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 the user community by Sibelius users, and there are some absolute gems among them.
Today, for example, I had cause to edit a large number of instrument names in a bunch of scores. Editing instrument names in Sibelius is a reasonably laborious process, because you have to double-click each instrument’s name in turn, and remember to do this for both the full name that appears at the start of the score (and/or at the start of sections), and the short name that appears on subsequent systems. Of course, if the instrument names aren’t currently showing, you first have to go into the Engraving Rules dialog to switch them on.
Fortunately, that most prolific of Sibelius plug-in developers, Bob Zawalich, has written a plug-in that makes editing instrument names in a large score an absolute snap. It’s called Edit Instrument Names, and it has saved me probably over an hour over the past day. Pretty cool!
When you run the plug-in, you’ll see the dialog above, which shows the long and short instrument names of up to 30 staves in a single dialog — much quicker to tab around this dialog than to double-click each instrument name in the score in turn. If your score happens to have more than 30 staves, no worries: the Previous staves and Next staves buttons at the bottom of the dialog enable, and you can flip to another page of the score with those extra staves listed.
It’s a very neat plug-in, and it could save you as much time as it saved me. Go download it now! (And if you don’t know how to install a new plug-in, read this.)
Thank you, Bob!