Plug-in maven Bob Zawalich has added two more plug-ins to the Sibelius repository.
The first plug-in, Hide Articulations, from the description, does just what it says: “This plugin hides articulations in selected notes or chords, while retaining the playback of the articulations. This automates what some users have been doing by hand. It creates hidden, sounding notes with articulations in another voice, then silences and removes articulations from the original note or chord.”
In the real world, you might find that a seasoned player would play certain notes accented or shorter in a given passage, without the composer needing to notate each and every articulation. This plug-in allows you to place the articulation for playback purposes only, so that Sibelius can approximate that playback style.
Another use would be when, say, an articulation pattern is displayed in only one bar of a repeating passage, with the remaining notes marked “simile”:
Note that the plug-in differs from Roman Molina Dunn’s plug-in Hide or Show Articulations, which hides articulations and replaces them with hidden text. The main purpose of Roman’s plug-in is to allow you to have two states of the score: one with articulations, and one without. This way you can add articulations for playback, and hide them when you print (or vice versa, if your playback workflow requires).
In Bob’s plug-in, you are actually hearing different playback than what is shown on the page, so the same score is usable for both playback and printing. However, as Bob notes, “Please remember that you did this later, as it could be tricky to figure out what is going on. There is no easy way to undo this after Undo is out of range, so be sure this is what you want to do.”
Bob further warns that the state of any visible accidentals will be changed to be cautionary so they can remain visible. “Be careful pasting such notes to different locations as the visible accidental may be inappropriate.”
Hide Articulations may be downloaded directly through Sibelius 7 or 7.5 at File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins > Notes and Rests. Users may also install it manually in Sibelius 7 or 7.5 by visiting the plug-in download page and following the usual manual installation procedure. Since the ability to check for accidental visibility was only first made available in Sibelius 7.1.3, Hide Articulations will not run in Sibelius 6.
The other new plug-in, Delete Leading Empty Bars, is aimed at Pro Tools users who export a score into Sibelius only to find themselves with many empty bars at the start of the score. Various reasonable options are available, and of course the plug-in moves any system objects, such as Title text, from the bar(s) to be deleted to the first bar that is not deleted. If a title page exists, it will be preserved.
Delete Leading Empty Bars may be downloaded directly through Sibelius 7 at File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins > Layout. Users may also install it manually in Sibelius 6, 7 or 7.5 by visiting the plug-in download page and following the usual manual installation procedure.
Derek Williams
This is useful, another great contribution from Bob, showing he is sticking with the Sibelius platform for now.
Still hoping that a plugin to filter just the accents will happen, unless it has already and I just don’t know about it. The standard Advanced Filter always selects the note as well as the accent, e.g. > and –
Philip Rothman
Derek: Yes, indeed, Bob keeps the hits coming. We are very grateful!
If your aim is, for instance, to delete all of the tenutos in a particular passage, you could use the Advanced Filter as you indicate, and then simply hit the corresponding key on the Keypad, since it essentially functions as an “on-off” switch.
As you point out, filtering the articulations themselves, e.g. to nudge them up or down, is impossible, as far as I know, except to select each one individually or as part of a multi-selection.
Bob Zawalich
I don’t really consider myself to be sticking to the Sibelius platform, but if I come up with something useful in the course of my work, I will still offer some plugins to the Sibelius community.
FWIW, filters will only work on separate objects, and things like articulations, accidentals, noteheads, and ties are not separate objects, but properties of notes. As Philip says, you can select some of these things by hand and manipulate them, but this ability is not available to filters or plugins. To them an articulation is like a color.
So you mostly need to filter the objects that contain the properties and try to figure out ways to manipulate the properties from there. If you have lots of things with properties that is about the only way to go.
Ron Ditzler
I think it is unconscionable that with all the defects that Version 7 inflicted upon us (often making it unusable) that you would charge those of us with Version 7 to update to 7.5. I for one will refuse to buy the update.
Philip Rothman
Ron: I have used Sibelius 7 for quite literally hundreds of projects, so to call it unusable is a bit of a stretch. But, in any event, if you post directly to the chat forum you’re more likely to be heard by someone official at Avid: http://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/helpcenter/chat/chat.pl?groupid=3