Sibelius plug-in: Round Metronome Marks

If you ever work with MIDI files that were created in a sequencer and you’ve opened them in Sibelius, you may have encountered some strange metronome markings upon opening the file:

Sibelius faithfully reproduces the tempi from the file to many decimal places, which may be ultra-precise but is not very practical for musicians reading the score.

The plug-in Round Metronome Marks, by Neil Sands of Chichester Music Press, has been around since 2009 to address this problem. The plug-in turns, for example, q=60.0003 into q=60~q=60.0003. Only the display is rounded; the tempo for playback isn’t changed (the use of the tilde tells Sibelius to hide any subsequent text in the expression).

The user can optionally round to a specified number of decimal places, or round to the nearest tempo value found on a traditional metronome, namely: 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 66, 69, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88, 92, 96, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 126, 132, 138, 144, 152, 160, 168, 176, 184, 192, 200, and 208.

Today, an update to this handy plug-in was released, which gives the user the option to actually delete the original metronome marks entirely, leaving cleanly modified ones in their place:

The result is very readable:

Thanks, Neil, for providing this useful tool! Round Metronome Marks may be downloaded directly through Sibelius 7 at File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins > Text. Users may also install it manually in Sibelius 6 or 7 by visiting the plug-in download page and following the usual manual installation procedure.