Ability to move notes and rests horizontally
Moving or “sliding” music horizontally (or vertically, for that matter) is a common workflow to those working with MIDI or audio in DAWs. In notation software, though, it’s not possible to do that. Sibelius 8.2 takes a first step towards making it easier, although the feature leaves much to be desired.
The shortcuts for moving a selection left or right are Command-Option-Left Arrow (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow (PC) and Command-Option-Right Arrow (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+Right Arrow (PC), respectively. These shortcuts are automatically added even if you have a custom feature set in File > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.
The most basic example involves a single note or chord in a single staff.
Invoke the shortcut, and the note slides over to the right.
Keep sliding, though, and the note leaves a trail of quarter notes in its wake:
In the above example I think it would be better if Sibelius grouped rests back together and replaced the bar rest entirely. As it stands now there’s a fair amount of cleanup involved.
In what is probably the best use case for the new feature, you can quickly slide a note while the note input cursor is active:
The feature also works on a passage selection. In this example it works quite nicely within the bar:
But when moving to another bar, the half note becomes Humpty-Dumpty-like, unable to be put back together again, and leaving a trail of rests:
The duration that the note slides is controlled by the denominator of the time signature (i.e., in 4/4 time, notes will slide by a quarter note; in 6/8 time, the notes will slide by an eighth note). The exceptions to this are if the selected note or passage are of a shorter duration than that note value, or if there are intervening rests that are shorter; in either case the note(s) will slide by the smaller duration.
Items such as lyrics or dynamics won’t move by themselves, but they will be included in a move if contained within a passage selection, which may be useful in certain circumstances:
Finally — and this will come as no surprise to long-suffering Sibelius users — if you try to move either a selection involving a tuplet or one adjacent to it, Sibelius will give up:
About the tuplet limitation, Sibelius senior product manager Sam Butler said today that “We are hoping to improve this in a future release.”
The concept of sliding notes and passages in time is interesting and, even with its current limitations, may be useful in certain conditions. The good news is that, being a workflow enhancement and not something that fundamentally changes the appearance of a score, hopefully the Sibelius developers can refine this tool to make it more useful in the future.
Installation, upgrading, compatibility
Sibelius 8.2 will overwrite any 8.x version you have on your computer, but will leave other versions intact, unless you tell the installer to uninstall those versions. You also have the separate option of copying supporting files from Sibelius 7.5, if you’re upgrading from that version.
If you have Sibelius 8.1.1 or earlier, you should upgrade to 8.2, and will be prompted to do so by the Application Manager. It’s free for most users of 8.x unless you bought a monthly subscription plan that has already expired.
Sibelius 8.2 uses the same file format as Sibelius 8.1, which is welcome news.
Sibelius 8.2 will run on any 64-bit system running Windows 7 or later or Mac OS 10.9 or later. Various purchase options, including subscriptions, perpetual licenses, and upgrades are available from Avid’s online store and other resellers such as Amazon and Sweetwater.
Bernie Cossentino
Welcome features and enhancements, especially the enharmonic respellings.
Not regrouping the rests while moving notes horizontally is a troubling omission. I’m assuming they wanted to get this feature out the door regardless of the issue. Let’s hope they complete this feature properly….and include tuplets with that :-/
Hans Nel
The “independent enharmonic spelling of notes in a part compared to the score” is the only improvement I like about this update. They should have finished the “sliding note” feature before releasing it. I can’t see myself using that feature…but then I never had the desire to move notes horizontally, and it will screw my lyrics up completely.
Joe Pearson
Hi Hans,
We’ve already improved the slide feature so that it automatically cleans up rests as you move your selection. We’re demoing it in a technical preview of Sibelius 8.3 at MusikMesse this week.
You can also make lyrics part of your selection and move them at the same time.
Joe
Hans Nel
Excellent!!
Bob Zawalich
The shipping plugin Combine Tied Notes and Rests (category Simplify Notation) will clean up the “fractured” rests – you can just use the “Rests” part of it. The plugin was written to deal with this very scenario of rests left behind after editing.
