Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.12, the latest version of its notation software. Coming less than three weeks after the release of Sibelius 2018.11, today’s release is largely intended to fix bugs that appeared in last month’s release, which was the first version of Sibelius to be written in the latest version of the Qt application framework. Sibelius 2018.12 also addresses several other issues.
Here’s whats included in Sibelius 2018.12.
Stability and bug fixes
Note spacing for whole score is no longer reset when adding an instrument or Ossia stave, thanks to reports on the Sibelius user forum.
Quick Look and Spotlight generators on macOS have been removed. Sibelius senior product manager Sam Butler said that these tools “have not been fixed up yet, and for some, they were causing problems. In this release, we’ve simply removed them. We’ll fix these up soon, but decided it was easier to live without them for now.”
The Cmd-Shift-Option-B shortcut now functions correctly once more (to filter the bottom note in a chord for copying).
Sibelius First can now run even if the Welcome to Sibelius… window is hidden.
Text handling and crash fixes
Sam Butler said, “A nasty bug crept into our last release where, in rare cases, Sibelius would crash when sometimes editing text on Mac. We’ve patched the bug (that was in Qt) and also optimized the multi-touch gesture on Mac to speed up the response times by around 50ms. In doing this, we disabled “Chord Click” on Mac only (where you could press both left and right mouse buttons together to copy and paste an object). Pressing the middle button, if you have one, continues to work and no changes have been applied to mouse and trackpad interactions on Windows.”
Word menus are much easier to get to when using two-finger gesture on track pads when editing text.
Wide italic text no longer has its edges cut off at certain zoom levels on Mac.
Sibelius no longer crashes when clicking on boxed text that used Myriad Pro font.
Plug-ins
The Copy Articulations and Slurs plug-in no longer has overlapping text in the dialog.
Transformations now work as expected when running Sibelius in French.
The Playback line no longer disappears after running the Double Note Values plug-in.
Video
The video window dimensions are now correct when adding a 1080p video on Mac.
Fonts
Support for the new Pori font (as a whole) and added Norfolk Chords to the existing Norfolk set. To check these, go to File > Preferences > Music Fonts. Learn more about the new Pori and Norfolk Chords fonts, distributed by us at NYC Music Services. (Thanks to the Sibelius team for sneaking this one into the 2018.12 update!)
Availability
The Sibelius 2018.12 update is free for all Sibelius users with active subscriptions and upgrade plans. The updated installers are available from users’ Avid Accounts or from Avid Application Manager.
As with Sibelius 2018.11, this release supports macOS 10.14 Mojave, but support for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks is dropped. If you are using Mavericks you will not be able to install Sibelius 2018.12. 2018.7 will be the last Sibelius version that you can install on that older operating system.
Luis
It’s sad. Sibelius and other software companies are evidently OK serving food that’s half baked, to use a metaphor. Fortunately, they’re not in the restaurant business or they’d be out of business.
Bill
Sibelius is a little more complicated than a burger and fries…
Robert
I’m confused. Are you referring to the temporary removal of Quick Look and Spotlight, as well as the removal of Chord Click on Mac? I don’t use Sibelius so what would I know, but the fact that the Sibelius team is bothering to fix bugs shows they are at least trying to make their customers happy, even if the people higher up in the company don’t give a hoot.
Not really sure exactly what the problem is.
Andrei
Wonderful! I encountered that text bug, I thought I was going nuts! Very happy with Sib 2018.12…
Oak
Just a quick question: How do you write in Sibelius scores like that, with “lines” instead of “pitched notes”? Thank you!!
Philip Rothman
Oak: You can change the notehead to #3 (Beat without stem).