Sibelius 2020.9 is available with enhancements to the Focus on Staves feature, enabling new layout and formatting workflows for scores and parts. There are other improvements to MIDI and MusicXML importing, ManuScript, and accessibility.
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Pitch before duration note input in Dorico
Beginning in the 3.5 update, Dorico officially added support for note input using pitch-before-duration, fulfilling a request of many users coming from other notation software accustomed to this entry method.
Notes to Notes, a real-world guide for the professional music creator
Tristan Noon’s e-book Notes to Notes: The Ultimate Guide to Business in Film & TV Music is a comprehensive and approachable guide to the music business, conveyed from the perspective of real-world experience.
Notion iOS 2.5 and Notion 6.6 desktop updates released
Notion is updated. Notion iOS 2.5 supports document handling, MP3 and SMP Press export, template saving, and more, including handwriting, MusicXML and MIDI import enhancements. Notion 6.6 for Mac and Windows brings over some of these improvements and addresses compatibility issues.
Converting folders of Sibelius scores to different formats
When you want to back up your Sibelius scores in a different format or work on scores you created in Sibelius in another program, there are lots of options and formats to export to, like MIDI, PDF, or MusicXML. But what if you want to work on many scores at once and need to convert folders of scores?
NotePerformer 3.3.1 released
Proving that getting saxophones to balance properly is as difficult to do in NotePerformer as it is in real life, NotePerformer 3.3.1 is out, fixing that problem and a handful of other issues from the 3.3 release.
Sibelius 2019.12 released; support for older OSs dropped
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.12. This year-end update tidies up a number of items such as accessibility, MIDI import, UX/UI, printing, PDF export, and plug-ins, but also drops support for Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
NotePerformer updated to 3.3; Catalina and Dorico 3 supported
Wallander Instruments has released NotePerformer 3.3, an update to its plug-and-play sound library. It brings official Dorico 3 support, support for macOS 10.15 Catalina, and a number of other fixes and improvements.
Real-time MIDI recording in Dorico
There’s no way to get around note entry. One way or another, you have to get the notes onto the staff. Thankfully, there are several features in Dorico that can make real-time MIDI entry a regular part of your workflow.
Using Finale’s “tempo map”
A tempo map is a MIDI track containing tempo information in beats per minute. Finale generates a tempo map when it parses a track, but its tempo handling won’t behave as you might expect if you’ve worked in a DAW or other notation software. Here are some common problems and solutions.