Sibelius Changelog

What's new in Sibelius 2019.4

May 17, 2019

Keep scores safe in Review mode:
With the new locked-down, read-only Review mode, copyists, engravers, orchestrators, publishers, and teachers can have peace of mind knowing that you can’t accidentally edit or move anything out of place as you review a score. Freely navigate compositions and add comments to communicate rehearsal notes, feedback, or directions to an editor, engraver, or student. You can even annotate parts directly with a stylus or Surface Pro pen.
Spark ideas with loop playback:
When composing, sometimes the best way to come up with parts is to improvise different melody lines, riffs, and chords over a section of music. Sibelius now enables you to select any part of your score for loop playback, so you can quickly experiment. You can even slow down the tempo during loop playback for easier rehearsal and lesson practice—ideal for students and teachers.
Find plugins fast:
Sibelius makes composing, arranging, and engraving scores even easier through a variety of available plugins (most are free!) that can add functionality to the software or perform complex tasks for you. And now it’s easier to find the plugins you need with new search capabilities built into the Install Plug-ins dialog.
Notate and play back parts in unison:
Got multiple instruments playing the same notes and melody lines in your score, such as an ensemble of violin or trumpet players? Instead of hearing only one voice play, Sibelius now supports playback for n players with Sibelius Sounds, NotePerformer, and other compatible sound libraries, enabling you to hear all of the richness and distinct nuances of having multiples of the same instrument part play together in unison.

New in Sibelius 2018.11 (Dec 13, 2018)

We’re really excited to introduce you to the November’s release for Sibelius | Ultimate, Sibelius and Sibelius | First. All three tiers are benefiting from this far-reaching update.
This release has mainly focused on modernizing the Sibelius codebase and many of the improvements are under the hood. These manifest themselves in the way Sibelius appears on your screen and draws the score, and is now even able to make use native OS features like Full Screen on Mac, DPI scaling on Windows, and so on.
In short, Sibelius has never been faster at redrawing the score as you drag individual objects or the page around; Sibelius has also never looked so good on high-DPI screens on Windows and Retina screens on Mac. We’ve thrown in some note spacing improvements and fixes to a slew of legacy bugs too.
If you can’t wait to get stuck in, open Application Manager on your computer to download and install the update. You can also get the update from your Avid account at my.avid.com/products. This update is available to all Sibelius | First users for free as well as all those subscribing to Sibelius or Sibelius I Ultimate, and to those with a license of Sibelius with a current Software Update and Support plan. If you need to renew, head over to your account.
If you’re on an older version of Sibelius, you can upgrade from one of our resellers or on our webstore.
Upgrading the Sibelius infrastructure:
The improvements in this release touch nearly every bit of the program. This is largely due to a complete upgrade of Sibelius’s underlying infrastructure, Qt. Qt is a cross-platform development framework that enables Sibelius to run on various platforms and devices. We’ve been using this since Sibelius 7, released in 2011, so it’s high time we upgraded this to take advantage of the new capabilities. The development team have been chipping away at this herculean effort for more than 2 years, so it’s a relief to get this out into the real world . This sets us up to provide more exciting features using the very latest cutting technology.
The UI:
I’ll start with the user interface (UI), since it’s the most obvious change. Overall, it now generally looks cleaner. Although Sibelius showed nice high-resolution images and icons in previous versions, Sibelius itself didn’t natively support high-DPI and Retina screens so very little of the UI was able to take advantage of these modern displays. Now though, you’ll notice some very subtle, and some more obvious, improvements in the way Sibelius displays the text and icons in the Ribbon.
Not all items in Sibelius have been upgraded to support the sharper icons – we still have some work to do in the Mixer, Ideas panel and so on, however the ground work has all been done now to make this much easier to implement and maintain in the future.
Sibelius is now able to take advantage of native OS features, and we’re able to make some other subtle changes such as:
You’ll see the scroll bars on Mac are now defined by the OS, so will show automatically based on your mouse or trackpad, as you set this up in System Preferences.
The pop-up messages now animate when they appear, and have the default color based on your System
On Windows, docked panels now have a narrower title bar so they take up less vertical space
Tick boxes in the Preferences used to be white-on-white, making it hard to know if they were ticked or not. These are now blue with a white tick, as you’d expect. This particularly affected the Input Devices and Timeline preferences.
Across all dialogs, the headings of each section would collide with the box below This was more noticeable in the Preferences and Engraving Rules dialogs.
On macOS:
The Keypad and Transport panels:
All the panels in Sibelius now have the nice rounded corners. These have always been there under the hood, but were prevented from appearing by the older implementation of Qt4.
Both the Keypad and Transport panels now support the lovely higher resolution graphics, giving a nice sharp look. Here’s a comparison of the old and new Keypad on a Retina display
The Ribbon:
You’ll notice the text seems sharper, and this is because Sibelius is now able to be more pixel accurate with the way it displays text. You’ll see this in all the dialogs and pop-up messages as well.
Accessibility:
In this release, we’ve paid a lot of attention to improving the way Sibelius works with screen readers. Screen readers, for those who may not know, are applications that can read and describe what is happening on the computer screen to help users who can’t see the screen well, or even at all. Both Windows and macOS come with their own built-in solutions called Narrator and VoiceOver. There are popular 3rd party solutions such as NVDA that is an open-source screen reader for Windows.
The screen readers themselves don’t know anything about music notation, so it has been our job to generate descriptions of the score elements on the screen. As such, we have vastly improved the way screen readers read and describe what’s happening on the screen.
Sibelius will read the names of Manuscript Papers when tabbing through scores in the Quick Start, as well as read the dialog as you set up a new score. Once in the score, Sibelius will read the contents of the Ribbon as you access this with the keyboard. Since nearly all of Sibelius is keyboard accessible, it’s possible to navigate the program using keyboard shortcuts and hear what’s happening. For example:
Pressing Tab will select the first staff object in the score and describe what the object is and where it is
Sibelius will announce the action you do too, such as “Move” note, or “Edit” note. The description that follows is the same as when selecting objects.
Searching Sibelius with “Find in Ribbon” will speak the results too. The keyboard shortcut to access the Find in Ribbon box is simply comma “,”. When it has keyboard focus, you’ll hear Sibelius say: “Find in Ribbon, Editing text”.
You can then start typing to find and perform any action you need, for example: To reset the position of an object, for example, you type “reset” and Sibelius will provide a list of all features that have Reset in their name or in their description. Use the arrow keys to cycle through the results to hear them.
Pressing Return will then apply that change – even when not using a screen reader, using ‘comma’ to access Find In Ribbon is by far the fastest way to use Sibelius!
Each screen reader is different, and it’ll take more work on our side to gain parity with them all.
During the development of these improvements, we’ve also fixed the following legacy bugs we had with screen readers:
Sibelius no longer crashes when closing Audio Options or Playback Devices when using NVDA
The bar number is no longer spoken followed immediately by the succeeding bar number
Goodbye EPS, hello true black PDFs:
Due to limitations in Qt5, we aren’t able to continue to support Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) file export. As such, Sibelius 2018.7 was the last version to support this feature. However, exporting to PDF has been improved to support greyscale, which converts to only the K color channel in CMYK.
To use this, go to File > Export > Graphics, choose PDF and untick “include colored objects”. Alternatively, go to File > Export > PDF and, again, untick “Include colored objects”.
Note Spacing:
To improve on the note spacing features we’ve been introducing this year, we’ve fine tuned the following:
Reset Note Spacing in the score or part no longer affects the This only affected scores using Version 3 spacing though.
Sibelius now only respaces multi-voice bars when adding or removing notes when the “Respace multi-voice passages during note input and editing” preference is set. In recent releases, Sibelius would perform a ‘Reset Note Spacing’ under the hood during articulation and accidental editing, which was found to be too heavy handed.
Video playback:
We’ve changed the engines used in Sibelius to sync a video (or audio file) to a score. On Windows, we now use DirectShow for QMultimedia and on Mac we’ve replaced the old 32-bit QuickTime player with AVFoundation. This change may require you to re-encode your videos to one Sibelius now supports, or install the necessary codecs to play the video.
Switching between feature-sets:
Since our release in June this year, your installation of Sibelius has had three tiers inside the single installation, so Sibelius will run the feature-set you are eligible for. This has been useful for those starting with Sibelius | First, trying out the Sibelius features then subscribing or buying the full feature of Sibelius | Ultimate. Since then, we’ve had several requests to allow you to check out the Sibelius | First features, say, to see if they are suitable for your beginner students who are starting out with their music studies. In today’s release, we’ve introduced this feature for Sibelius | Ultimate users only: simply hold down the ‘Alt’ key when Sibelius starts up and you’ll see the following dialog asking you which variant of Sibelius you’d like you run.
Clicking the version you need will run Sibelius with just those features enabled. Restarting Sibelius, without holding down ‘Alt’, will revert to running the full Sibelius | Ultimate feature set. Windows users should be aware that you need to hold down ‘Alt’ just after running Sibelius. If you hold ‘Alt’ at the same time as running the application, you will see a Properties window appear.
Overall stability and bug fixes:
As with every release of Sibelius, we fix a number of bugs, both old and new. Here’s a summary of what’s included in this release:
Rhythm Dots:
When dotted notes in multiple voices share the same pitch, Sibelius now correctly (and consistently) only shows a single dot. Previously, Sibelius would only do this for notes that were in a space and not when on a line.
The correct number of dots are now displayed on dotted chords with two or three notes.
Kontakt 6 Support:
Kontakt 6 is now recognised as a “Kontakt” device rather than a standard AU or VST plugin. This means Sibelius will now be able to automatically load sounds as it has been able to do with Kontakt 5 and earlier. So, if you have a Kontakt library, such as Virtual Drumline, old or older version of GPO/JABB, Sample Logic’s Fanfare or Rumble etc. you can now use these in the latest version of Kontakt. It’s worth noting that Kontakt 6 appears simply as “Kontakt” in your Playback Configuration.
Bug fixes:
All the “Name” fields in the Edit Instrument dialog are retained when saving and reopening a score. As such, you can now use the “Instrument change name” and “Instrument change warning name” fields independently.
Engraving Rules > Chord Symbols: Characters are now displayed correctly in the Language drop-down list on Mac.
In the Timecode and Duration dialog, the “Start video from” field now works correctly.
Note input, and dragging text objects are no longer sluggish when the Inspector is open.
The Edit Lines and Edit Symbols dialogs are now much more stable under the hood. Before, it was even possible to invoke multiple cursors on Windows and cause incorrect navigation behavior on both Windows and Mac.
Plugins:
Split Bar plug-in no longer overwrites the right hand side barline with a Normal barline.
Join Bars plug-in works properly once more when creating special barlines.
Compatibility:
It’s important to be aware of the latest system requirements for the Sibelius products and this release contains the following changes:
Full support for macOS 10.14 Mojave
Sibelius will no longer run on Mac OS X Mavericks
Performance:
On the whole, Sibelius is now faster than ever before. You should notice this when dragging around the score, performing edits to multiple text objects, adding slurs and articulations across several systems, and making changes at the end of large scores – all of which are vastly improved.
If you’ve made it this far down the list of improvements in this build, I’m impressed – thanks for sticking with it! This release has been a long time coming, and we’re really proud of how much has been achieved. Upgrading architecture is no mean feat, and much of the original implementation of Qt has been refactored or rewritten to bring the improved support for accessibility, high-DPI screens and so on.

New in Sibelius 2018.6 (Jul 19, 2018)

Sibelius – A New Single Installer:
We now have a single application called “Sibelius” that will run with the features based on the license you have activated. In the past, we’ve had separate applications for all the different flavours of Sibelius that would run with different features based on the version you had installed.
BUG FIXES:
Empty text boxes no longer remain after removing multiple items of text with undo
Multiple cursors are now displayed when entering expression and technique text across multiple staves
Keyboard focus is now brought back to a text object after changing the size of it in Text > Format > Size
As well as several improvements to grace notes, Sibelius will now retain the spacing correctly when copy and pasting passages. This saves the extra step to reset the note spacing.
When the Quick Start is disabled, the blank score that is automatically created used Version 2 voice spacing instead of Version 3
Several rare problems entering lyrics and chord symbols have all been resolved. This even included a crash and issues with the Undo queue
A lyrics extender line now no longer reappears after saving and reopening a score. This would only happen if there were empty bars between two lines of music that contained lyrics.
In rare cases, Sibelius would crash when working with text
You can now enter multiple pieces of text or lines using a very short lasso selection
When entering multiple hairpins onto a minim followed by a minim rest, it no longer results in a hairpin under the rest
Deleting the first bar of a score no longer deletes the time signature:
Continuing the improvements from April’s release, where we added the ability to delete the first bar of the score without losing your Title page and other blank pages, title, composer and other text etc.. In today’s release, the Time Signature is no longer lost. This works in such a way that it retains the Time Signature that was in the first bar of the score, as you would expect, however Sibelius will now check to see if the next bar contains a Time Signature change, and places that in the new ‘bar 1’ after the deletion. For example, if you’re deleting bars 1 to 5, and there’s a Time Signature Change in Bar 6, Sibelius will now display the Time Signature that was in bar 6, rather than retaining the initial Time Signature that was in bar 1. If you’re used to being cautious of deleting bar 1, try it now – it’s really quite liberating!
Further details on this release are available at:
http://www.avidblogs.com/sibelius-2018-6/

New in Sibelius 8.7.2 (Nov 26, 2017)

