Avid has released Sibelius 2026.5 for macOS and Windows on the desktop, as well as iOS, iPadOS, and Android on mobile platforms. The second major Sibelius release of 2026 is headlined by VST3 plug-in support.
Also new in 2026.5: expanded Sibelius Cloud Sharing that now extends to individual parts and score subsets, improvements to bar rest visibility control, continued polish to the dark theme introduced in Sibelius 2026.2, and an assortment of fixes.
Updates
VST3
“Long-awaited” is a phrase that gets thrown around pretty liberally in software announcements, but in the case of VST3 and Sibelius, it’s apropos. Steinberg officially ended VST2 licensing back in 2018, and the DAW world moved on to VST3 some time ago. Sam Butler, Avid’s vice president of product management, acknowledged as much at the 2026 NAMM Show when he noted that “VST2 is a bit old these days, so we need to upgrade to VST3.”
VST3 brings meaningful improvements over its predecessor: better performance, smarter handling of channels and buses, and more reliable plug-in state management. The notation world has been somewhat slower to follow, but Sibelius 2026.5 now joins that club.
VST3 plug-ins appear automatically in the Playback Devices dialog alongside existing VST2 and AU plug-ins, with no additional configuration required. As with VST2, plug-ins are scanned and cached on first load, so if you have a lot of VST3 plug-ins installed, expect that first launch of 2026.5 to take a bit longer than usual while Sibelius does its inventory.
Sibelius Cloud Sharing: parts and subsets in the web viewer
Sibelius Cloud Sharing — the feature that lets you share a score via a dedicated URL viewable in any web browser — gets a meaningful upgrade in 2026.5.
Previously, only the full score was accessible to viewers in the web viewer. Now, Sibelius Ultimate users can choose to share score subsets and individual parts alongside the full score, or instead of it.
The new options live in the Cloud Sharing Dashboard (Home > Cloud Sharing), where a View Settings panel offers checkboxes for Full Score, Subsets, and Parts. By default, Score Subsets and Parts are not shared, so you’ll need to enable the options you want.
When parts or subsets are shared, the Sibelius Cloud web viewer gains a new toolbar button that opens a list of all available parts and subsets — organized according to the custom ordering introduced in Sibelius 2025.12. Viewers click a part name to switch to it, and playback in the web viewer follows along: if you’re viewing the Violin I part, you’ll hear only that part during playback.
Sibelius now also generates a QR code for each shared score. The QR code is available through Sharing Options in the viewer toolbar, from which it can be downloaded or copied and passed directly to performers. Anyone who scans it lands on the score immediately.
When you’ve made changes and want to alert everyone who has the score open in a browser, the Push button (Home > Cloud Sharing > Push) notifies all active viewers that an update is available. It’s a practical mechanism for distributing last-minute edits to an ensemble before or during a rehearsal.
As before, Cloud Sharing is a Sibelius Ultimate feature.
Bar rest improvements
This is the only new engraving item in Sibelius 2026.5. Three changes come to bar rests in this update.
The first is the most immediately practical: bar rests in otherwise empty bars can now be hidden with a single Show/Hide operation. Since Sibelius 2023.5, hiding a bar rest in an empty bar required two separate hide operations — something users learned quickly but that always felt like one operation too many. In 2026.5, one is enough (in most cases).
The second change is the more architecturally interesting one: the ability to manually override the Show Bar Rests engraving rule on a bar-by-bar basis. If you’ve turned off Show Bar Rests globally in Appearance > Engraving Rules > Bar Rests to suppress bar rests across a part or score, you can now select an individual hidden bar rest and use Show/Hide to force it back into visibility, overriding the global rule for that bar.
Users arriving from Finale — and there are quite a few of those in the community these days — may find this immediately recognizable. For those who spent years in Finale’s labyrinthine-but-powerful approach to this same problem, a brief trip down memory lane is in order.
In Finale, suppressing bar rests globally was handled through Staff Styles, via the Behaviors tab: deselecting Display Rests in Empty Measures would hide default whole rests across any staff to which that style was applied.