It is not as good as having the program do it in the fly but is is a lot easier than doing it all by hand.
I would occasionally find sliding notes useful, especially while composing. What I would really like, though, would be to have Sibelius change what happens when you increase the duration of a note.
Say you have 2 quarter notes, and you really want a dotted quarter and an eighth. If you change the first note to have a dot, it will wipe out the second note entirely, leaving an 8th rest behind, and you have to recreate the 2nd note, assuming you remember what it was… I would really prefer it if Sib only removed the amount of duration from the following note that was needed by the first note. So if you dot the first note, change the next to an 8th note instead of wiping it out altogether.
That makes changing to a dotted rhythm trivial whereas it is really a pain to do it now. It would be OK with me if it did what it does now if the following note was a tuplet, because those are hard to deal with, but I see no disadvantage to reducing duration rather than overwriting adjacent normal notes notes, and I think it would be very useful.
But anyway, for now, check out Combine Tied Notes and Rests to consolidate fractured rests.
Bernie Cossentino
@ Bob Z. “What I would really like, though, would be to have Sibelius change what happens when you increase the duration of a note.
Say you have 2 quarter notes, and you really want a dotted quarter and an eighth. If you change the first note to have a dot, it will wipe out the second note entirely, leaving an 8th rest behind, and you have to recreate the 2nd note, assuming you remember what it was… I would really prefer it if Sib only removed the amount of duration from the following note that was needed by the first note. So if you dot the first note, change the next to an 8th note instead of wiping it out altogether.”
Bob, I totally agree. This is what I meant as well when saying “Let’s hope they complete this feature properly”.
Time will tell.
Philip Rothman
I second the motion! I do think that there is potential here if these types of issues can get sorted.
Kenneth Gaw
If you like the sliding feature, I suggest you have a look at the Move Selection Left/Right Plugins which were posted in June of last year.
https://www.scoringnotes.com/tips/three-new-plug-ins-from-kenneth-gaw/
They basically do the same thing but behave slightly differently.
Notes and tuplets can be moved but are never split, so the duration moved is the smallest possible one that avoids this.
Bars left with only rests are converted to bar rests in voice 1 and cleared completely in other voices.
Most other objects, such as dynamics, chord symbols, lines, repeat barlines, rehearsal marks and lyrics etc can be moved independently.
(Lyrics realign themselves to the changed durations.)
The code is quite slow if large passages are moved or if the score is very large, so the new 8.2 feature might be quite a bit faster.
Philip Rothman
Kenneth, many thanks for reminding us of your nice plug-in.
Kenneth Gaw
I came across the problem of notes being split when being pasted across the barline and remaining split thereafter when writing these plugins and avoided it by simply prohibiting any moves that split notes.
I think it should be possible for the development team to add code that corrects this problem during any pasting operation. If a user pastes two tied quarter notes into the first two beats of a 4/4 bar for instance, then it would automatically be changed to a half note. This would work like the “Combined Tied Notes and Rests” plugin except that any options would probably contained in File>Preferences rather than a dialog that interrupted each pasting operation.
Roberto Fabbroni
I just noticed that resetting the design of a passage that contains flats in a passage where the key signature has sharps will change all flats to its corresponding enharmonic sharp spelling. What’s the logic behind that? If I type an E-flat I wish it to remain an E-flat even if I decide to reset the design of that passage, let’s say to reset the beaming, or the curvature of the slurs. Moreover, why consider the enharmonic spelling as a matter of “design”?
This happens in the score, not in the parts, where the spelling remains fixed after resetting the design.
This feature, with all its potential, hasn’t been implemented well enough. For me, it’s just become more of a problem rather than a solution.
bob
incredibly stupid feature and indicative of the terrible design One would assume you could move a note left into a rest Instead it just squeezes the notes together, a nearly useless feature There is no mention of how to acutally move notes leftward into rests