Key Signatures and Instrument Changes:
This is an area we spent a lot of time on getting right. We’d like to thank our tireless beta testers for their feedback while we worked on improving this area of the program. Many of you will know that entering Instrument Changes would always come with a level of cleanup. Any change in key signature would be too close to the barline, and on the wrong side too. In the part, they would split the multirest and it would take a number of steps to get this right. In addition to this, if a Key Signature change would happen at the same time, you’d get two key signatures appearing at the same time. With Sibelius 8.7.2, this is now all handled for you.
Barlines:
Special barlines, which are accessed from Notations > Common > Barline, each have special properties. In previous versions, they would all split multirests, which was OK if you knew that was going to happen. However, many a Sibelius user has been confused to see a multirest split and not known why. In Sibelius 8.7.2 we have changed the behavior of some of these barlines.
When opening older scores:
Opening older scores in 8.7.2 that contain any of the barlines in the second list above now open with a ‘Split multirest’ above them in each part. This retains the layout of the score, and also gives you a useful visual indicator to show why the multirest is splitting. To snap this back into a single multirest, simply select the split multirest and tap delete.
Sibelius | Cloud Sharing:
Accepting the Terms and Conditions for the first time now knows if you’ve just opened the Dashboard or clicked ‘Share’—if the latter, it no longer just opens the Dashboard but continues to share the score.
When sharing an unsaved score, the “Uploading Score” message only appears after you’ve saved the score.
When extracting parts, the files are now given their own FileID, allowing you to share these independently from the full score.
The Push button is now enabled and disabled more reliably.
Workflow:
Non-magnetic gliss and port lines are now red when they are selected—this matches the colour of non-magnetic slurs.
Text along lines is now horizontal once more. It can still follow the angle of the line when you specify a value to move the text up by a number of spaces (found in Edit Lines > Centered Text).
A long-standing issue, where you’d lose title pages and other blank pages when changing time signature at the beginning of the score, has been fixed.
Using the left/right arrow keys to navigate through the selection no longer causes the selection to skip into another voice when you pass an object in all voices, like a chord symbol, or staff-attached symbol.
In some cases, entering notes into a bar directly after an Instrument Change would add them in the next bar instead. This dates back a really long time but you’ll now find notes go into the bar that you intend them go into.
Adding Split Multirests are now added to the undo queue.
Sibelius would sometimes move the score when performing an undo action. This no longer happens.
UI and Documentation:
When exporting a PDF, the wildcards are now correct in French and German languages.
The Lines section of the Inspector is now localized.
Text is no longer cut off in the Quick Start > Learn tab for all languages except Japanese and Chinese (Mac only).
When importing Ideas, the import button was sometimes cut off—the dialog has been extended to show this button.
Several improvements to the Manuscript plug-in language documentation have been made.
General reliability:
When pasting Lyrics, the Undo/Redo queue no longer gets out of sync. Previously, it was possible to repeat a lyric rather than paste the next one in the clipboard.
Sibelius no longer crashes if you quit while still inputting text (Mac only).
A score that containing $NumPages wildcard, if exported and opened in Sibelius 7.5 will crash—we’ve found this happens due to a bug in Sibelius 7.5-8.5. We fixed this back in March as part of the Sibelius 8.6 and Cloud Publishing engine development (where we found the Cloud Publishing engine would hang on some scores).
Sibelius no longer starts up slowly when “Avid Application Manager Helper” is not running.
As part of our regular monitoring of crash reports that come in, we’ve found several reports where RoboForm would cause a crash due the way Sibelius handles text. We will address this in a future update but the advice for now is to disable RoboForm.
Music XML:
In response to any “Tempo Scale” effect, Sibelius now removes the metronome metric modulation but keeps the text indications. The XML output from Sibelius is now valid, and we’ll look into adding the tempo scale in the future.
Sibelius now opens the newer MusicXML 3.1 files with the .musicxml file extension.
Sibelius on High Sierra:
Sibelius and Sibelius First 8.7.2 is now supported on macOS High Sierra. Although I’m sure earlier versions of Sibelius 8 will likely work, we haven’t tested anything other than the latest versions.
Note on compatibility:
Sibelius will only run when the hard drive is formatted in non-case-sensitive formatting. This is the default, so in general everyone will be safe. If you have purposely reformatted your hard drive to be case sensitive, which you need to have tried quite hard to do, then Sibelius’ playback and other features won’t work well at all.

New in Sibelius 8.7 (Sep 29, 2017)

Sibelius | Cloud Sharing is now available with the new Version 8.7 Sibelius and Sibelius | First software update. Leveraging the power of Sibelius | Cloud Publishing and running on the Avid MediaCentral Platform, this groundbreaking technology enables you to send Sibelius scores to the cloud for rendering that can be displayed in any web browser, posted on social media, and embedded in webpages and blogs, to be viewed by anyone, on any device.
In addition to the new Sibelius | Cloud Sharing features, the Sibelius 8.7 software update also includes a good set of useful improvements, including:
Finding and filtering:
When filtering for articulations in Advanced Filter, the filter now applies to just those you had intended to be selected or deselected
When using Find/Find Next, the notehead type search works correctly
Color function now works when noteheads are selected by pitch using Advanced Filter
Gliss lines and slides:
Slides now work properly in all non-English localizations
The Lines section of the Inspector is now correctly localized
When exporting to previous versions of Sibelius, gliss lines are now positioned in the same place vertically—Magnetic Layout for these lines is switched off to allow them to stay close to notes and not get moved further away
General bug fixes and performance improvements:
Legato passages play back correctly once more
Score redraw is no longer slow to respond with jpegs at the start of a score
Making a change in one bar no longer resets the spacing in a bar on another system
Space after key sig warning is no longer too wide compared to Sibelius 8.3 and earlier
Sibelius no longer crashes after using user batch plug-ins from Edit Plug-ins window
When Sibelius starts for the first time, the Activate button now opens the Account page in Application Manager—this will prompt the user to log in, which will trigger an auto-activation of Sibelius, therefore removing the steps of finding license numbers and entering them in manually—it also ensures that you are logged in already to make the sharing of music go smoothly
In some cases, Sibelius would crash when using sample rates of 96kHz or 192kHz after exporting audio—this no longer happens
The borders around buttons in the Inspector are now easier on the eye
Checking the “Use on single notes” checkbox in Engraving Rules > Ties 2 now persists after closing the Engraving Rules dialog
“Change instrument names at start of system after instrument changes” in Engraving Rules > Instruments now has the correct German translation
Sibelius is now generally more snappy

New in Sibelius 8.6.1 (Jul 21, 2017)

Playback:
Guitar slides from the Keypad now respond to changes in playback, which are set in the Inspector and the Edit Instruments dialog. The choices are Chromatic, White Notes, Black Keys, Continuous or None.
Trills that trigger soundID changes of +trill.half and +trill.whole now play back more reliably
The option to enable MP3 surround encoding has been removed from the Audio Export options
Exporting scores to previous versions of Sibelius:
When exporting to previous versions of Sibelius, gliss lines are, in most cases, now positioned in the same place vertically. Sibelius does this best when exporting to 8.1-8.5 but some shift may occur when exporting to 8.0 and earlier.
Engraving improvements:
Sibelius now positions accidentals correctly when engraving rules set to “prefer top accidental at right”.
Spacing between clef and the first note has been improved. It’s worth noting that scores created in Sibelius 8.4 to 8.6.0 will have had a small amount of extra space allocated to key signatures in some cases. This has now fixed in 8.6.1 but if you’ve manually adjusted the spacing in scores using 8.4-8.6.0, you’ll need to check this spacing for any adverse affects. The change is so small that we expect this has largely gone unnoticed.
The gap after a double barline in an unpitched instrument part can now be reset once more—there’s no need to delete the hidden key signature marking as a workaround.
The positions of Glissandi lines and Slides (LX, RX, LY) are now retained when opening an old score in 8.6. This means scores with Slides that had their ends manually adjusted in a previous version of Sibelius, now appear exactly the same when opened in 8.6.1. However, if old scores have been saved in 8.6, their Slides will continue to be offset. To fix this up, you can filter out all regular ‘Lines’, being careful to deselect any lines in the score that aren’t slides, and reset their position.
General stability:
Sibelius no longer crashes when rapidly creating a new score from the Quick Start.
Revoice Chord Diagram now works as expected once more.
It’s possible once again to be able to delete a user-created Guitar Scale Diagram.
When in note input mode, the color of the mouse pointer is now the same as on keypad.
Sibelius no longer crashes when recording Live Tempo if the playback line is at the end of the score.
Staff size change of a system is no longer lost after deletion and undo action, if it’s not the first system.

New in Sibelius 8.6.0 (Jun 5, 2017)

MAGNETIC GLISSANDI:
Sibelius automatically places your glissandi lines as you enter them into the score, positioning them between the two notes. As you compose, Sibelius automatically updates the positioning of the glissandi lines, saving you the manual steps of positioning the lines on creation, and subsequently when editing the notes too.
When entering Glissandi lines (Gliss, Port, or Wavy) in your score, you will now find these position themselves between the two notes, and will attach themselves to these notes, following the notehead as you move it. This saves you the manual steps to reposition the lines when creating them, and subsequently with editing the notes too.
The method for entering these lines has changed slightly, but it should feel familiar enough to experienced Sibelius users and is straightforward to grasp for new users. To enter the new gliss., port., or wavy lines, select the note with which you would like to start the line, and choose the line from the Lines gallery. Sibelius will draw the line from the note you have selected, to the next note:
You'll see the line is placed between the note you have selected and the next note.
Lines follow the direction of notes as you edit them.
Sibelius automatically provides more space for rhythm dots and accidentals.
Glissandi lines will even slope upwards or downwards between two notes on the same position on a staff to show the direction the gliss is going.
CHANGING THE APPEARANCE:
In Sibelius 8.5, we introduced the new Inspector, which brings relevant settings and features within easy reach and streamlines your workflow in Sibelius. With Sibelius 8.6, we’ve added new features to the Inspector to give you ultimate control over the new glissandi lines. In your score, select a new glissandi line, and open the Inspector (Ctrl+Shift+I/Cmd+Shift+I).
In the Lines section, you now have the following controls:
Slide ends: This allows you to fine-tune the precise position of each end of the gliss line.
Slide style: Changes the type of line from a Glissando, Portamento, Wavy, or a Line.
Slide text: Allows you to toggle the “gliss.” or “port” text that runs along the line.
This will happen automatically when the lines get too short to display the text, but you can override this, which is useful in cases where you need to.
If you wish to place a gliss line freely and independently of a note, you may do so by first deselecting anything you have selected (by pressing Escape) and then adding the line from the Lines menu. Since the line you create this way is not attached to any notes, the Inspector controls that are available for magnetic gliss lines are not available.
CREATING MULTIPLE GLISSANDI LINES AT ONCE:
Creating multiple gliss lines at once is fast and simple to achieve with Sibelius 8.6. In previous versions, you had to add the line manually, and then adjust each one by hand. If you then changed the notes, the line would then need to be manually positioned again. Now it’s really easy.
Select the notes you’d like to add the lines to, go to Lines, and choose the type of line you need.
You can then use the Inspector to toggle the text off.
CUSTOMIZING LINES:
If you need to move the ends of the lines, you can manually reposition them by dragging one using your mouse or selecting it and making fine adjustments using your keyboard. As you make further edits to the notes, the line will retain its relative position to the notehead to which it is attached. This is useful when indicating the gliss should go to a different note in the chord, say, or even when writing passages across a grand staff with cross-staff beaming. Once this has been done, you’ll see the lines move relative to the notes as you edit them. To reset the line’s ends to their default position, select the line and go to Appearance > Design and Position > Reset Position.
Creating your own lines in Sibelius is easy as well. You simply go to Notations > Lines > Edit Lines, and then choose the line you’d like to edit or to create a new line from. In the cases of the Gliss or Port lines, you can change the text that runs along the line, to whatever you need.
Any custom lines that you have created based on gliss lines receive the same treatment from the Inspector allowing you to edit them in the same manner as the ones that Sibelius provides by default.
ADDITIONAL TWEAKS FOR WRITING FOR GUITAR NOTATION:
Slides, up until now, have always been able to play back a continuous slide (that is, if you slid your finger up a fretless guitar), but from Sibelius 8.6, you’ll be able to change the way these play back from the Inspector:
Opening old scores in Sibelius 8.6
Sibelius will open any score from Sibelius v1 all the way through to Sibelius 8. These will open up in exactly the same way as before and will not move or convert any gliss. lines. This is important to retain the same careful layout you’ve spent so much time on. However, adding further glissandi to your score in Sibelius 8.6 will now create the new style of line.
OPENING SCORES FROM 8.6 IN OLDER VERSIONS OF SIBELIUS:
As ever, Sibelius has a way to convert a score into an older version, allowing you to work with someone who hasn’t upgraded to Sibelius 8.6 yet. This is simply done by going to File > Export > Previous Version and choosing the version of Sibelius you need to export to.
When doing this, Sibelius will convert what it can into the equivalent object that was supported by the previous version. In the case of the new glissandi lines, these are all converted into the old style gliss. line and their positions are retained.
NEW MANUSCRIPT SUPPORT FOR MAGNETIC LINES:
In Sibelius’ built-in scripting language, called ManuScript, Line objects now have a new SlideStyleId variable representing the Line style state of the note. This read/write variable lets you attach or detach glissandi as well as other lines to a note.
You can also define and assign additional custom Line styles that are not based on the available default Line styles (see Line styles in the ManuScript Language Guide for more information).
MUSICXML IMPROVEMENTS:
The new Magnetic Glissandi lines feature was borne out of an overall improvement and better support for MusicXML. It’s a long term project that we will chip away at for a while. When we started to work on adding support for importing glissandi lines, we needed a way to position these nicely to notes. As such, we rewrote how these lines are handled, so there is now very minimal cleanup to do after importing MusicXML files.
Here’s a summary for the changes to MusicXML that are included in Sibelius 8.6:Better support for small staves (improvements on support added into Sibelius 8.5)Sibelius now imports page margin values correctly (in previous versions, margins form odd pages were applied onto even pages, and vice versa)Ties are now no longer missing in chords over bar lines, and the direction of ties are respected (over or under)
We’ve also made several improvements to the way MusicXML files are parsed in general. As we all know, not all MusicXML files are created equally, so Sibelius 8.6 is now less prone to crashing or failing in some way when opening malformed MusicXML files.
IMPROVEMENTS TO MANY LONG-STANDING ISSUES:
As well as introducing new features and new ways to work in Sibelius, we are working on some old and hard-to-crack issues to improve Sibelius’ stability and overall performance. Some of these may be small niggling bugs and others will be larger scale issues that may have been getting in the way. Here’s the list of what’s included under the hood in the 8.6 upgrade.
GENERAL:
Sibelius is now over 10% faster starting up
Auto-save now works much more reliably. This is the feature where Sibelius will periodically save a copy of your score. If Sibelius unexpectedly quits, Sibelius will now recover the most recent version of the file, and hopefully won’t have lost too much work. To set how often Sibelius auto-saves, go to File > Preferences > Saving and Exporting.
When opening older scores in Sibelius 8.6, rests in parts are now where you expect them to be positioned
Sibelius no longer crashes when doing ‘Paste as Cue’ followed by ‘Undo’. This only occurred when pasting across different time signatures
When sliding notes from one page to the next, your selection is now followed so it’s clearer to see what’s happening
Annotating when the Inspector the is open is now muchsmoother
Improvements to the licensing engine, which should result in fewer “Error Initializing License Engine” messages
Editing values and navigating fields in the Inspector is now easier
The Inspector now resizes vertically when undocked
MAC:
Characters created with Shift + Option + shortcuts are no longer doubled
When editing text with Shift + Option + Left/Right Arrow no longer deletes the text you’re editing
Editing text in the Backstage (Score Info, dialog boxes etc.) with Shift + Option + Left/Right Arrow no longer deletes text as you do it
Sibelius will no longer hang when attempting to play back to a disconnected audio device
APPLICATION MANAGER:
Application Manager 17.5 is now included with Sibelius, which introduces a new Open button enables you to open Sibelius directly from the Apps tab. The Open button only appears if you have an active Avid Upgrade and Support plan or subscription, and Sibelius is up to date.
The following improvements have also been included:
Application Manager no longer randomly opens a terminal window on Mac
Choosing to restart App Man Helper in the Preferences tab is now nice and quick