But Finale gave you precise control over the type of rest sitting in an empty bar — and the type mattered, because the two behaved differently. Plug-ins under Plug-ins Note, Beam and Rest Editing offered two distinct options: Change to Default Whole Rests converted a rest to Finale’s standard placeholder, which would be hidden when a Staff Style suppressed bar rests and would allow multirests to form normally. Change to Real Whole Rests placed a forced bar rest that would break multirests and remain visible even when the Staff Style had globally suppressed bar rests — in other words, it overrode the global rule on a bar-by-bar basis, as if you inputted the bar rest yourself.
It was intricate, and the workflow for getting there involved several steps that weren’t exactly self-evident. But it was conquering-level power.
The new Sibelius behavior addresses the same essential use case — a global rule that suppresses bar rests, with the ability to selectively restore visibility in individual bars — and it does so with a considerably simpler mechanic: select the hidden rest, apply Show/Hide.
Composer, music preparer, and Scoring Notes contributor Jeremy Levy alerted me to another benefit of this update. Say you have bar rests turned off globally in score.
Then, you have a part divisi on one staff, in which Voice 1 has a whole rest, and voice 2 has music in it, like so:
Prior to the 2026.5 update, there was no behavior to tell Sibelius to show the whole rest, and the same problem occurred if the voices were reversed. Jeremy said that he “had been using a line with the whole rest symbol in the centered position to fake this,” so it’s good to know that cumbersome workaround is no longer necessary.
The third change in this area is a bug fix: hiding a bar rest in the full score could sometimes cause a related multirest in a part to disappear entirely. Multirest visibility is now calculated separately from the parent bar rests, so suppressing one no longer inadvertently takes out the other.
Dark theme
Sibelius 2026.2 introduced dark theme, and Avid acknowledged at the time that further refinements were coming. 2026.5 addresses a number of the issues that surfaced since that release:
- More color contrast has been added to the open view tabs
- Scroll bar colors have been restored on Mac
- The Plug-in Trace window no longer displays incorrectly in dark theme on Windows
- Quick Start Controls have received improved dark theme styling
- Licensing dialogs now properly invert to dark theme
- Dark theme sort arrow icons have been added to table columns in dialogs on Windows
Avid notes that additional improvements are still in the pipeline, and encourages users to continue sending feedback.
Other fixes and improvements
Several more fixes and improvements round out the 2026.5 release:
- The Edit All Fonts > Main Text Font dropdown now configures only the “Plain Text” text style, rather than affecting a broader range of styles than intended
- Objects that extend beyond the printed page are now fully selectable, which means you can drag them back onto the score rather than hunting for them with workarounds
- Plug-in dialog button widths no longer overlap on Windows
- Sibelius First and Artist no longer show an extra thumbnail in Quick Start after dismissing the tier limitation pop-up
- The Playback Configuration no longer loses the FixedProgramList when using a manual sound set
- The Tiling function command names in the View tab ribbon are no longer reversed
- Automatically hidden cross-staff bar rests are now correctly reported as “hidden” to screen readers
- Screen reader tabbing no longer moves focus from Playback Devices back to the score
- After triggering the “Repeat” selection command, all notes within a chord are now correctly selected
- The licensing action button now appears in the status bar when a license warning icon is visible, not only when the license is fully deactivated
- Playback configurations in the Backstage Export and Playback Configurations dialogs are now sorted alphabetically
- Imported MusicXML files can now be shared via Sibelius Cloud Sharing more reliably
- Copying notes to a TAB staff no longer omits certain notes
- Several of the most frequent crash reports have been fixed
Avid notes that the team is already midway through production of the next release, which they say “will continue on the theme of addressing a number of long-standing customer requests.”
Compatibility and availability
Sibelius 2026.5 is available now for desktop and mobile platforms.
Sibelius 2025.2 introduced a new file format. Files saved directly in 2026.5 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 using an older version, be sure to confirm what version they’re on.
The Sibelius 2026.5 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 2026.5 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 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.