because mobile, cross-platform, hybrid workflows—this is everyday music making. I’ll be speaking with Chris Swaffer in just a moment, and they just announced a rebrand and re-architecture of their product strategy, taking Fender Notion… they’re calling Notion “Fender Notion,” and they have a robust cross-platform app. And of course, Sibelius is cross-platform on not only the desktop Mac/PC, but also iOS, iPadOS, Android, Chromebook, and it runs basically on all those platforms. So how does that reality affect your roadmap and decision making?
Joe: The lucky thing for us is that 95% of the code between mobile and desktop and web is probably shared. So we make a change in one place and it goes everywhere. And that’s a testament to, I think, some brilliant architecture that was done at the time by our developers Antoine and Sylvain. And I remember every developer who was with us at the time looking at that merge request, that change coming in… it was by far the biggest, largest, boldest change that has ever been made I think in the history of Sibelius since I’ve been there. And it has paid off for us. The approach that we’ve taken means that having applications… having Sibelius on all of these devices is essentially no different than just having it on desktop. So it was really well done.
Philip: Are you seeing… do you have a sense—I mean, you must know—how many users are exclusively mobile, how many are exclusively desktop, how many are meaningfully using both of them?
Sam: Yeah, we’re beginning to track that. There’s a good healthy user base. There are many, many more people who are just on mobile on its own. There are millions of devices of that. But we don’t have millions of users on the desktop side. So there is crossover, though. And then the web, if they’re consuming, is… well, because we use the technology for publishers as well, that’s another several million on there. So there’s an ecosystem that sort of has everything.
Philip: Right. Oh, okay. So when we think about all the different users that are out there and where things are going—mobile, cross-platform, desktop, and so on and so forth—of course, we haven’t talked about AI yet. And it’s everywhere and it will continue to permeate everything we do and fundamentally change the landscape of music production and everything else in our lives. It’s undeniable. Tell me if you disagree.
Sam: Yes and no. It will change everything. And we’re using it internally. And it’s not replacing anything, but it’s allowing us to go five times, ten times as fast. Or, you know, even for internal reports or anything like that. It allows us to go really fast.
Philip: So there are two sides of the equation. There’s the AI that helps the internal development side of things, no doubt. But then there’s also AI for the customer-facing side. And I know we had seen Sibelius introduce—I think it’s fair to say it’s still a nascent feature—the chord symbol recognition analysis. But that is AI-based. I know it’s kind of based on a limited training set, and it’s local, and there’s a lot of guardrails that you put around it, which I think a lot of people appreciate. But where do you see this going in terms of AI’s influence in the way people create music and specifically music notation and the tools that we’ve been accustomed to for so long?
Joe: I think I’m a bit of a realist when it comes to this. So my opinion I think is just one of many. But within Sibelius, we’ve had success with what we call a hybrid approach. In that there are many things that we can do just with rule-based changes. You can say, “Based on the fact that you’ve got these three notes, this is going to be this chord.” But the advantage, I think, that comes with the data-driven approach is when I remove one of those notes, the ability to then infer things that are not there. And so that’s what our AI chord model does.
When we did that, we grappled with deep issues about what our users want. Obviously, they want to—some of them want to work faster. Some of them want to work more creatively. When you’re typing an email and it sort of autocompletes for you, that’s a nice flow of “Okay, they realize I’m trying to get something done fast.” But musicians are not always looking for the most obvious answer. Sometimes they want: “Help me explore the space of harmony. Where can I dig in here?” And when we explore that space, the question then comes: Who made that space? And that comes from training data.
And so we realize that artists have the rights to their music, their structures. And for the things that we want to build, if we want to build with their things, we need their permission. So that first AI feature… I was really proud of the way we did it responsibly and transparently. We have a white paper on it that walks through all the data sets. I think you could probably even rebuild it yourself from scratch and see for yourself, these are the limitations of it. But where that feature got really good was when we merged it back together with the rule-based approach. So it’s a combination of the things that are obvious and the things that work, but also the things that are not so obvious. And I think as we continue to explore data-driven features, this is what we keep in mind. We can make a feature better by adding new code to it, or we can get more data and train to explore more creativity. And that’s a powerful thing. We didn’t have that in Sibelius before.
Philip: Can you think of other things analogous to that within Sibelius?
Joe: We have explored other areas where these same tools can be used. And we’ve even shared some of them with users, and it’s fraught with worry. There are things that we want to make sure that our users are comfortable with.
