Avid has released Sibelius 2025.7 across its desktop and mobile platforms. In this release, engravers get more control over automatic music spacing, the status bar gains customization options, and voice colors now apply to staff objects. The various tiers of Sibelius have been more integrated directly into the overall Sibelius experience, and the First and Artist tiers gain some more capability with staves and clefs.
In addition, there are improvements on the mobile platform, especially on Android. Finally, there are some miscellaneous improvements and fixes in other areas of the application.
New features
Here’s what’s new in Sibelius 2025.7.
Auto-Respace toggle for automatic horizontal note spacing
For those old enough to remember, there was a time when automatic note spacing in music notation software was a Big Event. In the old days of Finale, you’d make a selection, apply note spacing, and wait patiently while all the calculations were being made.
Sibelius from its early days took a different approach, where the score would automatically respace horizontally (and, more recently, in 2020, vertically) as you entered and updated the music. In time, it was evident that this should become standard for anyone working in music notation software. Who wants to see all the notes squished together all the time?
Still, the software doesn’t always produce perfect results, and note spacing is inherently subjective. A little more space here, a little less here — the master engraver will want to make these fine adjustments to achieve practical and aesthetic clarity, and notation applications must cater both to the ease of workflow and the desire for precise placement of notes and objects in the score.
Sibelius has long offered options to carefully manually tweak the automatic results either natively, or via plug-ins. Regular Sibelius users will, hopefully be aware that you can simply select any note or rest and drag it left or right with the mouse. Notice how the entire beat in your score stays aligned, with all the music on that beat moving as well. You can also accomplish the same thing by using the keyboard: Shift-Option-Left/Right Arrow on Mac or Shift+Alt+Left/Right Arrow on PC. Add Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (PC) to this shortcut to move the beat in bigger increments.
A passage of music can be respaced in a similar way. Make a passage selection and use the same keyboard shortcuts. You’ll find that the music squishes together or spreads out proportionally:
If you need to manually adjust the width of a completely empty bar or of a multirest, simply click and drag its right barline to the left or right.
However, these fine adjustments were always at risk of being disrupted as soon as you made even the most rudimentary change, like adding accidentals, changing an enharmonic spelling, adding chord symbols, and lots more common actions.
To help keep these spacing adjustments intact, Sibelius 2025.7 adds a new option on a project-by-project basis in the Appearance tab, called Auto-Respace.
In practice, Auto-Respace is actually how Sibelius has always worked, and it’s enabled by default. So, if you wish to make use of this new ability, disable Auto-Respace so it’s not highlighted.
Here is but one example of the difference in the behaviors. Let’s say I’ve made some manual spacing adjustments and wish to change some notes enharmonically. With Auto-Respace on, Sibelius respaces the music, expanding it after I make the enharmonic change (by pressing Return):
With Auto-Respace off, Sibelius does not respace the music, and the note columns stay exactly where they were before.
It’s important to note that even disabling Auto-Respace doesn’t totally “freeze” the spacing, in the same way you would expect Freeze Positions to freeze Magnetic Layout. Instead, larger changes will continue to perform a reset of the horizontal space for the objects you’re entering, typically when more significant changes are made to the music, like inputting notes, changing note durations, and deleting music.
Here’s a complete list of actions you can perform while Auto-Respace is off, and Sibelius will not adjust the note spacing:
- Sliding notes left and right
- Transposing
- Moving a tied set of notes chromatically
- Using Pitch Correction Tool on the Keypad
- Respelling accidentals
- Changing notehead styles
- Adjusting accidental X position in the Inspector
- Adding or removing any of the following:
- Chord Symbols
- Lyrics
- Notes in a chord
- Accidentals
- Ties & Tie Into objects
- Scoops & Falls
- Arpeggios
- Accidental brackets
- Notehead brackets
This should be a reasonable approach for engravers and anyone else seeking more control over the appearance of their scores. Because the setting can be enabled and disabled easily, you can incorporate it at any stage in your workflow. And because it’s applied on a document-by-document basis, you may wish to turn it off for scores where the editing has been nearly or completely finished, while leaving it on for other scores that are in progress.
Status bar customization
The status bar, in my opinion, has always been one of Sibelius’s most underrated features. If you’ve ascribed to it a, um, “lowly” status, it’s worth a second look.
A series of information readouts tells you some document-wide information such as the total number of pages and bars in a score. How many times have you scrolled to the end of a long document to find out those tidbits, when you could have just looked down?
If music is selected, the status bar gives you the location, range and timecode of the selection; useful if View > Invisibles > Bar Numbers is switched off and View > Panels > Transport isn’t showing.
Need to do some quick chord analysis? Just select a chord and Sibelius will analyze its harmony for you, via the status bar.
The status bar also gives you a description of the current operation (such as Edit Passage or Edit Text) and whether you’re in Transposing Score or not. And there’s even more.
Still, that bevy of information comes at a price: visual and mental clutter. That’s a lot of controls at the dash.
If for instance, you don’t always need to be reminded of the Timecode position, Magnetic Layout State, and the Staff Size… not to mention your Licensing Status and Active Feature Set (we’ll get to those shortly), you can now disable those items in Sibelius’s Preferences, in a new Status Bar area. There are lots of options here:
That should tidy things up nicely for you:
And if screen real estate is at a premium, you can now hide the status bar entirely by unchecking the Show Status Bar option in the Preferences, or by using the new command Show / Hide Status Bar via Command Search.
If you were thinking it would be nice to minimize the Ribbon as well in order to gain more vertical space; that option is still there, via the green arrow, by double-clicking on the tabs, i.e., double-clicking Home, Note Input, etc. (did you know that trick?), or via the command Minimize / Expand Ribbon (the Ribbon isn’t ever truly hidden).
