Sibelius 2025.2 introduces decondensing parts with staff filters

Avid has released Sibelius 2025.2 across its desktop and mobile platforms. This release introduces a new “decondensing parts” option, where Sibelius will create two new Dynamic Parts from a single staff, rename them for you, and show only the music relevant to each player. Making this possible is a new feature, Staff Filters, which appear as overlays on the music and can be adjusted and moved freely.

This is part of a series of improvements in the application dating back several years, with the end-goal of making it as easy as possible to create voiced dynamic parts; in other words, two separate parts derived from a single source staff in the score.

Avid had previewed this release ahead of the 2025 NAMM Show and demonstrated it at their booth to attendees at the show from January 25-27, but did not publicly release the update until last week, on Thursday, February 6.

Sibelius 2025.2 also brings several other minor improvements and bug fixes.

The old(er) way, from 2023.5

The evolution of this release can be most directly traced to the Sibelius 2023.5 update, in which users gained the ability to create two dynamic parts from a single staff in the score.

However, the process was entirely manual and required multiple steps: creating two Dynamic Parts, renaming them, carefully filtering each player’s notes, hiding them, and then repeating this process for each condensed staff. While this was an exciting development, it was undeniably labor-intensive.

Still, it was a significant step forward; for the first time in Sibelius, notes in a chord could be hidden individually, and Sibelius would update the rules for displaying the result; previously, this was not possible.

The new (2025.2) way — Decondensing Parts

Sibelius 2025.2 streamlines this workflow:

• Select a condensed staff in the score
• Go to Parts > Decondense > Two Players

Sibelius will then generate two new Dynamic Parts, rename them, and display only the relevant music for each player, all while keeping Sibelius running as fast as before.

Simple, right? This efficiency is made possible by two new features: Staff Filters and Text Directives.

Staff Filters

When using Decondense > Two Players, Sibelius automatically applies Staff Filters to the new parts. To view a Staff Filter, select a bar, and click on the grey line that appears above:

Staff Filters are labeled in the top-left corner (e.g., “Player 1”) and color-coded (blue for Player 1, green for Player 2, etc.). They can be activated, deactivated, moved, copied, or repositioned (by dragging the three dots at the start or end of the filter). You can even stack multiple filters when necessary.

At times, unwanted material may appear through a Staff Filter. If so, it can still be hidden manually. Conversely, if a Staff Filter hides something you need to display, you’ll need to manually add an overlapping filter. For example, if a “Show Player 1” filter inadvertently hides bar rests in Voice 2 during a cue, you can apply a “Show Voice 2” filter on top to restore them. To add a Staff Filter manually, select the passage you want to filter, then go to Home > Instruments > Add Staff Filter, and choose the appropriate filter.

Text Directives

In a score, combined staves often include indications like “1.” or “2.” to specify which player is playing. In Sibelius 2025.2, many of these are now recognized as Text Directives, ensuring the appropriate music is displayed in each player’s part.

Text Directives are controlled via the Playback Dictionary, as they also influence playback. Sibelius 2025.2 introduces a set of default directives, but users can customize their own by going to Play > Interpretation > Playback Dictionary. Here, you’ll find a new Staff Filter Control setting, where text can be assigned to control the visibility of the top player, bottom player, or both.

 

Default Text Directives:

Top player only

• “player 1”
• “solo”
• “solo 1”
• “1 solo”
• “1.” and “I.”
• “1°” and “I°”
• “1” and “I”
• “primo”
• “~player 1”

Bottom player only

• “player 2”
• “solo 2”
• “2 solo”
• “2.” and “II.”
• “2°” and “II°”
• “2” and “II”
• “secondo”
• “~player 2”

Reset (both players)

• “play”
• “a2”* / “à2”* / “A2”* / “À2”* (with or without a space between characters)
• “a[3-9]”* / “à[3-9]”* / “A[3-9]”* / “À[3-9]”* (with or without a space between characters)
• “à deux”
• “a due”
• tutti*
• unis.* (with or without the period)
• “unison”
• “~play”

Note that Text Directives marked with an asterisk () will not control Staff Filters in scores created prior to the 2025.2 release.