New in Sibelius 8.5.0 Build 552 (Dec 3, 2016)

Inspector:
Part of the overall vision we have for the way you work in Sibelius, looks at minimizing features being hidden away in menus and dialogs, and presenting them in a clean and feature-packed Inspector panel. This will allow you to select an object in the score and see all the properties and possibilities for editing that object. Sibelius 8.5 is our first foray into this, by adding the new Staff size options, and we’ve smartened up the Inspector to give it a clean and modern look.
The main area we’ve improved on is the Text section. To help explain and guide the user, there are now useful graphics to indicate the sorts of things you’re capable of doing to any given piece of text. The other sections have been smartened up to align tick boxes, feature labels and controls to give the Inspector the professional look you have come to expect.
The Inspector now also behaves like other panels. You can invoke it from the Home tab, as before, but also from the View > Panels section of the Ribbon.
The Inspector will appear docked on the left of your main Sibelius window. You can pull this off and dock to on the right, or if you prefer, you can leave it floating; useful if you have a second monitor. When undocked, you can resize the Inspector by dragging out the bottom edge. Sibelius will populate the Inspector with features and controls that are only relevant for the item or items you have selected. For example, the Scale % only appears when you have a Chord diagram selected. The contents of the Inspector will sometimes be too tall for it to contain all the controls, so a scrollbar will appear on the right hand side to allow you to find what you need easily. Each section can be collapsed up too, so you can hide controls you aren’t using at that time.
Multiple staff sizes on breaks:
One such example of driving features and workflows to the Inspector is our new Multiple Staff Sizes feature.
The new control of the staff sizes allows you to change individual bars, whole systems of one or more instruments, large passages of music, or entire pages at a time.
Improvements since Sibelius 8.4:
It’s now possible to change Normal staff size to a smaller value then Medium staff size value in Engraving Rules. Smaller staff sizes all decrease so you can no longer get these out of order.
We’ve made dialog appearance improvements to Engraving Rules > Staves with 200% DPI scaling on Windows with high pixel density displays.
Making a change to a staff size in Engraving rules, and then clicking OK (without having unfocused the staff size spin box) now makes the change in your score.
Tuplet brackets and numbers now scale neatly when working with smaller staff sizes.
Instrument changes from unpitched to pitched instruments now create key signatures automatically.
MIDI input works once more after changing from an unpitched to pitched instrument.
Cancelling out of Document Setup now cancels the unit selection you may have made.
On Retina displays, some text fields in several dialogs are no longer too short, for example in the File tab > Score info dialog.
In Sibelius’ Manuscript plug-in language, note.Deselect() deselects entire parent NoteRest when it should just deselect that note.
Further general improvements:
The version number now briefly appears on the splash screen once more as it did previously in 7.5, so you can quickly verify the version of Sibelius you’re launching on startup.
The Save As dialog on macOS now correctly remembers the current file name and last path saved, so that you don’t have to navigate to the correct location every time.
Sibelius no longer hangs or crashes in rare cases when clicking ‘Music Fonts’ in Edit Symbols.
The Inspector and Timeline panel sizes and positions are now saved along with the other panels. See File > Preferences > Files in the “Windows Sizes and Positions” section. This means that it is now possible to hide the timeline by default just like you can with other panels, which has been a longstanding request since it appeared in Sibelius 7.5.0.
A problem has been fixed where some keyboard shortcuts didn’t work correctly on macOS Sierra.
Sibelius Sounds and Sibelius | First Sounds now correctly install on macOS Sierra.
Application Manager 2.5.11 is now included in the Sibelius and First 8.5 installers.

New in Sibelius 8.3.0 Build 62 (May 5, 2016)

Colorful notes:
We’ve added the ability to color notes independently in a chord. In earlier versions of Sibelius, the color applied to any note would affect the whole chord, but with Sibelius 8.3, the notes can be colored independently. This feature is useful not only for educators to help students learn music in more vibrant and engaging ways, but it’s just as useful in contemporary scores or even for simply marking up a score for editing.
We’ve updated the ManuScript Plug-in language in Sibelius (the built-in scripting language for automating tasks in Sibelius) to take advantage of the new coloring features. As part of this, the Color Pitches and BoomWhacker plug-ins that ship with Sibelius have been updated to use these new methods as well.
These changes have been added without any change to the file format version, so you can can open files saved in Sibelius 8.3, in 8.2 and 8.1. However, when opening scores in 8.2 and earlier, the colors you have applied to notes will be stripped out as those older versions won’t know how to handle the new coloring attributes.
Improvements to Note sliding:
In Sibelius 8.2, we introduced an innovative feature to allow you to move notes left and right in the score with two simple keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Alt+Left and Right, and Cmd+Alt+Left and Right). This handy little feature speeds up editing and note entry and saves valuable time where preparing a score. With Sibelius 8.3, rests that are cerated and left behind by moving notes, are now cleaned up nicely, so you aren’t left with a trail of rests.
Miscellaneous improvements:
To track down the problems some users have reported with scrolling and zooming on Macs when using a Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad or a trackpad on a MacBook or MacBookPro, we’ve given the feature an overhaul to resolve these issues. As a result, you should find scrolling and zooming on Mac smoother and generally more responsive. Gestures with three-fingers are now better supported, allowing you to switch windows more easily, for example.
A problem where Sibelius 8.2.0 could crash on quit after first launch on a clean system has been fixed
Start and end repeat barlines would sometimes appear too thick when written together. These are now lined up correctly as before.
Some users reported a problem where note input would stop working when switching scores. This has been fixed.
The Sibelius License Server is now supported on Mac OS 10.11 El Capitan
When using Reset Design in the score, it no longer affects accidentals in the part. This is a change in behavior from Sibelius 8.2 where resetting the design on a note or larger selection would reset the accidental in the parts too.

New in Sibelius 8.1.0 Build 91 (Jan 22, 2016)

Sibelius 8.1 introduces several of the customer community’s top requests from IdeaScale, demonstrating Avid’s commitment to listening to the needs of customers. The release aims to enable musicians, composers, arrangers and engravers to create beautiful, accurate, easy-to-read scores more effortlessly than ever. Sibelius 8.1 also includes stability improvements.
INTELLIGENT RESTS – ENHANCED MAGNETIC LAYOUT:
Inserting rests into your music just got a whole lot easier. Now any time a rest is created, the newly enhanced Magnetic Layout tool automatically re-positions the rest to align optimally with the phrasing of your surrounding notes. Rests in multi-voice staves also automatically re-position to avoid collisions. Not only does this eliminate having to manually fix note and rest bump-ups, it makes your score much easier to read. Check out the before and after examples below. This is the first time any application has built-in algorithms to avoid rest collisions and support for intelligent positioning of rests.
GET PERFECT REPEATED ENDINGS:
If you’ve ever written music with first, second, and third time bars, you may have spent some time fixing lines that Sibelius created a bit too long. That’s not the case anymore. With the layout improvements, you can now create multiple time ending bars that appear and play back just the way you expect them to.
SHARE YOUR MUSIC MORE EASILY—MP3 EXPORT:
Want to let your client, colleague, or friends hear your latest composition? You now have the option of exporting your score as an MP3 audio file, making it faster and easier to send your music through email or over Skype, or even posting it across all of your social network channels. Not only do you have control over the bit rate and sample rate, Sibelius will automatically generate ID3 tags from your Score Info dialog.
ADDITIONAL IMPROVEMENTS:
Rests avoid notes in other voices:
Rests now intelligently avoid notes when writing in multiple voices, and group with each other in a beam-group and/or bar. This feature includes new options in Engraving Rules to allow you to choose how rests are moved and grouped together. These options are on in all new scores and off when opening older scores. To find these new settings, have a look in the new Rests section of Engraving Rules.
MP3 Export:
Sibelius 8.1 adds the ability to export directly to MP3, removing the need to convert exported audio in another application. As you may know, there are licensing costs when converting to MP3, which we are covering for you.
Nth time ending lines:
First, second and third time ending lines are now placed correctly by default.
Fixes to pinch/stretch and scroll using the trackpad on Mac:
We've made further improvements to the way two-finger scrolling and pinch zoom are handled on Mac trackpads. In particular, users of Sibelius 8.0.1 will be aware that scrolling on a Mac was troublesome. This is now vastly improved in Sibelius 8.1.
Official El Capitan support:
Sibelius is now officially supported on Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 and higher.
Google Breakpad:
In the event of a crash, Sibelius now offers to upload a report to our servers which is then collated amongst other reports to help guide our efforts in improving Sibelius' stability. All information sent is anonymous.
Further miscellaneous fixes and improvements:
Sibelius no longer displays an error when using Share > Send using email
Many dialogs now aren't stretched on El Capitan
"This package is incompatible with this version of OS X" no longer appears when attempting to install the licence server on El Capitan
Reduce plug-in now doesn’t degrade to being much slower on subsequent uses
A problem where Sibelius would leak file handles is fixed
Spaces were missing from the German tutorials
Keypad button highlight logic now behaves properly after using the Transformation plug-ins
We've added a new "add11" chord to the Chords library
All characters in the news feed now display correctly
Sibelius 8.1 also includes several fixes to the most common crashes, which include:
generating thumbnail score previews in the Quick Start
'RTTI access violation error' after closing a score, when the Quick Start is disabled
crash when quitting Sibelius on El Capitan (mainly fixed by Apple in 10.11.2 and later)
using the Explode plug-in in conjunction with Undo operations
when adjusting the color parameters of graphics

New in Sibelius 7.5.1 Build 209 (Jul 7, 2014)

Highlights:
Sibelius 7.5 Reference and What’s New Guide have been fully translated into all 9 languages
Audio and video export now occurs faster than real-time
It’s now possible to have both Sibelius 7 and Sibelius 7.5 activated on the same computer (within the terms of the license)
Better support for high resolution displays on Windows; specifically, the QuickStart now displays properly
An old problem going back several versions of Sibelius has been fixed where Sibelius would crash after the computer was woken from sleep
A problem where the breath mark “comma” produces staccato playback has been fixed
Sibelius and the Sibelius License Server will now run correctly once more on Mac OS 10.6 and 10.7
Resolved a crash that could happen if a score has more than 128 instruments
We’ve fixed a problem where some Rhythmic feels may have been missing from the Performance dialog
Sibelius 7.5 no longer crashes if using a ‘Jump to’ and ‘Marker’ repeat structure
Mordents and Inverted Mordents now play back correctly
Ties now play back correctly again when using Repeat Bars
Preferences stored by plugins are now correctly saved
Video export and sharing to Facebook and YouTube have been improved
Playback line is no longer a beat behind (this accuracy varies depending on your playback device)
Problems posting to Facebook have been resolved
The tempo in the score is correctly reflected in the video
Further fixes to make the connection with Sibelius and Pro Tools more reliable when using ReWire
It’s possible, once again, to install Sibelius silently on Windows.
Timeline:
Long instrument names are now clipped to show more of the Timeline
Focus on Staves is now reflected in the Timeline
More musical symbols are displayed in the lanes (Repeats and Metric Modulations, for example)
Text and symbols are displayed on more appropriate lanes
It’s now possible to click+drag around the Timeline to navigate the score, similar to how the Navigator works
Hidden objects are now reflected in the Timeline and honor the option in View > Invisibles > Hidden Objects
F# Minor now shows as F# Minor on the Key Signatures lane
Comments are now shown in the Timeline with the same color they appear in the score
Various performance optimizations
Accessibility:
We’ve improved the way objects, menus and dialogs in Sibelius are read by screen readers, specifically when using NVDA on Windows. We also have some brand new plug-ins for Sibelius 7.5.1 that aid navigation of staff and system objects in the score. Many thanks to Kevin Gibbs, Gordon Kent and Bob Zawalich for their assistance. These plug-ins and supporting documentation for the improvements will be published soon.