And that’s why I think it’s useful for us to look for partners. As we come to NAMM, we start looking around and seeing the other things that people are interested in: optical music recognition or audio transcription. It’s useful for people who are dedicated to these specific problems—which are real problems in our field—to be able to integrate with Sibelius so that it doesn’t all have to happen within our application. But we want easy inputs and outputs within the app so that we can be part of those workflows too.
Philip: It’s striking to me because you could take this in so many directions. Because you could say, “Hey, help me do something that is basically a command in Sibelius.” Kind of the way you use Command Search, but more powerful. And still, even with Command Search, you kind of have to know what the thing is called. Not always,
Joe: That’s a fair criticism.
Philip:So I think that is something no doubt that one way or another we need to get to if you want to expose the next generation of users who are going to be comfortable with typing those types of prompts into a chatbot and getting an accurate response. And that’s the way they’re going to expect the software to be used.
So there’s that. And then that’s really almost going to be table stakes, whenever the tipping point is—a year, two, five years down the road. But then you start getting into things that start going up to that line and then maybe crossing the line: “Okay, help me find a good page turn.” Okay, that’s pretty mechanical. “Help me make sure that all the cautionary accidentals are there.” I mean, that’s almost an algorithm, but AI could probably refine that based on context a little bit and make some judgment calls. So there’s a little bit more there.
But then: “Help me realize this chord progression.” Uh oh. Okay. Well, in what style? And then what is the training set that’s on? And then you start going very quickly from there. It’s like, “Okay, write me a 40-minute symphony in four movements with a triple wind orchestration.” I’m sure you’re thinking about those things. But I think about those things as I think about where the next generation of the software is going to go and how you use these tools in a responsible manner, as you said.
Joe: Our focus really is on getting the tools to the creators to be more creative. And also in some cases to improve their productivity. But we want things that help the creators, not replace the creators.
Philip: Yeah. Well, that’s a fair philosophy. I think that’s very welcome news to hear because I know it runs the gamut, I think, that’s out there in people’s approach to this. So it’s fun to speculate about about where that may be going, and I hope that we will continue that part of that conversation next year. But just looking ahead both in terms of the near term and the long term, anything that you want to let us know about that’s on the horizon to refine over the coming year? And also maybe more long term, again, thinking about how maybe these short-term refinements will lead into a longer-term product?
Sam: So very short term, that we’re previewing at the booth, is Dark Theme, which has been often requested.
Joe: Shout out to the developers who have been working like mad to get a great build on the stands.
Sam: So yeah, it’s really good. And we’ve had really good response, lots of feedback. So we’re going to be tweaking away over the next couple of weeks and then releasing that in February.
There are some cross-staff beaming improvements, which are not all going to come in one batch. So we’re going to probably put that over several releases as we tackle all that.
Philip: Why has cross-staff beaming been so difficult to tackle over the years?
Sam: I’ll ask a developer.
Joe: If we can get technical for just a moment… within Sibelius, we have staves. A single staff. And then something like a piano is actually two staves, one instrument. And it’s just never been implemented, an awareness across those staves. It’s just never been part of Sibelius. And in my former life, I used to teach students how to read and write music, and now I teach computers how to read and write music. And it’s fun to say, “Oh, Sibelius, you just don’t know about this.” So we educate Sibelius. We bring those features on. This has been asked for for so long. It’s impossible to ignore. Users have pain points on cross-staff beaming. And we finally get to sit down and address them. But we won’t do it all at once because we’ll deliver value on the most pressing needs, the things that can’t be worked around will be fixed first. And as we know, music notation can get deep, can get into very edge-type cases. Those things will be done as well, but just in a later priority.
Philip: I guess I was thinking—sorry to interrupt—but I have a follow-up to that which is: Does your work on the de-condensing play into working in cross-staff beaming at all, or are they not related? Because you mentioned the two staves but being aware of each other, and that kind of seems to me related.
Sam: I don’t think they are. No. Our approach for the de-condensing was to add a filter across a stave. And then it lets through the music that it needs to show at draw time.
Philip: I guess I was thinking of the dynamic guitar staves.
Sam: So that really is replicating the data twice. So it’s the same data replicated in a different fashion.
Joe: It’s hard to believe that after 30-plus years of developing the software that there are still some things that haven’t been taught to Sibelius. But that’s what we get to do next.
Philip: Anything else?
