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.
Sibelius 2019.7 released with MusicXML improvements, other fixes
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.7, its latest update to Sibelius. 2019.7 contains no new major features, but there are some MusicXML improvements and fixes in the areas of stability, fonts, PDF export, and playback.
View 2-page spreads in notation software and PDFs
Essential to any good printed part layout is the page turn. The easiest way to check for good page turns on-screen is to view the music as a two-page spread. We’ll quickly run through how to view music this way in all the major desktop music notation applications as well as in Adobe Acrobat and Mac Preview.
Sibelius 2019.5 fixes audio and printing issues
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.5, its latest update to Sibelius. The release contains no new features, but it brings a number of important improvements and fixes mostly in the areas of audio, playback, and printing.
forScore 11 release further refines the best-in-class iOS score reader
forScore has released forScore 11, the first major update to the iOS score reader since 2016. It’s largely an evolutionary update, but the improvements are thoughtful, practical, and welcome.
The best iPad score reader for most people
We spent time with each of the leading iPad score reader apps — forScore, Newzik, nkoda, Blackbinder, and Piascore — to assess the current state of the category, and to help musicians decide which of the excellent options best suits their needs.
Printing music for The Tonight Show in Central Park
Jimmy Fallon brought The Tonight Show outdoors to the Summer Stage at Central Park. Joining the show’s house band The Roots were musicians from the New York Philharmonic, making for a unique 20-piece ensemble. NYC Music Services played a small but important role in printing the music that got on the stands.
MOLA 2018: Newzik entices orchestras with collaboration, annotation, organization
At the 2018 MOLA conference, I spoke with Aurélia Azoulay, Newzik’s head of marketing and international development and Netta Shahar, their orchestra specialist, to talk about how the app has progressed based on their real-world experience, including collaborations such as those with the l’Opéra de Rouen Normandie.
New and updated PDF utilities for music printing
Two new utilities for music printing are now available: PDF-MusicBinder and PDF-BatchStitch, which take the tedium of setting up PDF files for accordion-style and booklet printing and turn it into a one-click process. Updates to other PDF utilities are also available.
Paperless composition lessons with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil
Composer and educator David MacDonald describes in detail how he teaches composition using the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and why he can’t imaging returning to the dead-tree way of doing things.