New in Sibelius 7.5.0 Build 155 (Apr 16, 2014)

Unrivaled expressiveness and feel:
With the unique and fully redesigned Espressivo 2.0 feature, Sibelius 7.5 gives you complete control over and customization of the rhythmic feel of any individual part to produce more expressive and realistic musical phrasings. And because the software can now better interpret such notation distinctions as tempo markings, metric emphasis, grace notes, mordents, caesuras, and breath marks on playback, you can hear every nuance of your score—the way you intended it to be heard.
Accelerated navigation:
With the new Timeline window, you get a quick view of the entire structure of your score—no matter how large or complex—enabling you to navigate to any part fast for editing or playback. Simply click on any bar, in the timecode ruler, or on any landmark—the important objects that make up your score, including rehearsal marks, repeat structures, comments, key signatures, tempo, and more—to jump immediately to that section.
Easy collaboration and sharing:
Get all of the score sharing and social media features of Sibelius First in Sibelius 7.5, enabling you to collaborate more easily with others and distribute your compositions for the world to hear. Share scores through email, upload and publish them as sheet music on ScoreExchange.com, and even share your composition as a video or audio file on YouTube, Facebook, and SoundCloud.
Export video of your composition:
Save a video file of your score to share your work with others on a DVD or online. Sibelius can export in a variety of resolutions—up to 1080p—in QuickTime format (.mov) on Mac or Windows Media Video (.wmv) on Windows, enabling others to see and hear your work without requiring Sibelius.
Full Scorch app integration:
Export Sibelius scores directly to Avid Scorch on your iPad (available on iTunes) for fully interactive playback, practice, performance, and publishing. Sibelius automatically optimizes your score for iPad display, paying special consideration to page orientation, number of staves, margin sizes, and more.
Localized for Brazil and Russia:
If Brazilian Portuguese or Russian is your native tongue, Sibelius 7.5 offers new native support for these languages in addition to English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.

New in Sibelius 7.1.3 Build 77 (Sep 28, 2012)

Platform support:
Sibelius 7.1.3 is supported on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Sibelius now has initial support the Retina Display found on the latest models of the Apple MacBook Pro. The score, all text in dialogs etc. are all drawn at the appropriate resolution for the Retina Display. All graphics on the ribbon, in Backstage (i.e. the File tab), and in the Quick Start window are also now also drawn at double the resolution for optimal appearance on the Retina Display. Only the Keypad, Mixer, Fretboard, Keyboard and Ideas windows do not currently support the Retina Display (though the small text on the Mixer is much clearer on the Retina Display).
Sibelius is now signed with an Apple Developer Certificate, which satisfies the requirement of the Gatekeeper system, under Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, that all applications must be signed with an Apple-approved certificate.
Sibelius’s installer is now also signed with an Apple Developer Certificate.
Look and feel:
Both the System ID and Activation ID of your copy of Sibelius are now displayed directly on the File > Help Backstage page, so you do not need to launch Avid License Control to find these important pieces of information.
Stability improvements:
Sibelius no longer crashes if you quit the application when Use virtual instruments and effects is switched off in Audio Engine Options, accessed via Playback Devices.
Sibelius no longer crashes when exporting a MusicXML file when it encounters an explicit normal barline in the score.
Sibelius no longer crashes if you attempt to show the Inspector when no document is open.
Sibelius no longer crashes if you attempt to open another score when Sibelius is running in full screen mode and an empty document window is shown (Mac only).
Sibelius no longer crashes if you create any non-note object (e.g. a clef change, special barline etc.) at the end of the bar while using Note Input > Note Input > Re-input Pitches and then attempt to continue inputting notes.
Sibelius no longer crashes when you attempt to open a score from the blank document that appears when the Quick Start window is not shown at start-up (Windows only).
Sibelius no longer crashes after extended periods of use in which a lot of text objects (e.g. lyrics or chord symbols) are edited (Windows only).
Sibelius no longer crashes if you delete all the staves from the score when the note input caret is visible.
Sibelius no longer crashes or hangs when using the Get Score feature in File > Teaching > Classroom Control.
Clicking very close to the flashing cursor when the text editor is open in order to close the text editor no longer causes a crash.
Various other stability improvements.
Quick Start:
Keyboard navigation in the Quick Start window has been improved, especially on the Recent and New Score pages. You can now type Ctrl+F (Windows) or Command-F (Mac) to move the focus into the search box, then hit Tab to move the focus into the thumbnails pane, move around the pane with Tab and Shift-Tab, select the score with Space (to show the more information pane at the bottom of the thumbnails pane), and open the score with Return.
The Quick Start window is now correctly closed if it is shown when you open a score via the operating system (e.g. by double-clicking an icon in Windows Explorer or the Finder), just as it is hidden after you open a score via the Quick Start itself.
The colors used for mouse-over and highlight states for the thumbnails on the New Score and Recent pages in the Quick Start have been improved.
Some cosmetic problems with the way the search widget on the New Score and Recent pages is drawn have been fixed (Mac only).
Sibelius now maintains a maximum of 500 recent scores and other documents (except for those pinned in File > Recent, which are maintained in addition to the total of 500 scores), which prevents the performance of the application degrading during start-up and when opening the File > Recent Backstage page.
When Sibelius starts up and the Quick Start is not shown, the blank document that is created now respects the user’s choice of default paper size (as set on the Files page of Preferences).
Printing:
When printing to a PDF printer driver (e.g. Adobe Acrobat), Sibelius now produces PDF files with correctly embedded fonts, rather than rendering all glyphs as paths in the resulting PDF (Windows only).
A problem whereby the previously chosen printer was not always correctly restored when returning to the File > Print page during a Sibelius session has been fixed.
Sibelius no longer crashes when attempting to print to certain HP printers (Windows only).
Playback:
Playback of attached video and audio files (via Play > Video > Add Video) is now synchronized much more accurately (Mac only). For optimal results, use uncompressed audio (e.g. AIFF or WAV rather than MP3) or video, since this allows the time position in the attached file to be returned and set with much greater accuracy.
Editing the mapping of an unpitched percussion staff type now correctly invalidates the playback routing, so that the percussion staff plays back correctly once you finish editing the staff type and return to the score.
Setting a manual repeat sequence in Play > Interpretation > Repeats no longer causes the bar numbering in the score to go wrong if Count repeats on the Bar Numbers page of Engraving Rules is switched off.
It is once again possible to type into the Wordbuilder text editor in the EastWest Play virtual instrument (64-bit, Mac only).
Exporting audio:
Audio files exported from Sibelius no longer insert one beat’s worth of silence at the start of the file before the first note is played.
Exporting MusicXML files:
A problem whereby notes could have incorrect default-x values if the bar to which they belong contain a change of time or key signature has been fixed.
The export of chord symbols has been overhauled, and a wider range of the chord types understood by Sibelius are now exported in MusicXML. (Note that if you import such extended chord types into Finale, the resulting chord symbols in Finale may be considerably more verbose than the chord symbols in Sibelius, due to the way Finale represents these extended chord types.)
Hidden bar rests are now exported in MusicXML files.
Exporting PDF files:
A problem whereby a slur that crosses a page break may incorrectly change direction on the second page when printing or exporting a PDF has been fixed.
When choosing All parts only (separate files) in File > Export > PDF, the full score is no longer incorrectly also exported.
Exporting a PDF file from a score that uses a raster font will no longer crash (Windows only).
Keyboard shortcuts:
A problem whereby a keyboard shortcut assigned to the Chord symbols text style would stop working after the right-click context menu is invoked has been fixed.
Several duplicate key tips in the French- and German-language versions of Sibelius have been resolved.
Music fonts:
A problem whereby the upbow articulation in the Inkpen2 font would appear a long distance to the left of the note on which it is supposed to appear has been fixed (Windows only).
Lyrics:
Hyphens are now once more correctly centered between syllables, rather than being offset very slightly to the right.
House styles:
Importing a house style no longer causes the options on the View tab (in the Invisibles, Rulers and Note Colors groups) to change unexpectedly.
Panorama:
When editing a score in Panorama that uses Hide Empty Staves in the normal page view, the score no longer moves vertically unexpectedly.
Slurs:
The controls for Scale slur height, Minimum shoulder and Maximum shoulder on the Slurs page of Appearance > House Style > Engraving Rules now correctly accept values between 0% and 200%, rather than incorrectly being limited to a maximum of 100%.
Wildcards:
New \$NumPages\ wildcard, which shows an estimate (correct more often than not!) of the total number of pages in the score, useful for creating text such as “Page x of y”. Because pagination of Sibelius scores is dynamic, the total number of pages in the score may appear to change from time to time as you work on your score. Don’t be alarmed: when you print your score, or export a PDF, the total page count will always be correct.
Plug-ins:
Note Input > Transformations > Halve Note Values and Double Note Values now work correctly when run from a dynamic part.
Home > Bars > Split and Join now work correctly when run from a dynamic part.
ManuScript language:
New note.IsAccidentalVisible read-only variable for ManuScript, allowing a plug-in to determine whether or not an accidental explicitly appears next to a given note in the score.
New methods and variables for BarObject objects that allow you to specify whether a given object is set to play back on a particular pass through the score, when the score has a repeat structure.
New variables for the Score object that provide access to the order in which bars are played back in scores with repeats.
A problem whereby manipulating individual notes in a chord could cause the index of the note to get out of step, and appear to return properties belonging to a different note of the chord, has been fixed.
New methods for hiding and showing empty staves.
The Score.OptimizeStaffSpacing() method now works correctly in the full score and dynamic parts alike, and can also be called with no parameters to apply to the whole score.
It is now possible to suppress the default text that Sibelius passes to screen reading software for visually impaired users, in order to provide alternative text (Windows only).
New Sibelius.LaunchApplication() method that makes it possible to launch an external application (and pass in arguments) from ManuScript.
Activating Sibelius:
If Sibelius finds that the location in which it needs to store information relating to the program’s activation is not writeable (which commonly occurs after using the Migration Assistant to copy programs and settings from one Mac to another, for example), Sibelius attempts to fix the permissions on the required location automatically, and if it fails will display an informative message (rather than Unspecified Error 1 as in Sibelius 7.1.2).
Auto Breaks:
In Layout > Breaks > Auto Breaks, the value of System must be n% full under Use auto system breaks is now set and restored correctly.

New in Sibelius 7.1.2 Build 46 (Apr 11, 2012)