Sam: Yeah. I think there’s always modernization efforts that we need to do across the app. We’ve embarked on a journey of customizability as well. So the status bar, you can customize what’s down there. So we see a lot of orchestrators in particular clearing everything out apart from whether it’s transposed score or concert score. And it just tells them at the bottom left. So they’ve always just got this reassurance that they haven’t accidentally toggled it the wrong way. Or they might receive a score from somebody else and they work on it assuming it’s concert and actually it’s transposed. So that’s always good to see. But that’s completely customizable so you can hide that.
And when you minimize the Ribbon and go full screen, it’s nearly wall-to-wall music. Which is something that we haven’t had for a long time. So that’s really nice to bring. So we’ll keep delivering on the customizability as we go on. And the modernization… obviously VST2 is a bit old these days, so we need to upgrade to VST3 and so on. So we’ll work on those and deliver these throughout the year.
Joe: As Sam has had this vision for a long time now of bringing Sibelius everywhere, and it’s largely come to fruition—Sibelius is on your phone, it’s on your tablet, it’s on your Chromebook—the question is, what is the next vision? What’s the next North Star that we’re after? And Sam mentioned customizability, and this is really key for us. We want to make sure that we have a music notation that adapts to your workflows and not the other way around. We want you to be able to work the way that you want to work within the program. And the thing is, users approach it differently. Not everybody goes from note input to notation to text. So we want to make…
Philip: There’s gotta be some sort of anagram or mnemonic that we can come up with. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened.
Joe: At the next mixer!
But this is one of the North Stars that we’ll be looking at long term… well, best long term. And I think that’s really key for us to make sure that whatever users need, whatever roadblocks they’re having, whenever they can’t find something, that we come up with the ways so that the application fits them.
Philip: Well, look, I think it continues to be a good goal that you’re working towards. You have to consider the complexity of the software and all the things that it can do, and yet consider that new user, or the existing user for that matter. And how do they get where they’re going? How do they do it fast? How do they do it reliably? How do they also make it customizable to their workflow? And say they’re in some sort of a mode—not a Sibelius mode, but just a mode—and then the last thing you want, has always been the case, is that you open software and then… whatever. Loading audio plugins. Click this dialog. And the best applications just get out of your way. It’s like that Steve Jobs saying, he just wants it to float away, the iPad is just your surface. And there’s no button to click or anything like that.
Obviously, you need to consider how you get to where you’re going in terms of controlling the software, and you have to design those dialogues thoughtfully and all that. But it’s a really commendable and respectable challenge that you have, I think, because you are stewards of this software that is now, I think, close to entering its fourth decade. And yet need to keep it modern and fresh. I know the user community is very appreciative of that.
Joe: We want to keep the “time to fun” as short as possible. We want you to get in and have fun using Sibelius.
Philip: Excellent. Is that in your list of equations and RICE scores?
Joe: Fun factor. Highly.
Philip: Right. Don’t forget the fun factor, everybody, whenever you create music notation. We have a lot of fun here on Scoring Notes, and I’ve had a lot of fun personally talking to Sam Butler and Joe Plazak from Avid about Sibelius. Let’s do it again, gentlemen.
Joe: And Philip, I just wanted to say thank you so much for all you do. I went looking this morning; you’ve covered the 51 releases that I’ve made in Sibelius on Scoring Notes. The Product Page is my favorite page. I view it quite often. And so thank you for all your coverage. Shout out to our release manager Edith who has been with me for those 51 releases. And again, all the coverage and community building that you do for us, I really appreciate it.
Philip: Oh, well thank you. That means a lot. And yeah, what Joe is referring to, of course, is scoringnotes.com/productguide. We do our very best to keep up with all those releases. I might have missed like a point-something, point-point-something here and there. I don’t know if I covered Sibelius 2025.12.1…
Sam: Oh, come on, Philip!
Philip: But most of the rest of them. That goes for Dorico, that goes for MuseScore, and it did go for Finale until 27.4.1. So keep it tuned there. Keep it tuned to Scoring Notes. But in the meantime, thank you both again for taking a little bit of your precious time here at NAMM. And wish you all the best of luck in the coming year.
Joe: Thank you, Philip.
Sam: Thank you. Thanks so much.
Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show.
MR RIKKY ROOKSBY
Interesting read, but nothing about playback, the mixer and the challenges (and absence) of soundsets making it hard to use Sibelius with a variety of sample libraries.
Brett Rosenberg
first thing I thought of also…very disappointing.