A couple of small UX gripes, if I may:

1. The term “Text Directive” does not appear anywhere in Sibelius, so searching for it in Command Search will yield no results. A reference to the Playback Dictionary when typing “Text Directive” into Command Search would be helpful.
2. Since these directives impact part layout more than playback, they might be more intuitively placed in the Decondense section of the Parts tab.

Cues

How does Sibelius prevent cues from being incorrectly hidden by Staff Filters? Simple: cue-sized notes and rests will always show through Staff Filters regardless of voice. This means that the old workflow is unchanged when cueing an instrument on a different staff using the Home > Paste > Paste as Cue function.

However, if you need to cue Player 1 in Player 2’s part, the workflow is more complex:

• While viewing Player 2’s part, select the Player 1 notes and set them to be cue-sized in the second Keypad layout. (To see Player 1’s notes, you’ll need to display hidden objects, which you can turn on in View > Invisibles > Hidden Objects. You may also need to temporarily turn off multirests in Layout > Breaks > Show Multirests.)
• Add the cue label using text, make it cue-sized, hide the text in the score (which will also hide it in all parts), then un-hide it in Player 2’s part.
• You may also need to add bar rests in Voice 2 from the second Keypad layout. After adding them to the relevant bars, hide them in the score, and then in Player 2’s part, add a “Show Voice 2” Staff Filter to those bars to force the bar rests to display.

“Automatic” decondensing?

Well, sort of. But we’re getting there!

While decondensing is now largely automated, there are a couple of caveats:

Text, lines, and symbols will strictly adhere to the “rules” of Staff Filters. For example, dynamics that are assigned to Voice 1 will be filtered out by a Player 2 Staff Filter, even if the Player 2 notes are in Voice 1:

To avoid this, assign text, lines, and symbols to the correct voice (“Voice 1” for Player 1; “Voice 2” for Player 2; or “All”, also known as “Voice 5”, for both).

Text Directives persist until cancelled. At certain times semantically “incorrect” Text Directives may be needed to ensure parts display the correct material. For example, say Horn 1 plays on its own marked with the Text Directive “1.” and then Horn 2 enters a few bars later in harmony with Horn 1. Normally, no indication would be needed in the score — the presence of two notes implies both horns are playing. However, Sibelius will continue to dutifully follow the “1.” Text Directive, resulting in the Horn 2 notes being hidden in the Horn 2 part. To correct this, a “reset (both players)” Text Directive is needed when the Horn 2 material resumes (such as “play”). For semantically “incorrect” Text Directives, a tilde (~) can be added before the text to prevent them from displaying in the score and parts (e.g., “~play”).

Sam Butler, Avid’s director of product management, told Scoring Notes, “All these considerations have been made with two things in mind: giving the user complete control over what is and what is not shown in a part, and also keeping Sibelius running at full speed. At no point will a user find Sibelius is slowed down by this feature. So while Sibelius can’t always guess the intentions the user has, we give them all the tools they need to accomplish them.”

Important settings to check

For decondensing to function correctly, ensure the following:

• File > Preferences > Note Input > Editing: “Respace includes hidden notes and rests” must be unchecked.
• Appearance > Engraving Rules > Bar Rests: “Use bar rests and multirests when all notes and rests in a bar are hidden” must be checked. (This is checked by default for files created in Sibelius 2023.5 or later.)
• Appearance > Engraving Rules > Accidentals and Dots: “Allow hidden notes to update accidentals” should be unchecked. (This is unchecked by default for files created in Sibelius 2023.5 or later.)

Where to go from here

The 2025.2 release marks a significant advancement in automating the decondensing process — congratulations to the team on this impressive achievement!

Of course, there’s still room for further refinement. As with many of Sibelius’ recent updates, new features are introduced and then enhanced in subsequent releases.

Here are a few ways the decondensing process could be improved:

• Automatically hide Text Directives such as “1.”, “2.”, and “a2” in parts.
• Enable Sibelius to intelligently determine which dynamics should be displayed in each part, eliminating the need for manual voice assignments.
• Streamline the process of cueing Player 1 in Player 2’s part and vice versa.

Additional updates in 2025.2

Several smaller feature requests and bug fixes are included in the Sibelius 2025.2 release:

• Highlights now end before the barline to prevent them from splitting multirests.
• The mixer can be muted independently between a score and score subsets.
• Instrument changes for dynamic guitar staves will no longer convert tab staves to notation.
• Magnetic Layout commands have been ported to Mobile.
• And more! For the full list of updates and bug fixes, see the official post from Avid.