Platform support:
Sibelius 7.1.2 now runs on Windows XP SP3 (32-bit only). Windows XP is unable to fully support all of Sibelius 7’s features, so you will not experience DirectWrite text measurement and drawing or multi-core CPU support for playback, and the Quick Access Toolbar will appear between the document title bar and the ribbon tabs, rather than embedded in the title bar. You are also recommended not to use the full Sibelius 7 Sounds library on a 32-bit system, though Sibelius 7.1.2 is Large Address Aware (LAA) and can use up to 3GB RAM if available.
Performance:
Sibelius’s redraw speed has been improved substantially. When working at a low zoom level or on a large display, so a lot of music is in view, redraw time is on average around three times as fast as in Sibelius 7.1.
Note input and editing in normal (page) view is now up to twice as fast as in Sibelius 7.1, and input and editing in Panorama is now up to 40% faster than in Sibelius 7.1. This optimization has been achieved by improved caching of text objects.
Inputting and editing text is now considerably faster than in Sibelius 7.1 (Mac only).
The speed at which Sibelius opens new windows has been improved by around 40%. This is particularly noticeable when extracting parts and choosing to open the parts in new windows as they are extracted.
Stability:
Sibelius no longer crashes when you type : (the shortcut to turn an existing note into a grace note) in a score containing no staves.
Sibelius no longer crashes if you type a key on the numeric keypad when the Quick Start window has the focus.
Sibelius no longer crashes if you quit the application while it is still generating thumbnails for the New Score and Recent pages of the Quick Start window.
Sibelius no longer crashes if you click on the score to clear the selection immediately after running the Export Selection as Audio plug-in.
Under some circumstances, Sibelius could crash when generating the thumbnail images for the New Score and Recent pages of the Quick Start window. This has now been fixed.
The Quick Look and Spotlight importers supplied with Sibelius have been improved and no longer crash on many scores.
Look and feel:
It is now possible to close the last tab in the last document window and leave the empty window behind, so that Sibelius does not either return to the Quick Start window (if Show Quick Start again after closing last score is switched on) or exit Sibelius completely (on Windows). You can close the last tab by clicking the close button on the tab itself, or choosing File > Close, or using the shortcut Ctrl+W or Command-W. Once you have the empty window visible, you can choose File > Recent to open a recent score, or File > Open to open any other score. Note that, on Windows, unless you have set the Quick Start window to reappear after the last score is closed, once you close this last empty window, Sibelius will quit (just as other ribbon-based SDI applications, such as Microsoft Word, do).
Document tabs (e.g. containing the full score or a dynamic part) can now be moved to a new window by tearing them off the existing window: simply click on a tab and drag it off the window in any direction: when you see a Sibelius icon appear under a grabber hand mouse cursor, you can release the mouse button to create a new window with the contents of that tab.
Document tabs can be re-ordered by clicking and dragging them left and right in the tab bar. The order of tabs is remembered when you re-open the score.
Sibelius now respects the locale settings on your computer for the display and entry of floating-point numeric values, i.e. numbers expressed to one or more decimal places. Sibelius now expects you to use the appropriate decimal mark for your locale, e.g. , in most European languages, in numeric controls in dialogs throughout the program.
Dialogs throughout Sibelius now once again include mnemonics, i.e. Alt+letter shortcuts that allow you to select specific controls via the keyboard (Windows only).
Quick Start:
Scores that were last opened more than a month ago now correctly appear in the Older category on the Recent page of Quick Start.
The ranges of times and dates used to populate the Today, Yesterday, This Week, This Month etc. categories are now updated every hour, so if you leave Sibelius running overnight, scores on the Recent page of Quick Start should appear in the appropriate category.
Items in the system menu bar that do not work when the Quick Start window is the foreground window have been disabled (Mac only).
The search box in the top right-hand corner of the Recent and New Score pages of the Quick Start window can now correctly handle multiple word search terms.
Checking or unchecking Show Quick Start again after closing last score on the Other page of Preferences now correctly updates the corresponding checkbox in the Quick Start window itself, and vice versa.
Creating a new score via the New Score page of the Quick Start with a pick-up bar or metronome mark will no longer cause the next score you create via the Quick Start to also have a pick-up bar or metronome mark, even if none is chosen.
Printing:
New Full score and Parts checkboxes have been added at the top of the File > Print page, to make it easier to choose whether to print either the full score or the parts, or both together.
The list of parts at the top of File > Print now shrinks vertically if there are fewer than 10 parts in the score, to minimize the amount of space the list takes up.
The handling of page ranges has been improved, including the ability to specify a range of pages as e.g. 10-1, which will now print those pages in reverse order. Furthermore, comma-separated ranges of pages can now be printed collated if desired (previously they were always printed uncollated, even if the option to print collated was chosen).
When using PDF > Save as PostScript in the native Mac Print dialog, the resulting PostScript file is now PS Level 3 and hence correctly sets the page size (instead of always assuming Letter size).
When using PDF > Save as PDF in the native Mac Print dialog, the resulting PDF is no longer offset horizontally and vertically.
Articulations:
A problem whereby articulations that had been flipped in scores saved in Sibelius 5 or earlier would appear unflipped when opening them in Sibelius 6 or later has been fixed.
Under some circumstances, the presence of an articulation under a slur no longer causes the slur to flip when using the Position slurs on mixed stem notes above the notes option.
Note input:
New Left arrow in note input hides caret and selects previous note option on the Note Input page of Preferences, switched on by default. Switch this option off to restore the behavior of the left arrow key during note input from Sibelius 6 and earlier, namely that the note input caret should be hidden, but the selected note should not change.
When the Specify pitch before duration option is chosen on the Note Input page of Preferences is chosen, playing the MIDI keyboard with nothing selected no longer causes the note input caret to appear incorrectly.
It is no longer possible to switch QWERTY mode on or off when the Keyboard window is visible.
Using MIDI thru to audition sounds using a MIDI keyboard (i.e. with no selection in the score) no longer causes redundant program and bank change messages to be sent before each note is echoed back.
Using MIDI thru no longer causes an extra bar to be created at the end of the score if the final bar of the score contains notes.
When entering music in guitar tab in the last bar of the score, new bars are no longer created before the current final bar rather than after the final bar.
Playback:
New Release device when Sibelius is in the background option in the Audio Engine Options dialog (accessed via Playback Devices, which is opened using the dialog launcher button in the Play > Setup group on the ribbon). When this option is switched on, Sibelius will release the audio device when the application is minimized or another application is brought into focus, unless Sibelius is playing back at the time. Additionally, Sibelius now correctly suspends the audio interface when your computer goes to sleep, and resumes it when your computer wakes up (Windows only).
The appearance of the progress indicator in the status bar that appears while Sibelius Player is loading sounds has been improved.
The Re-use already loaded sounds option on the Playback page of Preferences now works correctly, minimizing the amount of time taken to load and re-load sounds when switching between open scores.
Support for WASAPI audio interfaces has been improved, which improves compatibility with soundcards from manufacturers including RME and Creative Labs (Windows only).
Adjusting the tempo slider in the Transport window no longer causes VST synchronization information to drift away from the current playback tempo.
Playback is now steadier when using a large buffer size (in Audio Engine Options) and adjusting tempo with the tempo slider in the Transport window (Windows only).
Running Sibelius for the first time on a clean system now correctly scans and loads VST virtual instruments and effects (Mac only).
When using a manual sound set that defines unpitched percussion patches, Sibelius now correctly prioritizes the drum maps in the sound set used by the manual sound set, and will allocate the channel in the manual sound set to staves in the score correctly.
The start-up sound now plays correctly once more, if enabled (Windows only).
Audio Units that use Cocoa windows no longer sometimes display in windows that are too small for their user interfaces (Mac only).
A repeat bar that contains a sound ID change caused by a notehead (e.g. a cross notehead) no longer has the sound ID change applied again on each repeat (e.g. causing the volume of cross noteheads to be reduced in each repeat).
When using a repeat bar to repeat e.g. a sequence of staccato notes, Sibelius will now correctly use a staccato sound if one is available, and not both play the staccato sound and also reduce the duration of the notes (i.e. what it would do if no staccato sound were available).
Further improvements to the playback of variant sounds when using e.g. staccato on two identical instruments where variant sounds are available.
Grace notes now play back correctly in repeat bars once more.
ReWire:
Sibelius can now connect to 64-bit ReWire hosts, e.g. Cubase 6.5, Sonar X1 Extended, etc.
Text:
It is now possible to specify the default horizontal alignment of a text style independently of the default horizontal alignment of the text object itself, e.g. to create a right-aligned text object within which the text itself is center-aligned by default. The new option is found on the Horizontal Posn tab of the Edit Text Style dialog.
Any font substitutions you specify in the Missing Fonts dialog will now be remembered and automatically chosen for you the next time the Missing Fonts dialog appears, so it is only necessary to set up a given substitution once. If you subsequently choose not to show the Missing Fonts dialog again, your saved substitutions are applied automatically.
Changing the size of part of a text object that contains changes of character style (e.g. use of the music text font) no longer causes the font to be reset incorrectly.
Hitting Return in a text object and then hitting Backspace to remove the new line no longer requires two hits of Backspace.
If the Tablature letters or Tablature numbers text styles are set to use an extended style (e.g. Condensed, Semibold), the tab letters and numbers now draw in the correct style (Mac only).
Sibelius can once more correctly synthesize italic, bold or bold italic versions of fonts that do not provide real italic, bold or bold italic styles (e.g. Inkpen2 Script, or Tahoma on Mac). Such text also no longer sometimes appears double italicized in exported PDF files.
Glyphs stretched by way of character scaling now export to PDF correctly stretched.
Using the Backspace key to delete a range of text that extends from the start of the text object now works correctly.
Right-to-left text (e.g. Hebrew) no longer prints reversed (Windows only).
Selecting some text and then dragging it with the mouse, or pasting text into an existing text object, no longer incorrectly changes the alignment of the text.
The text editor now resizes correctly when editing right-aligned text.
When editing text, the text editor now once more correctly opens at the Magnetic Layout position of the text object, not its original position.
Changes made to the font substitutions on the Font Equivalents page of Preferences now once more take effect as soon as the Preferences dialog is confirmed, rather than requiring you to restart Sibelius.
Music fonts:
It is once again possible to use third-party fonts, e.g. Jazz, Maestro, etc., with Sibelius.
Parts:
A bug whereby the margins in parts could change incorrectly when opening scores created in Sibelius 4 in later versions of Sibelius has been fixed.
MusicXML export:
Sibelius now exports MusicXML 3.0 files, and supports the new features for describing instrument sounds, virtual instruments, and changes in playing technique.
Atonal/open key key signatures are no longer incorrectly exported as C major key signatures in MusicXML files.
Whole notes (semibreves) and longer notes that don’t have stems no longer incorrectly export stem direction in MusicXML files.
Repeat barlines now correctly export the bar-style element for a more complete description of their appearance.
Transposing instruments are now always exported at written pitch rather than sounding pitch.
The voice numbers used in multi-staff parts are now unique, thus fixing problems whereby voice numbers could clash in passages using cross-staff beaming.
Beam groups and tremolos are now more accurately exported in MusicXML files.
Tied notes that cross barlines are now exported correctly in MusicXML files.
System objects (e.g. rehearsal marks, tempo text, etc.) now export at all the selected system object positions, rather than only above the top staff.
The vertical placement of tuplet brackets is now more accurately described in exported MusicXML files.
The position of text in exported MusicXML files is no longer incorrectly specified according to the left-hand edge of the page.
Sibelius now validates against the MusicXML 3.0 schema (Windows) and DTDs (Mac).
Metronome marks are no longer incorrectly exported as two pieces of text.
Stem lengths are now exported in MusicXML files.
Additive time signatures (e.g. 3+2+2/8) are now exported correctly in MusicXML files.
If a score uses huge or large time signatures, these are now exported in MusicXML files (though the exact staves above or on which the time signatures appear are not exported).
Special barlines that occur in the middle of a bar (e.g. repeat barlines) are now correctly exported in MusicXML files.
MusicXML import:
The handling of gaps between staves and systems in imported MusicXML files has been improved: Sibelius will now correctly use the distances specified in the Defaults element at the start of the file if there is no distance specified for a given staff or system.
Sibelius now attempts to import notes in MusicXML files that do not have the Type element set correctly.
The handling of system and page breaks in imported MusicXML files has been improved: Sibelius will now force all of the bars between two breaks onto the same system, which ensures the layout is the same as specified in the MusicXML file.
Sibelius now imports page margins in MusicXML files more accurately, in particular no longer causing the left-hand page margin to often be much larger than specified in the MusicXML file.
A problem whereby Sibelius could incorrectly insert a system break at the end of the first bar in an imported MusicXML file has been fixed.
Plug-ins:
A problem where by Sibelius was unable to download the list of available plug-ins for the Install Plug-ins dialog has been fixed (Mac only).
ManuScript language:
Plug-ins that operated incorrectly on non-English systems in Sibelius 7.1 now work correctly once more.
New SoundInfo object, which allows plug-ins to access information about the sound ID (requested and actual), patch name and sound set of a given note at any point in the score.
New Sibelius.SetFocusToControl() method to explicitly set the focus to a given dialog control.
New Sibelius.CloseDialog() method to programmatically close a plug-in dialog.
New Sibelius.ShowTraceWindow() method to show the Plug-in Trace Window and force it in front of other windows.
New Sibelius.NoteSpacingRule object, corresponding to the values in the Note Spacing Rule dialog, making it possible for plug-ins to adjust note spacing.
New Sibelius.FontFamilies variable, returning a list of the fonts installed on the system, and Sibelius.IsFontFamilyInstalled() method to check whether a given font is installed.
List boxes in ManuScript plug-in dialogs can now optionally support multiple selections, returning the selected items as an array of strings.
The Plug-in Trace Window now has its own button on the Windows taskbar so that you can switch to it by clicking its button on the taskbar. You can also switch to the Plug-in Trace Window on Mac using the Command-~ shortcut to cycle between windows belonging to Sibelius.
The Plug-in Trace Window now opens towards the top left-hand corner of the screen when it is shown for the first time during a session, and remembers its size and position throughout the session.
The Plug-in Trace Window now correctly scrolls as new lines are added, so that the most recently-added line is always in view.
Other improvements:
View > Panels > Hide All no longer has any effect on the Inspector.
Clicking the button part of Home > Editing > Color now correctly shows the color picker if no color has already been chosen.
The previously missing option Swap 3 and 4 has been added to the Note Input > Voices > Swap menu.
The default file type in File > Open or via the Open Other button in the Quick Start window is now All music files.
Changing the numeric values in the table in the Edit Arrange Style dialog (e.g. for Max. voices etc.) now works correctly once more.
It is once again possible to change the value of Live Playback velocities by clicking and dragging in a sweep beyond the first page of the score.
It is now possible to resize a Sibelius score window by dragging the bottom left- or right-hand corners once more (Windows only).
Opening files (e.g. MusicXML files) from paths containing accented characters now works reliably.
After installing Sibelius 7 for the first time, the operating system will now pick up the new Spotlight importer immediately, rather than continuing to use the Spotlight importer from Sibelius 6 or earlier, if it is installed (Mac only).
The tool tips for items in the Recent Places list on the File > Recent page no longer show the final folder in the path twice.
Dots in guitar chord diagrams can now correctly show two characters once more, instead of only one.
Importing an SVG graphic to the score via Notations > Graphics > Graphic no longer causes Sibelius to crash.
Hitting the menu key on a Windows keyboard, or typing Shift+F10, to show the context menu now always works reliably (Windows only).
Tree view controls (e.g. in Home > Instruments > Add or Remove) now show tool tips when appropriate.
Using the Find box in Home > Instruments > Add or Remove or Change now works correctly when running the Japanese-language version of Sibelius.
The way in which Sibelius detects the presence of an appropriate PDF reader in order to open its on-screen documentation has been improved. If Sibelius is unable to find a suitable PDF reader using the Windows Registry, it will show the standard Windows dialog for associating PDF files with a program that can open them (Windows only).
The names of symbol categories in the Edit Symbols dialog (opened via the dialog launcher in the corner of the Notations > Symbols group) are now always shown in full, and not truncated.
The rightmost column of symbols in the Edit Symbol dialog is no longer partially covered by the scroll bar.
File > Save As will no longer shown the wrong file extension by default when saving a Sibelius score created by importing e.g. a MIDI file.
Dashed and dotted slurs are no longer sometimes clipped incorrectly when their shape is adjusted by Magnetic Layout.
When clicking on the Sibelius application icon on the Dock, the menu that appears now lists the open document windows, and allows you to switch to an open window (Mac only).
Dotted and dashed slurs are no longer forced to be clipped at the end of the system even when Clip at end of systems is switched off.
The Command-. (period) shortcut for Cancel buttons in dialogs (an alternative to Esc) now works once more (Mac only).
Using the Next Part or Previous Part commands when viewing parts belonging to a version now works correctly.
If the Navigator window was showing when you entered Panorama view, it is now shown correctly again when you leave Panorama.
When installing or uninstalling Sibelius on Windows, the installer will now warn you if Sibelius is already running and ask you to quit Sibelius before the installer will proceed.
Using Review > Highlight > Highlight to highlight a passage when using Pitch before duration note input now works correctly.
Dynamic parts in scores created by importing MIDI, MusicXML or PhotoScore files now respect the Default Page Size options on the Files page of Preferences, so if you have European page sizes chosen, parts will be created on A4; if you have US page sizes chosen, parts will be created on Letter.
Sibelius no longer incorrectly allows a new document to be opened (e.g. by double-clicking a score in the Finder) if a modal dialog in the application is already open (Mac only).
Further fixes to keyboard handling for non-English keyboards, e.g. shortcuts that use Ctrl+number on Czech keyboard layouts now work correctly.
The Input Method Editor is now always correctly closed when leaving the text editor, so keyboard shortcuts for e.g. note input work correctly at all times (Mac only).
The Ideas panel now correctly retains the selection when switching between the compact and detailed view.
Under some circumstances, it was possible for captured ideas to be lost when saving the score. This has now been fixed.
When exporting PDF graphics via File > Export > Graphics with the Use smallest bounding box option switched on, the resulting PDF is no longer slightly clipped.
Typing a new staff size in the Document Setup dialog and then clicking Cancel without moving the focus to another control no longer results in the staff size changing incorrectly (Mac only).
Using View > Window > Tile Horizontally or Tile Vertically now correctly switches off full screen mode for affected windows.
Several new chord types have been added to the default chord library, e.g. 5add9, 5add2, add9add11, add2add4.
Under some circumstances, Sibelius could crash when opening some PhotoScore .opt files. This no longer occurs.

