Avid has released Sibelius 2026.6 for macOS and Windows on the desktop, as well as iOS, iPadOS, and Android on mobile platforms — the third major Sibelius update of 2026, arriving just a month after Sibelius 2026.5. The headline feature is one that longtime Sibelius users have been waiting on for a very long time: accidentals on cross-staff notes finally behave the way they should.
Sibelius 2026.6 also brings auto-save on Sibelius for mobile, a dynamic “concert pitch” wildcard, proper banjo tab, tie UX improvements, the return of macOS Quick Look support, Cantai support, and accessible touch screen navigation on mobile, among other fixes and improvements.
Every notation program has its own short list of things that are notoriously hard to get right. In Sibelius, mine has long included tuplets, page-attached text, and cross-staff accidentals, among others. With 2026.6, I can finally cross one of those off the list and stave off accidental errors.
Cross-staff accidentals: a long time coming
If you’ve ever written cross-staff piano music in Sibelius — music that moves between the treble and bass staves, as it so often does — you’ve probably run into Sibelius’s stubborn refusal to draw accidentals correctly on those notes. Naturals would be “active” internally without ever showing on the page, tied accidentals across the staff break would vanish, and there was no clean way to fix it without resorting to a workaround.
And I mean a long-standing problem. We first wrote about it on this blog back in 2013, when Bob Zawalich’s plug-in Display Accidentals In Selected Notes offered a way to automate the tedious process of hiding redundant accidentals one at a time. We revisited it again in 2017 with a bracket-accidental-and-hide trick contributed by Wim Hoogewerf and Jeremy Hughes on the Sibelius forum. Even then, a reader pointed out that the issue — and a workaround for it — dated back to Sibelius 3.0, when Ben Finn himself was still answering help requests on the forum. So this is a problem that’s been with us for the better part of Sibelius’s history.
Improvements started with Sibelius 2026.2, which introduced the first cross-staff beaming and rest-awareness improvements; 2026.6 builds directly on that foundation, this time turning Sibelius’s attention to accidentals.
I asked Joe Plazak, Sibelius product owner and senior principal software developer at Avid, about this directly at the 2026 NAMM Show, and followed up with him on the occasion of this release. He said:
“From the technical side, each individual staff in Sibelius keeps track of accidentals within the current key signature, as well as accidentals that have been added in the preceding and present bars. This information then informs the draw code if accidentals need to be drawn. Cross-staff accidentals have always been a Sibelius anomaly, in that note information is stored on one staff, yet drawn on a different staff. Prior to Sibelius 2026.6, our draw code did not have enough information about cross-staff notes to properly draw accidentals on the staff where the notes actually appear (i.e. Sibelius wasn’t directed to look across all staves within an instrument). In general, extending the legacy music logic within Sibelius is actually a pure joy. We simply point Sibelius to where it can find the missing information, and the rest of the code knows exactly what to do. Obviously, we’re not finished with cross-staff improvements, as there are several other places in the codebase that are still missing some musical context. We’re looking forward to sharing more of these improvements in our forthcoming 2026 releases.”
The result is that Sibelius is now able to analyze a multi-staff instrument for the presence of cross-staff notes and draw accidentals according to the staff a note visually appears on, rather than how it’s represented in Sibelius’s underlying data. In practice, that means accidentals no longer erroneously repeat on every note of a cross-staff passage, Sibelius is aware of tied accidentals that carry across the staff break, and the new logic extends to grace notes as well.
Finally, you’ll wax rhapsodic about no longer having the blues from this limitation, like in this example:
This is controlled by a new engraving rule, Rules for accidentals apply to cross-staff notes, tucked into Appearance > Engraving Rules > Accidentals and Dots. Its placement there is not accidental: you’ll find it in its own Cross-staff Accidentals section, sitting directly below the existing rules for cautionary accidentals.
The rule is on by default in new scores, but off by default in existing ones — a sensible choice, since you may have already patched up an old score with one of the workarounds above, and Avid doesn’t want to disturb that. If you turn the rule on in an existing score, Sibelius will offer to respace the whole score to clean up any resulting collisions; just be aware that doing so will wipe out any manual spacing adjustments you’ve made, so you may want to decline and review the affected passages by hand instead.
It’s a minor UI consistency that there’s a note-spacing pop-up offered here instead of a separate note-spacing preference in Engraving Rules, like there is for cautionary accidentals; presumably that’s because changing the cross-staff accidental option is not something you’re likely to fiddle with once you turn it on — the option is really only there to preserve compatibility with older scores.