Compatibility

A note about compatibility: Sibelius 2025.2 changes the file format. A reminder that when this happens, files saved in this version cannot be opened in older versions. To collaborate with users on previous versions, export the file via File > Export > Previous Version. The previous file format change occurred with the 2023.11 release., and before that, the file format changed with the aforementioned 2023.5 release.

Avid says that when exporting back to a Sibelius file from the 2023.5 – 2024.10 versions of the software, “notes filtered out by Staff Filters will be hidden, so your scores and parts will look the same, but the functionality will be limited to the capabilities of the old version.”

If you’re exporting to a version earlier than 2023.5, “individual notes will be hidden, but if a chord had one or more notes hidden, then the whole chord is shown. Bars with the whole contents hidden aren’t turned into full bar rests or multirests as those much older versions simply don’t have these newer capabilities.”

Conclusions and availability

Sibelius 2025.2 significantly improves the decondensing workflow, introducing automation into a process that was previously largely manually executed.

As impressive as this new feature is, it’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s quite easy to accidentally filter out material that should be visible in a part. No one wants to find out in the middle of a rehearsal that 8 bars of the 2nd bassoon are missing because of an incorrect filter or misplaced Text Directive. (Careful proofreading is a must, especially as the complexity of the music increases!) On the other hand, the way this feature has been implemented gives the user complete control over what does or doesn’t appear in a part at any given spot — all while keeping Sibelius running as quickly as ever.

In our interview at the 2025 NAMM Show with Sam Butler, he said that there was room for refinement, something that he reiterated upon the release of Sibelius 2025.2. “This is very much a solid feature that is complete and it’s to spec, and as with everything we do with Sibelius, this will evolve,” Sam said. “It’s important to note that while we are unlocking the ability for a condensed stave to be decondensed into two Dynamic Parts, this is only the start, and we’re eager to expand to more players and more capabilities in the future.”

The Sibelius 2025.2 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 2025.2 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 in 2025.2 are only 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.

Update: how decondensing has evolved since 2025.2

When we first published this article, Sam Butler told us the feature was “just the beginning.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Over the releases that followed, Avid went back and filed down several of the rough edges we flagged above — and two maintenance updates in particular, Sibelius 2025.3 and Sibelius 2025.4, targeted the decondensing workflow directly. With thanks to Gábor Orth, who translated this article into Hungarian for his site kottagrafika.hu and appended his own survey of what’s changed since, here’s where things stand.

Dynamics and technique text that make it into the part

The thorniest limitation we described was that dynamics and technique text attached to Voice 1 could disappear from the second player’s part once the Staff Filters did their work — the “double-edged sword” in action. Sibelius 2025.4 softened that edge: staff text entered with a passage or system selection is now assigned to all voices (“voice 5”), the same way hairpins and other staff lines already behaved, so each Dynamic Part receives the dynamics and technique markings it needs. (Enter text on a single-object selection and it still goes into that object’s voice, as before.) It’s not a cure for every case, but it removes a whole category of manual cleanup.

W to walk through the parts

The trusty W shortcut — long the way to flip between a score and its part — grew up in 2025.4 as well. With multiple Dynamic Parts now hanging off a single staff, pressing W cycles through each part in turn before returning to the full score: full score → Player 1 → Player 2 → Full Score. It makes checking a decondensed staff against its offspring considerably quicker.

Filtered notes that transpose properly

Sibelius 2025.3 tended to a subtler, under-the-hood matter: notes hidden or filtered out by a Staff Filter are once again transposed correctly, both by the arrow keys and by the transpose function (Shift+T). That counts for more than it might sound — a filtered note silently left at the wrong pitch is exactly the kind of thing you don’t want to discover at the session.

Where it stands

None of this makes the careful proofreading we preached above optional; divisi and other multi-voice passages still reward a close read of every part. But the automation has quietly taken over more of the busywork, and the “double-edged sword” is, several releases on, a good deal easier to hold by the right end. Decondensing has settled in as a dependable part of the everyday preparation workflow rather than the promising experiment it started as.

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.