New in Sibelius 7.1.0 Build 54 (Dec 20, 2011)

Printing:
Sibelius now has improved support for printers with automatic duplex units, i.e. printers that can automatically print on both sides of each sheet of paper. If the chosen printer supports automatic duplexing, a new option is added to the drop-down that includes Print One Sided and Manually Print Both Sides: choose Automatically Print Both Sides to activate automatic duplex support.
Because Sibelius cannot tell the exact capabilities of your printer’s duplex unit, a new Duplex Options dialog has been added, which can be accessed via the link below the choice of printer drop-down in File > Print. In this dialog you can specify whether your printer’s duplexer flips paper on the long or short edge: change these settings if you find that the music printed on the reverse of the paper is upside-down.
Other improvements to printing in Sibelius 7.1 are as follows:
The Duplex Options dialog also includes an option for manual duplexing (i.e. when Manually Print Both Sides is chosen in File > Print) to determine whether the order of pages to be printed on the reverse side of the paper needs to be reversed. Change this option if you find that you get the wrong page printed on the reverse of each sheet when using manual duplexing.
Duplex printing now correctly inserts blank pages as required if the document being printed has an odd number of pages or otherwise requires a blank page to be inserted to prevent the first page of the next copy being printed on the reverse of the last page of the previous copy.
There is no longer a long delay after clicking Print in File > Print and the document spooling to the printer (Mac OS X 10.7 Lion only).
When using the native Mac Print dialog (accessed by clicking Use OS Dialog at the bottom of File > Print), the settings in Sibelius’s File > Print page are now ignored. When the native Mac Print dialog appears, it is as if all pages are set to print a single copy, normally (i.e. not as a booklet, or spreads, or 2-up), uncollated, and at 100% scale with Fit to paper switched off. You can then use the settings in the Mac Print dialog to access all of the settings of your own printer, including those not accessible via Sibelius’s File > Print page (Mac only).
Further improvements to the way the native Mac Print dialog is initialised, if chosen. The page size and orientation shown on the Page Atrributes page of the dialog now matches that chosen in Layout > Document Setup, allowing you to correctly set alternative options on the Paper Handling page of the dialog (Mac only).
The page range edit control in File > Print is now correctly updated when you select a different part from the table view at the top of the page (when opened via Parts > Print > Print All Parts or with a part in the selected tab).
Exporting PDFs:
File > Export > PDF now provides greater flexibility in setting the filenames of the PDFs to be produced, using the same tokens as those that can be used for naming extracted parts (in Parts > Extract > Extract).
New Export full score and all parts (separate files) option in File > Export > PDF.
New Export selection of parts (separate files) option in File > Export > PDF, replacing the previous Export single part option and the extra options for extracting parts as PDF files in Parts > Extract > Extract, both of which have now been removed.
New Export selection of parts (one file) option in File > Export > PDF.
Exporting PDFs using certain fonts could cause Sibelius to crash; this has now been fixed (Windows only).
Exporting graphics:
Exporting a graphic from a dynamic part via File > Export > Graphics and then returning to the Backstage after choosing a different part to export now correctly updates the automatically-generated filename (provided it has not been edited by the user, in which case the user-edited filename is retained).
Display settings:
Sibelius 7.1 now uses DirectWrite on Windows to provide improved text measurement (particularly noticeable at low zoom levels, where characters are now spaced much more evenly than in Sibelius 7.0) and ClearType font smoothing, which uses RGB sub-pixel anti-aliasing rather than full pixel grayscale anti-aliasing (so-called “standard” font smoothing) for improved on-screen display.
Text:
A problem whereby some weights of fonts with extended styles (e.g. the full Plantin MT Std family from Monotype, beyond the weights supplied with Sibelius 7) would not display correctly in Sibelius has been fixed (Mac only).
Horizontal scaling of text now works correctly in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
Sibelius now opens much more quickly when thousands of fonts are installed on the system (Windows only).
When exporting a score from Sibelius 7 to earlier versions of Sibelius, Italic and Underline properties of the text style are correctly preserved when opened in Sibelius 6 or earlier.
When exporting a score from Sibelius 7 to earlier versions of Sibelius, Sibelius uses the Mac-specific full name of the font if available (this is only defined in some fonts from some manufacturers, e.g. some Adobe font families), which increases the chances that Sibelius 6 and earlier will use the correct font. In general, the way Sibelius 7 stores font names on Mac is not backwards compatible with previous versions, because the names that were used in previous versions are no longer accessible via 64-bit APIs. With this change, a wider selection of extended weights will be exported in such a way that Sibelius 6 and earlier can find them; e.g. a score using all weights of the Myriad Pro family can now be exported back to Sibelius 6 or earlier correctly (Mac only).
Changing the properties of a selected text object using the controls in Text > Format now updates the status bar display immediately.
Fully-justified text no longer sometimes prints incorrectly, where the last word of one line ends up incorrectly overlaying the words on the next line (Windows only).
Sibelius no longer sometimes fails to bring the text input position into view when creating some kinds of system text, e.g. Title text.
When exporting a score from Sibelius 7 to earlier versions of Sibelius, character styles that have been overridden with explicit font changes are now correctly preserved when opened in Sibelius 6 or earlier.
Lyric hyphens no longer appear offset both vertically and horizontally when using PostScript Type 1 fonts for lyrics (Windows only).
ManuScript language:
The dialog editor for ManuScript plug-in dialogs has been reinstated, and is available for the first time on Mac as well as Windows. It has also been improved significantly, with improvements including:
Nudge and align controls with the arrow keys
Keyboard shortcuts for control Properties dialogs, and testing the dialog
Improved grid display
Improved tab/creation order editing
Full undo/redo within the dialog editor
New Score.ExportScoreAsPDF() and Score.ExportPartsAsPDF() methods.
Sibelius.ShowDynamicPart() now works correctly in respect of Sibelius 7’s SDI and tabbed interface.
New Sibelius.ClearRecentDocuments() ManuScript method to clear the list of recent files shown in File > Info and on the Recent tab of the Quick Start window.
Note input:
When using the 5 on Keypad option on the Note Input page of Preferences, which changes the first Keypad layout to use Finale-compatible shortcuts for note durations, you can now create a tenuto articulation by hitting the 9 key on the numeric keypad. You can also use the * key on the keypad to create an explicit natural accidental.
Hitting 0 on the numeric keypad at the same time as playing a note on the MIDI keyboard during step-time input or re-inputting no longer causes a crash.
Other improvements:
Deleting a part by viewing said part, triple-clicking its staff and then hitting Delete no longer crashes Sibelius (Mac only).
Batch processing plug-ins that open and close scores will no longer crash when closing a score with an attached video (Mac only).
Submenus (e.g. in the context menu when you right-click on the score, or in the hierarchy of menus used for choosing sounds in the Mixer) no longer appear and disappear as you move the mouse over the parent menu (Mac only).
Further stability improvements.
Home > Plug-ins > Batch Processing > Convert Folder of Scores to Earlier Version now works correctly if the chosen destination folder does not exist.
Opening a score with an attached video will now correctly open the Video window, unless the user has specified that the Video window should not appear for that score.
Copying a selected Idea in the Ideas window to the clipboard using the Command-C shortcut now works once more (Mac only).
Re-selecting an already-selected item in a combo box or list box in a ManuScript plug-in dialog now works the same way as in previous versions once more.
New Home > Plug-ins > Batch Processing > Export Folder of Scores to PDF plug-in.
The height of the Preferences and Engraving Rules dialogs is now constrained to the height of the screen display, with a vertical scroll bar shown for the chosen embedded page if necessary, to ensure that the OK and Cancel buttons always fit on the screen.
Sibelius now detects Kontakt 5 as a Kontakt-type device and can load sounds automatically from Kontakt-based libraries, provided a suitable sound set is available.
The progress bar that appears during the Arrange process no longer appears on top of all other windows, and the warning that tells you you're arranging a long passage now has a Don't say this again checkbox so it can be suppressed in future.

New in Sibelius 7.0.3 Build 63 (Oct 25, 2011)