Finally, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the status bar icons have been updated with a cleaner monochrome look.
Color
Since the beginning of time, Sibelius has determined which colors represent which voices and other elements like out-of-range notes, collisions, and staff and system selections.
Sibelius 2020.6 added options for the user to customize those settings. If you weren’t aware, you can go to Preferences > Accessibility > Color Preset to view and change these settings:
These colors won’t be evident unless they are selected, unless you have switched on View > Note Colors > Voice Colors.
New to Sibelius 2025.7 is the addition of staff objects, like dynamics, text and lines (although not slurs), that exhibit their assigned color when this setting is enabled. In the Default preset, objects in multiple voices will be colored light blue.
This enhancement aligns with Sibelius’s recent ability to create parts that are split out into individual players on decondensed staves. This should help make it easier to see the voices of each object when using Staff Filters.
And, if you fancy yourself a Dorico user…
All in good fun, as it’s only an approximation, of course, although if you switch between the two programs frequently, you might well prefer having as consistent an experience as possible. To spare my inbox, here are those settings:
Sibelius tiers
In today’s official post announcing the release, Avid’s Sam Butler says, “We’re focusing our efforts to simply make Sibelius easier to work with. We’ve embarked on a journey that’ll likely span several releases to simplify how you discover, download, install, license, and ultimately use Sibelius.”
To that end, there a few changes.
Sibelius First
Sibelius First is getting a couple of feature bumps — and it’s probably not a coincidence that they are more comparable now to what’s offered in Dorico SE, Steinberg’s free tier of their notation software.
Before, it wasn’t possible to add alto and tenor clefs directly in Sibelius First (although it was possible to use them if starting from, i.e., the included string quartet template), causing what one clever user called “altocations”.
Now those clefs come along with Sibelius First.
Further, it was only possible before to create music with 4 staves in Sibelius First, but now 8 staves are possible. In addition, Sibelius Artist, Avid’s mid-tier offering, gets a bump from 16 to 24 staves. Avid notes that this will better accommodate big-band scorers, among others (traditionally 18 musicians).
In-application switching and consistency of experience
If you use Sibelius Ultimate yourself but often work with colleagues or students who use one of the lower tiers, you’ll be pleased to learn that Avid has made it easier to switch among them, right in the application.
The place to do this is the aforementioned Status Bar, where you can choose among them:
As you do this, you’ll see the features available in each tier come “online” or go “offline”:
The little green checkmark is your Licensing Status; green means good, yellow means your license or trial is expiring, and red means that you need to reactivate your license.
Perhaps intending to spur FOMO (and paid upgrades), users of Sibelius First and Sibelius Artist will now see all Sibelius Ultimate features in the Ribbon as well, although they’ll be disabled. Unchecking Show all features in File > Preferences will hide those, if you just can’t bear the thought of knowing what you’re missing.
This change in consistency of experience among tiers has the side effect of exposing the Score Starter to fancy Sibelius Ultimate users for the “First” time.
Other improvements and fixes
Sibelius for mobile on Android
- Create a new score in the folder you wish using the + icon (no more ‘Save As’ flow).
- Choose from many of the manuscript papers and example scores and start writing your music
- The score is created and saved in the folder you created it in (eliminating the previous ‘Save As’ workflow)
- Enhanced file permissions to choose which folder you’d like to use.
- Top-reported crashes are fixed so the app is even more stable and widely available on Chromebooks.
Avid Link
- The latest version of Avid Link is included (v2025.5.1). This includes a number of improvements and optimizations to several areas of the app.
Improvements
- Dashed lines that show where staves are hidden in a system now also appear above and below the top or bottom staff in the system. You’ll find these lines if you are using either Focus on Staves or Hide Empty Staves, and you’ve hidden the top-most or bottom-most staves.
- When copying nested tuplets, Sibelius now automatically copies the immediate parent tuplet as well. This results in better results when pasting certain types of passages with nested tuplets.
- Single-stem notes hidden by staff filters no longer stay visible when Note Colors are set to Voice Colors. This bug was first introduced in version 2023.5 but became more starkly apparent when using Staff Filters.
- It is once again possible to trigger Notate Glissando from filter-selected notes crossing a barline.
- Following user feedback, the legacy logic for the former W command is reintroduced. The older logic retains the command name of Switch Between Full Score and Part but it is no longer the default shortcut assigned to the W key. The newer logic is now called Switch between Full Score, Score Subsets, and Parts and remains the default logic associated with the W shortcut in all shipping feature sets. Users who prefer the legacy logic will need to make a custom keyboard shortcut to remap the functionality of the W key.
- A bug is fixed related to playback position data to better support VST plug-in developers. When Sibelius is not in playback mode, it no longer sends a running clock signal.
- The status bar dash in the timecode display is fixed.
Stability fixes
- Sibelius no longer crashes when playing back grace notes with tremolo.
- Notate Glissando plug-ins no longer crash on Windows.
- A hang during playback when a two-note tremolo preceded by a pre-bend grace note which has been dragged before the barline is fixed. The tremolo no longer plays forever when using a 1-note tremolo in this scenario too.
- Sibelius no longer crashes after sometimes returning to the Quick Start and opening another score.
- A bug is fixed which prevented extracted parts with TAB staves from being reopened.
Compatibility and availability
Sibelius 2025.7 uses the same file format as Sibelius 2025.4, 2025.3, and Sibelius 2025.2.
Sibelius 2025.2 used a new file format. Files saved directly in 2025.7 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 2025.7 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 2025.7 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.