LMo
I commented the same thing below without having read your comment first. Glad that others are saying these things as well. I have nudged avid multiple times over the past decade to make it dead easy to use your own sample libraries, make templates, create per-library templates of key switches tethered to articulations, etc. Never a response. Then Dorico comes along, absolutely nailing this to the wall in just a few years!
Rikky Rooksby
Surely with AI there could be a faster, automatic method for creating soundsets to enable Sibelius to playback sample libraries, and in particular doing the job of mapping percussion to a specific library – since very few drum libraries have a soundset (Native Instruments Studio Drummer being an honourable exception).
ben
I agree, pretty disappointing. The interview is more like a mutual pat on the back… . No word about SMuFL.
ben
… and comments like “the triage process there is complicated” worry me.
Joe Plazak
This is true, we did not talk much about our plans for playback within our short chat with Philip. Rest assured, there are certainly playback improvements on our roadmap, including better interoperability with other products. I fully agree, many of these changes are overdue.
Byron Luce
It’s not just the cross-staff beaming that is bad. It’s accidentals, spacing and slurs too. It would be nice to see some improvement in this area. It has been bad for the entire 20 years that I have been using Sibelius. It takes a lot of time to get things even up to the level of looking terrible. Something like that definitely means more to working engravers than cloud publishing for which there is no shortage of platforms (just to pick an example!).
Nicolai Pfeffer
I absolutely agree Byron
LMo
Right? It kind of blows my mind how much they rambled about workarounds that get the job done. Somehow skewing it as a perk of the software being old. Everyone’s got their own workarounds.
Joe Plazak
Thanks for your feedback, Byron. As we mentioned in our interview, cross-staff beaming was merely the first step in addressing several legacy cross-staff issues. Accidentals, spacing, and lines for cross-staff workflows will all see improvements.
Nicolai Pfeffer
Many thanks for the interesting interview. While a dark theme might be an eye-catcher, I think there are still many problems in the software that need to be addressed. For example, it is still not possible to split a bar that contains tuplets; there are many issues with accidentals, as well as awkward spacing problems and sudden, unpredictable “jumps” when adjusting note spacing manually.
I am very happy about the latest improvements, but I also think that for a piece of software like Sibelius, which is certainly not new, some fundamental engraving features should be addressed as soon as possible. Dorico seems to place a strong focus on solid, engraving-related features. I would be very happy if Sibelius paid more attention to the professional engraving community.
Joe Plazak
Nicolai- Tuplets could, and will, certainly be improved. The team has discussed a major overhaul many times. Nearly every release last year had some type of tuplet related fix (most of them were covered here on Scoring Notes), and we clearly have more work to do. Thanks for your feedback.
LMo
Great interview.
I’m frustrated at Sibelius. In all of that, no mention of improving the mixer, playback engine, the heinous and archaic sound set editor — stuff I have been asking for, for 15 years. They talk about modernizing it, well, Dorico is one to look at then, with regards to playback. Sibelius is basically in the Stone Age as far as playback goes. They talk about trying to listen to people and touch on various needs of a varied user base. Well, I know that I’m not the only one who wants this, and I know droves of people who have left to Dorico because of how great the VST integration is, plus articulations and key switches, etc.
For people who are composing for film or video game, where the end product will not be performed by live performers, but instead will be “performed“ by software, it is incredibly important to compose with the sounds that you will use in production. Because of the fact that sample libraries have strengths and weaknesses. I might write a line for a horn that any professional player could play. But the sample library just can’t do it without sounding obviously sampled. In those instances, I wouldn’t know until I’ve finished the composition, moved to the DAW. So here I am now re-composing it so that the sample library can do it and sound less artificial, but I am now having new orchestration problems. Changing that line has now left the harmonic structure deficient, and I need to recompose other things. But I’m doing all of this outside of Sibelius — composing directly in the DAW (like a heathen).
Why hasn’t Sibelius caught onto this or followed suit with other modern notation software?
If you compared Sibelius to a painting program, every new feature that Sibelius has developed for the past 10 years has been the equivalent of new shapes of brushes, new background textures, different ways to select, copy, paste, move stuff, print stuff… but it’s still stuck in BLACK AND WHITE. The new softwares are figuring out how to do everything Sibelius already can, but in full color.
Joe Plazak
I appreciate the colourful feedback. It’s well received and appreciated. Playback improvements, which have been notably absent from our roadmaps in years past, are one of our top priorities going forward.
Philip Rothman
Thanks everyone for the comments, and to Joe for replying. I plan on covering the topics raised here in a future Scoring Notes post and/or podcast.