Installation:
Sibelius is now always correctly registered as a ReWire device when first installed (Mac only).
The Sibelius installer now correctly overwrites the files that specify the location of the Sibelius application package for the purposes of ReWire, so if you reinstall Sibelius to a different location, ReWire will now work correctly without first having to click Repair in Audio Engine Options (Mac only).
Quick Start:
Typing the shortcut Ctrl+N or Command-N to show the New Score page of Quick Start now correctly ensures the Quick Start window is brought to the front.
The manuscript paper chosen on the New Score page of Quick Start is now correctly remembered between sessions.
Switching on Start with bar of length on the New Score page of Quick Start now correctly puts the focus into the duration control.
A time signature is now always chosen on the New Score page of Quick Start, which ensures that if you also choose to create a pick-up (upbeat) bar using Start with bar of length, the pick-up is created correctly.
If you use Save As to save an open score under a new name, the original score now appears in the Recent tab of the Quick Start as well as the new score created by using Save As.
Text entered in the Other information field on the New Score page of Quick Start is now correctly saved in the resulting score (i.e. so you can see it in File > Info).
Thumbnails for the Recent page of Quick Start are now captured when the score is saved, not when it is closed.
Playback:
Sibelius now attempts to detect when it is running low on memory while loading sounds in the Sibelius Player to avoid the application becoming unstable or crashing due to running out of memory. When around 400MB of your total system memory is available, Sibelius will show a warning dialog and offer to switch to a less memory-intensive playback configuration (e.g. switching to Sibelius 7 Sounds (Lite) or Sibelius 6 Essentials if available) or reduce the number of slots, or to continue loading. When only around 200MB of your total system memory is available, Sibelius will show an error dialog and will not load any further sounds, and requires you to choose a different playback configuration or reduce the number of slots to use.
New Sibelius 7 Sounds (Lite) default playback configuration. This uses cut-down patches that both load more quickly and consume less RAM than the full patches. If you are running a 32-bit system or experience very long load times, you are recommended to use this playback configuration instead of the other default Sibelius 7 Sounds configurations.
The Sibelius Player’s memory management has been improved by reducing memory fragmentation. This significantly improves the number of sounds that can be loaded simultaneously on a 32-bit system., and on some systems will also reduce the time taken to load sounds.
Changing the playback configuration while sounds are still loading no longer causes a crash.
Deactivating a playback device that is still loading sounds while editing a playback configuration in Playback Devices no longer causes a crash.
When changing playback configuration after opening a score, the output levels for the virtual instruments used by the score are now correctly reset.
Playback of an attached MP3 file no longer stutters or has irregular timing when using a DirectSound audio interface (Windows only).
Playback via an external MIDI device (e.g. a sound module) no longer suffers from irregular timing when using a DirectSound audio interface (Windows only).
The Sound ID substitution rule for variant sounds (those whose sound IDs end with e.g. .2) has been improved in the case where the sound ID elements preceding the variant element are not prioritised, i.e. they are not specifically known to Sibelius. This fixes a problem whereby some switches to variant sounds would not work correctly.
Changing the Timecode of first bar value in Play > Video > Timecode now works correctly for the 23.97 frame rate.
The [ and ] shortcuts for fast-forward and rewind now work correctly, and playback reliably returns to the normal speed when the key is released.
Dismissing the Loading Sounds dialog immediately after it appears no longer prevents Sibelius from continuing to load sounds.
Drawing of the Mixer has been optimized, reducing CPU usage when the Mixer is showing during playback; this is especially beneficial on Mac.
It is now once again possible to type [reset] into the Sound ID change combo box in Play > Interpretation > Dictionary.
File > Export > Audio now shows a warning if you have a passage selection in the score to remind you that only the selected staves will be exported; likewise, if the active view in the score is a dynamic part, Sibelius warns you that only the staves in the current part will be exported.
Printing:
When saving a PDF via the PDF button in the native Mac OS X Print dialog, the filename of the PDF now correctly defaults to the filename of the current score, rather than untitled (Mac only).
When printing a series of parts using the PDF > Save as PDF option in the native Mac OS X Print dialog, the filename of each PDF now correctly includes the part name once more, so that each PDF saved does not automatically overwrite the previous one (Mac only).
Choosing to save a PostScript file via the native Mac OS X Print dialog now correctly saves a PostScript file, rather than a PDF file with the incorrect file extension (Mac only).
Exotic paper sizes chosen in Page Setup are now correctly remembered when you return to the Page Setup dialog.
Sibelius now remembers the chosen printer to ensure that the paper size chosen in Page Setup can also be remembered, as the list of paper sizes that appears in Page Setup is dependent on the chosen printer (Mac only).
Changing the orientation of the score using Layout > Document Setup now correctly updates the orientation in Page Setup.
If you choose to print a selection of (or all) parts, any part set to print zero copies is now correctly not printed.
When opening scores created in earlier versions of Sibelius, the printing options saved in those scores are ignored, thus fixing problems where Sibelius 7 will default to printing, say, odd or even pages only, with no obvious way to return to the default settings.
Printing the current page only now works correctly.
Changing the output resolution in the printer driver settings no longer incorrectly changes the scale factor of the printed output, causing the music to appear too large or too small on the page.
Choosing to print two pages per sheet now correctly updates the scale factor for the pages to be printed such that they fit on the paper.
Repeatedly changing page orientation in the File > Print page no longer sometimes causes Sibelius to crash (Windows only).
When printing a selection of (or all) parts, the controls in the File > Print page now always correctly reflect the print settings saved in the selected part, or in the first part in the selection if multiple parts are selected.
Part-specific changes to pagination (e.g. booklets, spreads, etc.) are now correctly saved and restored.
Manual duplexing is no longer automatically switched on when you choose to print Spreads or 2-up.
The Orientation control in the File > Print page is now always set correctly when first creating a score.
A new command has been added to the File tab category in the Keyboard Shortcuts page of Preferences called OS Print dialog, which allows you to specify a keyboard shortcut to go directly to the native Mac OS X Print dialog if you wish (Mac only).
The Scale combo in File > Print is now initialized correctly.
Switching off Print in color in File > Print now correctly updates the print preview.
Clicking Page Setup in the Document Setup dialog no longer causes Sibelius to crash if you have not previously visited File > Print (Mac only).
Page Setup settings are now defaulted appropriately based on the page size and orientation specified when you create your score.
When the saved page size for the score or parts is not available on the currently-chosen printer, Sibelius attempts to find the nearest available size automatically, first by checking the saved dimensions and choosing a page size that matches by dimensions (e.g. Tabloid paper is called 11” x 17” on some printers, but it’s the same size), and if it can’t find a page size with the same dimensions, it falls back on the best available default.
Fit to paper is now switched on by default in File > Print, as it used to be in previous versions of Sibelius.
Booklet printing has been overhauled substantially, improving the imposition rules so that booklets with irregular numbers of pages not divisible by four are handled more sensibly. When you choose to print a booklet, Sibelius disables the other options on the File > Print page, so you cannot disable collation, manual duplexing (Manually Print Both Sides) or change the orientation or page range to be printed. If your printer supports automatic duplexing, don’t use Sibelius’s built-in booklet printing mode, and instead use your printer driver options to achieve this.
Printing of spreads has been improved, ensuring that the first page is correctly printed on the left- or right-hand side based on the initial page number.
Leaving the File > Print page by hitting Esc after having accessed it using screen tips now works as expected.
Print ranges where no last page is specified (e.g. 2–, to print from page 2 to the end of the score) are now handled correctly.
The state of the Date and time footer option in File > Print is now saved on a per-score basis.
Printing multiple parts with differing page size/orientation settings in a single job now works reliably once more.
Choice of page size, orientation and other printing preferences for dynamic parts – either via the Page Setup buttons in Document Setup or Multiple Part Appearance, or directly in File > Print after choosing Parts > Print > Print All Parts – now correctly persists in the score. Two new columns in the table that appears at the top of File > Print when printing parts show the saved page size and orientation for each part.
Changes to print settings (in Page Setup or File > Print) are now fully undoable.
Scores and parts that are set to use a custom page size (i.e. one defined via the Manage Custom Sizes dialog, accessed via Page Setup) now have that custom size saved and restored correctly (Mac only).
The Page Setup dialog now shows the correct values when first visited via Document Setup or Multiple Part Appearance before File > Print has been visited for the first time.
The Print in color option on File > Print no longer appears on Mac: Sibelius will print in color if your printer supports it. To prevent printing in color, change your printer’s settings.
Sibelius now sets the default Page Setup page size and orientation for the full score and the dynamic parts based on the page size and orientation set in Document Setup. If you change the page size or orientation in Document Setup, Sibelius will also automatically update the Page Setup settings to match, provided you had not already changed the Page Setup settings such that they no longer match the Document Setup settings in the meantime.
Ideas:
Clefs and key signatures are no longer missing from previews shown in the compact view of the Ideas window.
The context menu (right-click on Windows or Control-click on Mac) now works correctly in the Ideas window.
The combo box used for filtering ideas now works correctly in both the compact and detailed views of the Ideas window.
The detailed view of the Ideas window now always scrolls the list of ideas to ensure the selected idea is visible in the list.
Typing into the filter combo box in the detailed view of the Ideas window no longer causes a crash.
The preview in the detailed view of the Ideas window now always matches the selected idea.
The preview in the compact view of the Ideas window now correctly shows L in the corner of the preview when the idea is saved to the library.
Ideas are now sorted by name by default in the detailed view of the Ideas window, and you can re-sort the list by clicking on any of the column headings.
The detailed view of the Ideas window now correctly only lists ideas from the current score when multiple scores are open.
The behaviour of the compact and detailed views of the Ideas window has been rationalised when multiple scores are open: each score window can have its own Ideas window showing the compact view, but there is only one detailed view for the whole application. When any score window’s Ideas window is set to detailed view, the compact view windows in other score windows are closed. Toggling the detailed view back to compact view will only re-open the Ideas window for the current foreground score window.
The Edit button in the detailed view of the Ideas window now works correctly for score ideas as well as library ideas.
The compact view of the Ideas window now always shows a scroll bar, improving its appearance.
The chosen filter (as typed into the combo box) is now correctly maintained when toggling between showing Score, Library or All ideas.
Previewing of ideas in the compact view of the Ideas window now works more consistently, whether you click and hold the mouse button or press and hold the Space bar.
The compact view of the Ideas window now correctly only allows a single idea to be selected.
When the detailed view of the Ideas window is open, but no score windows are open, only Library ideas are visible.
The appearance and resizing behaviour of the Edit Idea Info dialog has been improved.
The graphical display of the selected idea in the detailed view of the Ideas window is now always correctly centered.
Ideas that are duplicated in the library and the current score can now correctly be opened when the Score button is chosen in the compact view of the Ideas window.
The Return key now more reliably closes the drop-down list in the Ideas window and performs a search, without requiring you to hit Return a second time.
Importing graphics:
Sibelius now reliably imports graphics at any bit depth; previously it assumed that bitmap graphics always used 24-bit depth, which could result in strange effects when e.g. manipulating the color of imported graphics or flipping them.
Exporting graphics:
The Monochrome option is now correctly enabled and disabled for the appropriate graphics formats in File > Export > Graphics.
When Use smallest bounding box is switched on, the bounding box for PDF and EPS files exported via File > Export > Graphics is no longer too small, so the edges of the graphics are no longer incorrectly clipped.
A problem whereby some standard glyphs in fonts were embedded in EPS files using a generic Unicode descriptor rather than the standard Adobe glyph list descriptor has been fixed. This means that characters in symbol fonts such as the rhythm dot in Opus Special Std now appear correctly when an EPS file exported from Sibelius is opened in e.g. Adobe Illustrator.
Fonts that use extended styles (e.g. Condensed, Semibold, etc.) are now exported using the correct style/weight when using File > Export > PDF (Mac only).
The appearance of imported SVG graphics has been significantly improved when exporting to PDF (and when printing on some printers).
Text:
Text that changes back from the Music text character style to the regular font of a text style is now exported correctly to a previous version of Sibelius.
The Gap after paragraph control on the Font page of Edit Text Style is now scaled correctly in points.
Selecting a word from a word menu using the mouse now works correctly once more.
The Keep absolute option for text styles now works correctly for text on small staves once more.
Text that is set to appear at an absolute size (via Keep absolute) is no longer the wrong size when you first create a new dynamic part.
Typing accented characters by holding down Ctrl+Alt or AltGr and typing a letter key, as used in Polish text, now works correctly once more (Windows only).
Lyric input using the Icelandic keyboard layout now works correctly once more (Windows only).
The Å key no longer incorrectly produces a hyphen during lyrics input on a Swedish keyboard.
Keyboard shortcuts in word menus now work correctly when the keyboard layout is set to Dvorak in the input source menu (Mac only).
Symbols that map onto empty glyphs in a font no longer fall back on showing a character from the “last resort” font, and instead appear blank as they did in previous versions of Sibelius (Mac only).
The text editor now remembers fonts that have been substituted when it is first opened, and reinstates these fonts for their substitutes when it is dismissed. This works in a similar way to how it did in Sibelius 6, in that multiple fonts that are substituted by the same font will all end up as the same font when the editor is closed, and any explicit font switches to a font that has been used as a substitute will be replaced with the substituted font, regardless of whether you really wanted that font.
Further improvements to the font name matching rules used by the Missing Fonts dialog in order to try and come up with the best possible suggestion for the new font family automatically.
Shortcuts for accidentals in the word menus used by legacy chord symbols have been fixed.
The Chord symbol text style in the contextual “create” menu (i.e. right-click with no selection, then choose Text > Special Text > Chord symbol) no longer shows a spurious shortcut.
Font families and style names are now localised to the current language of the operating system, which is not necessarily the language in which Sibelius itself is running. This means that choosing Japanese on the Language page of Preferences on a Mac running Mac OS X in English will still display the English font names. The Japanese translations will only appear if Mac OS X itself is running in Japanese. However, as a special case, when Sibelius is set to run in English but the OS is set to run in another language, the English names will appear. The localised font and style names are used everywhere in Sibelius that font names are shown to the user, including the Missing Fonts, Edit All Fonts and Edit Text Style dialogs, the Text > Format combo boxes on the ribbon, and the Text display on the status bar (Mac only).
Chord symbols:
The Choose Chord Diagram dialog (accessed by clicking Choose Preferred in Edit Chord Symbols) now displays correctly when it is first opened, without requiring the user to resize it to force a redraw.
Sibelius no longer crashes when inputting chord symbols near the end of the score in Panorama.
Plug-ins:
New File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins dialog, which lists all of the plug-ins available for download from the Sibelius web site and allows you to install any of them with a single click.
The File > Plug-ins > Edit Plug-ins dialog has been revamped and now allows the user to specify on which ribbon tab each subfolder (or category) of plug-ins should appear. You can even make plug-ins appear on ribbon tabs that do not have a Plug-ins gallery by default.
Keyboard shortcuts assigned to ManuScript plug-ins no longer end up out of step if you install or remove additional plug-ins.
New Home > Plug-ins > Batch Processing > Export Folder of Scores as MusicXML plug-in, allowing you to export a folder of Sibelius scores as either compressed or uncompressed MusicXML files.
Running Note Input > Transformations > Double Note Values in Panorama no longer causes a crash.
Home > Plug-ins > Batch Processing > Rehearsal Recordings no longer crashes if the Transport window is open (Mac OS X 10.7 Lion only).
Note Input > Transformations > Halve Note Values now works correctly in all language versions of Sibelus.
Note Input > Plug-ins > Copy Articulations and Slurs no longer crashes when it is run in a dynamic part.
The Circled numbers preset now works correctly again in Text > Plug-ins > Add Fingerings to Notes.
Home > Plug-ins > Batch Processing > Convert Folder of Scores to MIDI no longer fails if the folder on which it is run contains files other than Sibelius scores (Mac only).
Text > Plug-ins > Change Dynamics has been updated to make it clearer how to use it to convert Expression text in the default text style font into the correct music text font, e.g. Opus Text.
Home > Clipboard > Paste > Paste Into Voice now retains the color of pasted objects.
ManuScript language:
Calling the Close() ManuScript method on a window containing a read-only version of a score no longer causes Sibelius to crash.
Creating a symbol at Cue grace note size via ManuScript now works correctly.
New Score.RemoveVideo() ManuScript method that removes an attached video from the current score.
The Plug-in Trace Window has been improved: there is now just one window for the whole application, rather than one for each Sibelius document window, so the trace window does not close when a score window closes.
It is once again possible to click in the Plug-in Trace Window while a plug-in dialog is showing (Windows only).
The ColorGreen and ColorBlue bar object variables now work correctly again.
The ExtractParts() method now has an extra optional Boolean parameter to determine whether or not Sibelius should open the extracted parts upon extraction (defaults to true).
New Folder.FileCountAllTypes read-only variable that returns the total of files of all types (not just Sibelius scores) in the given folder.
Score.SaveAs() no longer incorrectly changes the name of the open score to the name of the exported file (e.g. filename.sib would previously have become filename.xml when specifying the MusicXML format).
The Sibelius.New() ManuScript method can now find manuscript papers that are located within categories/subfolders. You can either specify the manuscript paper name on its own (in which case Sibelius will look in all available subfolders to find it), or appended after the name of the category/subfolder in which it is located.
Inspector:
It is once again possible to open the Inspector during text input by clicking its button on the Home tab of the ribbon.
The General panel of the Inspector can be opened correctly once more (French-language only).
Ribbon:
The focus no longer seems to disappear when moving around the Clef and Barline galleries with the arrow keys (Mac only).
Exporting:
The various File > Export pages no longer incorrectly default to a filename that ends with .sib rather than the correct file extension for the chosen export format (Windows only).
Unbeamed notes are no longer exported to MusicXML with erroneous beam elements.
In addition to being able to specify bit-depth, it is now possible to specify the sample rate to be used when exporting an audio file.
Exporting scores to previous versions of Sibelius has been optimized, now works reliably with large scores, and no longer appears to hang.
File > Export > Audio is now correctly disabled when Sibelius is running in ReWire mode.
Stability:
Opening several files at once from Windows Explorer now correctly only starts one instance of Sibelius (Windows only).
If Sibelius crashes, and Windows Restart and Recovery attempts to restart the application, Sibelius now restarts correctly.
Sibelius will no longer automatically re-launch if it is running when you log out or restart your Mac with the Reopen windows when logging back in option set. This avoids a problem whereby Sibelius is unable to reliably open or save files after having been relaunched automatically, caused by a bug in the operating system (Mac OS X 10.7 Lion only).
Other improvements:
New Draw old style multirests up to 9 bars option on the Bar Rests page of Appearance > House Style > Engraving Rules. When this option is switched on, and Appearance is set to Old style, Sibelius will start drawing H-bar multirests after 9 bars, instead of after 7 bars, to support a convention used by several European publishers.
New Notehead type gallery shortcut in the Notations tab category in Keyboard Shortcuts in Preferences to open the Notations > Noteheads > Type gallery directly.
New Export PDF shortcut in the File tab category in Keyboard Shortcuts in Preferences to go directly to the File > Export > PDF page.
The Instrument Change dialog now always creates the correct instrument change if you simply open and then confirm the dialog by clicking OK.
Creating an Open key/Atonal key signature in a dynamic part via the Key Signature dialog (rather than the gallery) now works correctly.
Changes to page margins set in special page breaks now always draw correctly, regardless of which pages are in view.
It is now once again possible to resize a score window by dragging its top right or top left corner (Windows only).
The drawing of lyric hyphens has been optimized and is now considerably faster.
The speed of Layout > Magnetic Layout > Freeze has been significantly improved.
Sibelius no longer crashes when closing a score when the video window is open (Windows only).
Sibelius no longer crashes when importing a house style created in Sibelius 3 or earlier.
Quitting Sibelius from the Dock while a dialog is open no longer causes a crash (Mac only).
Sibelius no longer sometimes crashes when a ribbon gallery menu closes (Mac only).
Sibelius’s GDI resource usage has been substantially reduced, so it is possible to open many more (five times as many) Sibelius windows before the per-process resource limit is reached, resulting in a crash (Windows only).
The Home > Edit > Go To Bar dialog now allows input of bar numbers with two or more digits, as it should (French-language only).
Sticky lines no longer have a small but accumulating error in their length when input over a series of tuplets.
Operations that show a progress dialog now also display progress in the Sibelius window’s button on the Windows taskbar (Windows 7 only).
Closing a score now correctly deletes the auto-saved version from the AutoSave folder, so that Sibelius does not incorrectly present you with files that were successfully saved and closed in the event of the application crashing and offering to recover auto-saved scores.
The state of View > Invisibles > Hidden Objects is now remembered correctly when opening and closing scores.
The View > Panels > Keypad checkbox no longer incorrectly shows as being switched on when opening a score and the Use custom size and position option is chosen on the Display page of Preferences, having been saved with the Keypad window not showing.
The resolution of the Quick Look preview has been improved (Mac only).
Sibelius no longer crashes when editing a selected page number change.
Moving the selection to the staff above or below during step-time or alphabetic note input with a sticky line active now correctly stops the sticky line on the original staff.
Starting a crescendo or diminuendo hairpin during step-time or alphabetic note input while a hairpin is already active now correctly stops the original hairpin.
The position of the line following text at the start of a line (e.g. rit./accel. lines) is now correct when the line is attached to a small staff.
Hitting Esc to move the focus from a spin control (e.g. the font size control in Text > Format) back to the score while the text editor is open now works correctly.
The status bar now includes a read-out of the instrument belonging to the staff on which the current selection resides, as the General panel of Properties did in Sibelius 6 and earlier versions, in between the total number of bars in the score and the selected bar(s). If multiple staves are selected, it reads Multiple staves; if the system (e.g. initial barline) is selected, it reads System.
The various Export… commands in the File tab category in Keyboard Shortcuts in Preferences now open the appropriate page in the File tab, rather than showing the deprecated dialogs used in Sibelius 6 and earlier.

