With spring and a sense of renewal in the air, last week I had the pleasure of seeing Sibelius do something new for the first time. It’s a small pleasure, often repeated throughout the course of each development cycle, but you never forget the first time you see an idea you had brought to life in […]
We have today made available small updates for Sibelius 5, Sibelius First and Sibelius Student that fix the only significant known problem with running these programs on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, namely that the program can crash when displaying the Mixer window. Go straight to the download, or read on for the boring […]
Twitter is brill. I’ve just learned about a meeting of the Wellington Macintosh Society, WelMac for short, that has just concluded, at which the noted conductor and composer Sir William Southgate (the first New Zealand-based artist to be knighted, as a knight bachelor). Says Twitterer @JoMangee: Fantastic Sibelius 5 demo by Sir William Southgate at […]
Composer and educator Joshua Harris has just upgraded to Sibelius 5, and has posted a short review, in which he coins the term “Finalification.” This term resonates with me, and perhaps I might be permitted to attempt a (cheeky!) definition: Fi•na•li•fi•ca•tion (fin-ah-li-fi-key-shuhn, fə-nāl’ē-fĭ-kā’shən, noun): an act of masking great power behind bewildering complexity.
There are currently almost 200 additional plug-ins for Sibelius available for download from the Sibelius web site. They’re really an incredible resource, and if you’ve never taken the time to have a look at the plug-ins on offer there, you’re strongly recommended to do so. Just about all of those plug-ins have been contributed to […]
Unpitched percussion is one of the more complex parts of music notation, and although we have tried hard to hide as much of this complexity as possible in Sibelius 5, if you find writing for percussion instruments and getting appropriate playback difficult, you’re not the only one. I’ve put together a short tutorial video (just […]
I’ve linked to Dr. Tom Rudolph’s blog before, but Tom’s most recent post is definitely worth a fresh link. He talks about the benefits of using the re-pitching features in your notation software to save time when creating parts: If you use notation software to notate scores, consider using the re-input pitch option available in […]
We have always tried to make Sibelius as accessible as possible for users with disabilities or impairments. Mostly this has been achieved through trying to follow the guidelines set by Microsoft and Apple for how applications should interact with the accessibility technologies built in to the operating system. Blind and visually impaired users have been […]
Update – September 16, 2013: The following post from 2008 pertains to Sibelius 6 and earlier versions. For instructions and tips on how to create PDF files from Sibelius 7, see this blog post. Nowadays many Sibelius worfklows end with creating a PDF file. “PDF” stands for “Portable Document Format,” and it’s an open standard […]
Quite a few: 340,237, in fact. (And there are 63,157 words in the Sibelius 5 Handbook.) Now you know!