One thing the new rule does not address: vertical spacing. Staff optimization still doesn’t take cross-staff beaming into account, so you’ll want to visually check any cross-staff instruments for collisions or unnecessarily wide gaps between staves after enabling it.
There’s also an important compatibility wrinkle. Sibelius 2025.2 introduced a new file format, and 2026.6 files can be opened directly — not just exported down — in any version back to 2025.2. But the new cross-staff accidental rendering itself requires 2026.6; open the same file in an earlier version and the accidentals will revert to their old, broken display. If you’re sharing files with collaborators on an older release, Avid is reminding users that this is a good time to upgrade their perpetual license, which Avid will gladly do for $99 through your Avid account.
Concert Pitch wildcard
Sibelius adds a new dynamic wildcard, \$concertpitch\, that automatically reflects the transposition state of the current view: it renders as “Concert Pitch” when viewing a score in concert pitch, and “Transposing Score” when viewing it transposed. You can drop it into any text item, find it in the Wildcards menu for applicable text styles, and customize its wording either through the File tab (Backstage)…
…or by editing the text in place with the syntax \$concertpitch=Sounding Pitch;Written Pitch\.
It’s customizable in essentially the same spirit as the transposition token David MacDonald told me about in Dorico, where a layout’s text can automatically flip between labels like “Sounding Pitch” and “Transposed Pitch” without the user having to type and remember to update it by hand — which, as it happens, David and I had just discussed on our podcast episode Score preparation and production double-checklist a couple of weeks before this release. It’s as if we summoned it — though I’m quite sure it was already well into development at Avid before we ever started talking about it on the show.
macOS Quick Look
After a long absence, Sibelius restores basic support for macOS Quick Look: select a .sib file in the Finder and hit the spacebar for a one-page preview, without having to open Sibelius itself. Spotlight integration is promised in a future release.
Tie UX improvements
Ties get two small but welcome usability upgrades: visible handles now indicate that a tie’s height can be dragged (a capability that’s existed for a while but wasn’t discoverable without them), and a new selection filter lets you isolate every tie within a passage selection to adjust them as a group.
Banjo TAB
Sibelius’s banjo instrument definitions have been overhauled to resolve a long-running quirk of banjo tablature: because the fifth string starts halfway up the neck, should its first fret be labeled “1” or “6”? The new default banjo tab definitions now number that string starting at fret 6, while the previous “legacy” definitions (starting at 1) remain available for anyone who prefers them or needs to match existing scores. This is powered by a new, fully generic “initial fret number” property that can be set per string on any tablature staff — configurable through Edit Instruments > Edit Staff Type, or via ManuScript for custom instrument definitions.
Cantai support
Sibelius 2026.6 adds support for Cantai, the vocal synthesis plug-in from Richard deCosta and the Turing Opera Workshop that’s already found its way into Dorico and MuseScore Studio. Officially, Avid describes it as “coming soon” rather than available today — Cantai for Sibelius had originally been targeted for release on May 30, and that timeline has clearly slipped a bit. If you want a sense of what to expect once it lands, David MacDonald’s hands-on review of Cantai in Dorico is a good preview of both its strengths and its current limitations.
NotePerformer for education
Wallander Instruments’ NotePerformer 5 is now free for educational institutions with a Network multi-seat license of Sibelius — that is, schools using the Sibelius License Server. Downloads are available through your account at my.avid.com/products, under Sibelius Ultimate Multiseat (Network) > Software Download Links & Product Details. Note that this currently applies only to network multiseat licenses; individual EDU, Team, and Standalone multiseat licenses aren’t eligible yet, though Avid says it’s working with Wallander Instruments to extend the offer.
Mobile improvements
Sibelius for mobile gains an Auto-Save option, off by default.
Long-press the Back button and tap the Auto-Save toggle to turn it on; once enabled, the Back button’s icon changes as a reminder, and the other save options in that menu are disabled. With Auto-Save on, your score is saved after every change, so there’s no risk if your phone rings mid-edit — and a single tap of Back takes you straight back to the file browser, since everything’s already saved. It’s a more natural mobile workflow than hunting for a “Save” button, which has never really felt like a mobile-native interaction in the first place.
