Avid has released Sibelius 2025.10 across its desktop and mobile platforms. This update continues to refine elements of the application that were introduced or updated in the previous releases, Sibelius 2025.8 and Sibelius 2025.7, such as the tier-switching process, activation and the first-time user experience, the appearance of the Status Bar and the Ribbon, among other items. There are also several minor improvements and bug fixes.
Updates
Here’s what’s new in Sibelius 2025.10.
Workflow improvements
Better behaved trills and other lines
Trills no longer overshoot the barline for all types of selections (item, multi-item, lasso, passage). The implementation for adding trills to a score now matches how hairpins are added, with the most significant change being that trill lines will snap to the barline when extended or retracted via Space (or Shift + Space). This is not a draw-time change, so only newly added trills will be affected.
A related change is that adding lines to passage selections ending at the end of the last note in a bar no longer act as if the passage selection ended at the very end of the bar. Instead, line lengths for both types of selections are capped so that nearly all lines end within the bar where the selection ends. As with trills, these changes only affect newly added lines.
Courtesy time signatures on new page or spread
There is a new option in Appearance > Engraving Rules > Time Signatures to add a courtesy time signature to either every new page or every new spread (every left page):
This is an interesting option that some users may find useful, especially those working with large scores that involve frequent changes of meter, or users creating worksheets.
It appears that this option controls both the score(s) and parts globally, rather than independently.
A future iteration that would likely be helpful to many users could be if courtesy time signatures were automatically applied at the beginning of a new section, such as a new movement or song, rather than a new page or spread, but that option is not present in Sibelius 2025.10.
Following standard practice, this option is off by default.
Note that if you send a Sibelius 2025.10 file to someone using an earlier version of Sibelius 2025, they will be able to open the file, but this option will not exist and therefore the courtesy time signatures will not appear in their score.
Status bar preferences
Preferences > Status Bar gains options to Clear All and Select All, saving a lot of clicking if you routinely change these options. The ability to customize the Status Bar was introduced in Sibelius 2025.7.
Launch options
Also in Preferences, in Other, you’ll find a new option in Launch Options to open the most recent score. This matches the behavior of Sibelius for mobile. Existing users will need to opt-in to this new preference, whereas new users will find that the Open most recent score option is set by default.
UX/UI
The background colors throughout the Sibelius window are adjusted, and the colors on the status bar are improved, including removing the gradients on the separators. Avid said that the new color scheme makes use of an ongoing effort to unify the look and feel of all of its products.
Users launching Sibelius for the first time will be greeted with a simpler option:
Users obtaining Sibelius First via the new one-click download can dismiss the welcome dialog and jump right into using the product.
Moreover, “business-related” pop-ups look different from other Sibelius pop-ups, to help distinguish them.
Bug fixes
- An issue is fixed that caused certain tool windows to be restricted after changing feature sets.
- A crash on Sibelius for mobile (iOS) that could occur while choosing a template paper is fixed.
- ManuScript now has read-write access to “Restore original item after single-bar selections” user preference.
- The Play Music option now cohabitates with the rest of launch options in Sibelius First and Sibelius Artist.
- Sibelius for mobile on Android is now compiled with 16 KB native library alignment.
- A legacy crash when closing a score after closing a newly created version is fixed.
- The Inspector width has been slimmed.
- The Quick Start window once again has a resizable width (Mac only)/
- When transposing rootless slash chords, Sibelius no longer fills in the root.
- The Arrange feature no longer provides incorrect transpositions when using octave doubling (in certain cases).
- An issue is fixed that would cause “tuplet bracket placement / direction” to be momentarily drawn wrong after editing.
- System Object Text Frames once again render with a light gray color (as opposed to black).
- The Playback Devices dialog will no longer disappear behind the main Sibelius window on Mac builds.
Other
- Translations are added to all the new features and dialogs in this release.
- The documentation is updated (Sibelius Reference, ManuScript Language Reference, What’s New, and Credits).
Compatibility and availability
Sibelius 2025.10 uses the same file format as Sibelius 2025.8, 2025.7, 2025.4, 2025.3, and Sibelius 2025.2. Note that some features, like the new courtesy time signature feature, will gracefully degrade if the feature does not exist in a previous version of Sibelius.