Sibelius continues to be the unquestioned leader in accessibility among the major notation programs, and 2026.6 extends that lead with a new set of touch gestures for navigating scores with VoiceOver on iOS — no physical keyboard required. The gestures are on by default whenever VoiceOver is active (with an option to disable them in iOS Settings if you’d rather keep standard touch gestures), and they’re explicitly designed for use with VoiceOver, not for sighted users. Once VoiceOver is on and focus is in the score, a one-finger swipe up or down changes the granularity of navigation — staff, bar, item, voice, and so on — while swiping left or right moves backward or forward at that level. A two-finger double-tap starts or stops playback from the current selection.
Other fixes and improvements
Several more fixes and improvements round out the 2026.6 release:
- On Mac, the ManuScript error window is no longer automatically dismissed when running certain plug-ins
- A NotePerformer VST3 issue that could lead to false instrument assignments has been fixed
- The mouse cursor no longer gets stuck as a text input cursor after using Command Search
- Several cases where notes were fretted as “?” on tab staves (e.g., during alt+click copy-paste) have been addressed
- Tuplet copy and pasting has been improved on Dynamic Guitar Staves
- “Keep absolute” text styles no longer unnecessarily duplicate when copying and pasting between scores
- Dynamic cue size scaling no longer breaks when “Keep Absolute” is enabled in the Edit Staff Type dialog
- Scores opened on Sibelius for Mobile, especially on smaller devices, now center properly on the page when using the Fit Page zoom type
- Attached items such as text and lines are no longer lost when switching a tuplet between voices
- A crash related to Timeline colour preferences has been fixed
- The Worksheet Creator now correctly interprets time signature changes at system breaks
- Sibelius First now respects the Concert Pitch/Transposed state of existing scores
- The minimized Keypad squircle no longer spontaneously moves on Windows
- Text changes are now undoable even when deleted character by character
- ManuScript now has read and write access to the CrossStaffAccidentals, AvoidCrossStaffBeamCorners, and CrossStaffHideBarRests engraving rules
- The most commonly occurring VST3-related crash has been fixed
Compatibility and availability
Sibelius 2026.6 is available now for desktop and mobile platforms.
As noted above, Sibelius 2025.2 introduced a new file format; 2026.6 files can be opened directly in any version back to 2025.2, but the new cross-staff accidental rendering requires 2026.6 itself.
The desktop update is free for users with active subscriptions or upgrade plans, available through your Avid account or Avid Link. The iOS/iPadOS and Android updates are available the usual way and should arrive automatically unless you’ve turned off automatic updates. As always, not every feature in this release is available in every tier of Sibelius — our coverage here, as usual, focuses on Sibelius Ultimate.
Learn more
For the latest information about compatibility for Sibelius, Dorico, and MuseScore Studio, 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.
Bug – when ‘Rules for accidentals apply to cross-staff notes’ is on, it breaks the link between tied notes when moving up and down.
But the cross-staff beaming will not allow a single note from a chord to be moved to an adjacent staff. It moves the entire chord. I can think of possible and convoluted workarounds, but this should be a “click of a button” operation
Buggiest release in a while. Very sad to see. Is there no quality control any more? Not least because ties and accidentals appear to be the focus of this release, yet Avid has not even noticed they’ve broken exactly those features? As someone who’s finding it difficult to make the jump to Dorico despite how antiquated and bloated Sibelius is fast becoming, this is very frustrating.
Moving a group of tied notes by adjusting the first one only is now broken. The subsequent notes in the group end up with microtonal accidentals! This (very helpful) feature isn’t even that old!
Additionally, selecting and transposing passages with the up and down keys used to transpose them diatonically, more or less. At the very least it didn’t used to add accidentals to a passage without them! For example, if I enter a standard Db major chord with a Db major key signature, select it, and press up, I do not expect the result to be Eb major!
Very, very disappointing it has been released in this state. Considering so many users of Sibelius have very strong muscle memory for using features like the above, releasing software that completely breaks those flow states is the one thing you do not do.
Malcom and Alex- Thanks for reporting these bugs. Internally, these issues have now been fixed for the next release (which we will expedite). In the meantime, turning off the “Rules for accidentals apply to cross-staff notes” engraving rule eliminates both issues (note that this engraving rule will already be off by default for any pre-2026.6 file).
Jesse- Cross-staff chords are still on our list of forthcoming cross-staff notation improvements, and will certainly be one-click operations.