Sibelius 2025.2 used a new file format. Files saved directly in 2025.10 will not be able to be opened in an earlier version of Sibelius prior to 2025.2 without first exporting them in File > Export > Previous Version. If you’re collaborating with someone else that’s using a previous version, be sure to find out what version they’re using.
The Sibelius 2025.10 desktop update is free for all Sibelius users with active subscriptions and upgrade plans. The updated installers for desktop are available through users’ Avid accounts and through Avid Link.
The Sibelius 2025.10 iOS/iPadOS update and the Sibelius app for Android and Chromebook are available in the usual way, and will be delivered automatically, or, if you’ve disabled automatic updates, you can manually update the app on your device. Some of the features may only be available on the desktop version of Sibelius.
Typically our Scoring Notes coverage only extends to the Sibelius Ultimate version of the application. Not all features are available in all tiers of Sibelius.
A reminder that if you’re an existing Sibelius customer with an active support plan or subscription, you get the mobile version at the same tier at no extra charge. If you have a subscription to Sibelius Artist (mid-tier) on your Mac or PC, that will carry over to Sibelius Artist for Mobile, and the same for Sibelius Ultimate — a Mac or PC subscription allows you full access to Sibelius Ultimate on iPhone and iPad.
Learn more
For the latest information about compatibility for Sibelius, Dorico, and MuseScore, as well as links to the latest news and reviews about product releases, please see the Scoring Notes Product Guide.
Avid also has a “What’s New in Sibelius” page highlighting the features in recent Sibelius updates.
While appreciated, nothing is to be excited about in this update. I mean, it seems that Sibelius is fixing some thirty years old basic glitches that should have been patched a long time ago. Is there still a team working on this app? A few months ago I’ve been selected to talk about my experience of my use of Sibelius, web-chatted with some people from the development team, and I proposed some new features, for example: adding keyswtiches on MIDI keyboard input to select objects (notes length, symbols) on the keypad. Probably a couple of dozens of people has shared their particular wishes, but all the new things that we see coming off are only minor updates, about every 2 or 3 months. I mean, I like the new Subsets and some relatively new features over the years, but the progress is very slow.
Moreover, there is so much small maintenance fixes that should be focused on and done. For example, basic tuplet management; they quickly turn to chaos when handling them in any way (perhaps the structure of the program does not make it easy to handle this problem).
All that being said, I love Sibelius (using it for over 25 years) and will continue to do so, but seeing the rapid development and new features of the competitors make me wonder if (I wish not) Sibelius will eventually be “Finaled”.
Thanks for the feedback, Fred (both here, and last year within the research group). The comparison to Finale is simply unfounded. The 2025.10 release was our 6th desktop release this year (we also had a 7th release that was mobile-only). There were improvements to tuplets in the 25.3, 25.4, and 25.10 releases that were specifically tied to recent customer requests. If you can tell us more about tuplet workflows that “quickly turn to chaos,” we can tackle those issues as well.
Historically, Sibelius used to put out a new “major” version every 2 years. For a similar perspective, check out the excellent “Product Guide” here on Scoring Notes, and in particular, the 12 Sibelius releases made in just the last two years. In that timeframe, we’ve tackled hundreds of customer requests (some big, some small). If we haven’t been addressing the needs of your specific workflows, then please let us know what would help the most.
Sorry for the rant. I am happy to see that there is still development of the software, and after a quick glance on all the new features and bug fixes since in the last releases, I will concede that there are really big improvements and useful functions.
That being said, here is a couple of things about the tuplets:
– Cannot create tuplet with existing notes without rewriting them (only first note is kept)
– Filtering or copying notes does not select tuplet brackets automatically, and copy-pasting then without the brackets creates a mess.
– Impossible to nudge tuplet groups left or right
– Impossible to move a note or group of notes left or right within a tuplet
– Impossible to transform a tuplet into another ratio without rewriting all the notes
The feature I wish to see in the future (like I said in the earlier post):
– Using MIDI keyboard keyswitch (like in Virtual Instruments in DAWs) to simulate the keypad, so we do not have to move the hands off the keyboard when entering notes.
I wish the Sibelius team the best.