New in Sibelius 7.0.2 Build 8 (Sep 9, 2011)

New in Sibelius 7.0.1 Build 45 (Aug 22, 2011)

Look and feel:
Checkboxes and radio buttons can now wrap onto multiple lines if necessary, allowing dialog layouts to be narrower in non-English language versions of Sibelius without text becoming truncated.
Multi-page dialogs with list boxes for lists of pages (e.g. Preferences, Engraving Rules) now default their size according to the size of the largest page.
Right-click (Windows) and Alt+click (Mac) to zoom out when View > Zoom > Zoom is active now works correctly once more
Improvements to the handling of native message boxes on Mac OS X, including making them respond correctly to Command-Y/Command-N and Return/Esc for Yes/No
Message boxes can no longer end up behind the window or dialog to which they belong (Mac only)
The controls for choosing note values (e.g. in Home > Select > Advanced) now show the correct note values both in the edit control part and the drop-down menu of the control
The proxy icon in the window title bar no longer disappears when you leave full screen mode (Mac only)
Combo boxes now open to the correct height, so no longer forcing them to scroll unnecessarily (Mac only).
The pinned Inspector no longer incorrectly steals the focus when a dialog is closed (Mac only)
It is no longer possible for the buttons on the Transport window to remain stuck down if double-clicked during playback
Commands are now correctly passed through to Sibelius when a floating window (e.g. the Keypad) has focus (Windows only)
The keyboard voicing control is now sized correctly in the Edit Chord Symbols and Edit Chord Symbol Voicing dialogs
When quitting Sibelius with a previous version of a score visible in a tab, the position of the score window is now saved correctly.
Tool window states are now correctly saved when closing several document windows at once (e.g. when quitting).
Position and visibility of undocked floating windows are now correctly restored when re-opening a saved document.
Clicking on another document window now correctly activates it if the ribbon had the focus in the previous window.
Floating tool window positions are now correctly restored when re-opening a saved score, if Open maximized is chosen on the Files page of Preferences.
Opening a new tab in a second window of a score that has docked tool windows no longer causes its tool windows to disappear
Ribbon:
The text labels in the Line, Symbol and Text Style in-ribbon galleries have been centered, and light gray gridlines added.
You can now confirm your choice in the File > Export pages where there are lists of options (e.g. PDF, MusicXML, Previous Version) by double-clicking the list item.
The status bar on the ribbon now shows Create Note/Rest rather than Edit Note when the note input caret is visible
Custom line styles can now be created correctly from the Notation > Lines > Line gallery after switching to a user-defined keyboard shortcut set
Using “find in ribbon” to find items within gallery menus (e.g. plug-ins) has been improved
“Find in ribbon” can now find disabled commands.
Controls in collapsed groups that are displayed using “find in ribbon” no longer subsequently display incorrectly when invoked using the mouse.
“Find in ribbon” no longer obscures tabs in the ribbon tab bar when the window is narrow
Highlighting a ribbon control using “find in ribbon” now correctly divests focus to the score if invoked via its key tip.
The key tip for “find in ribbon” no longer appears when the control is hidden.
Checkmarks in the View > Window > Switch Window menu now correctly display when windows are minimized to the Dock and then restored (Mac only)
Checkboxes and radio buttons in a collapsed ribbon group now correctly clear their clicked state, so they no longer remain a darker color once they’ve been used within a session (Mac only).
Quick Start:
Scores are now listed in reverse chronological order (i.e. most recently opened score first) on the Recent tab of Quick Start
The appearance of long path names on the Recent page of Quick Start has been improved
If there is no network connection, Sibelius now shows the Quick Start dialog immediately, rather than waiting for the connection to the Sibelius blog RSS feed to time out
Floating tool windows now correctly disappear when a score window loses focus and the Quick Start gains focus (Mac only)
The Quick Start window no longer increases in size every time Sibelius is restarted, if it was the last open window when quitting (Windows only).
Note input:
Undoing note input with a sticky line active now correctly retracts the line as well
“Sticky” input of lines now works correctly when using Note Input > Note Input > Re-input Pitches
Sticky lines now extend correctly when creating a tied note across the barline by inputting a note too long for the end of the previous bar.
Using Pitch before duration note input now works correctly on unpitched percussion staves.
The wrong note is no longer sometimes input when using Use QWERTY keyboard and Use piano arrangement (on the Note Input page of Preferences) to input notes in Specify pitch before duration step-time input
Choosing a bar rest from the Keypad with nothing selected in the score no longer incorrectly moves the view back to the first page
Note Input > Transformations plug-ins now work correctly in non-English language versions of Sibelius
Running the Explode or Reduce plug-ins on a system passage selection no longer causes the plug-in to bail out with an error
The correct shortcuts for toggling sticky tuplets (Shift+Alt+K), reinput pitches (Shift+Alt+N) and the Inspector (Ctrl+Shift+I) have been set in the default keyboard shortcut sets for non-English languages
Hitting N to start note input in a score with no instruments no longer causes a crash.
Text and lyrics:
The Edit All Fonts dialog can now be accessed by clicking the dialog launcher button in the Text > Format group on the ribbon
Lyric and chord symbol input now correctly advances to the next note or the next beat as appropriate in all circumstances
Entering lyrics in the last bar of the score no longer fails to close the text editor correctly, disabling some functions thereafter
Using Ctrl+Alt+Space in the middle of a piece of text to reset the style now correctly persists after saving the score and reloading it.
Using Alt+click to copy an open text editor now works correctly
Switching to another tab in the window now closes the text editor, if it is open
When using a non-English version of Sibelius, the Regular weight no longer appears twice in the list of font styles in Text > Format (Mac only)
When creating a new text style copying the values from an existing text style, the original text style now appears in the Based on drop-down at the top of Edit Text Style, allowing you to inherit the settings from that text style if you wish
It is no longer possible to attempt to set Line spacing for a character style
The display in the font family and font style combo boxes in Text > Format when the selected text object contains multiple fonts and/or styles has been improved
Making part of an instrument name superscript no longer results in the remainder of the instrument name being made superscript when you leave the text editor
The Missing Fonts dialog can now appear when opening a Sibelius 7 score rather than just scores from earlier versions, because it is beneficial to handle the different ways in which OpenType font families, e.g. Myriad Pro, are named on Windows and Mac
Fonts that provide two bold weights (e.g. Bold and Semibold) now always display the correct weight when chosen from the font style combo box in Text > Format, rather than always using (say) Semibold, regardless of whether Bold or Semibold is actually chosen. (Mac only)
If you change the font style (e.g. Light or Bold) as well as the font family for a missing font in the Missing Fonts dialog, any existing changes to or from bold/italic/bold italic will be removed from the text in the score, to ensure that the newly-chosen style is correctly substituted in all cases.
Changing the point size of e.g. one word in the middle of a text object now correctly restores the original font size properly, so subsequently editing the font size of text style correctly resizes the text following the font change
The shortcut for the bold italic z in the Expression word menu has been changed to Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Z (Shift-Opt-Command-Z on Mac) to avoid clashing with other shortcuts.
Editing text that has a character style with no font name set no longer removes the character style change.
When View > Invisibles > Handles is switched on, text frames no longer draw around hidden system text even if Hidden Objects is switched off.
Word menus now correctly allow enough space for accented capital letters (Mac only).
Underlining part of a text object now works correctly once more.
You can now correctly open the Inspector from the text editor by typing Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows only).
When editing text, typing shortcuts that aren’t defined for the word menu in question no longer has bad effects.
The Words list is no longer truncated on the Word Menus page of Preferences.
Strings that contain more than one font no longer always show Times New Roman in the Text tab of the ribbon.
The Style combo box no longer incorrectly shows Regular when the text object uses another style.
Reset Design no longer incorrectly removes the reset for a character style.
Resetting the character style in an instrument name no longer incorrectly removes the restoration of the text style’s default font after the music text characters in other parts in which the text object appears.
Closing a score while the text editor is open and editing a chord symbol no longer causes a crash.
Deleting all the text in the editor when there’s a style change at the start no longer causes the editor display to differ from the text when the editor is dismissed.
It's now possible to delete a style change at the start of a new piece of text, just as it is for an existing piece of text.
The supplied house styles now have hierarchical text styles set up correctly.
Playback:
The limiter setting for Sibelius Player has been improved, making full orchestral scores sound far less compressed.
While Sibelius is loading sounds in the Sibelius Player, it now shows a progress indicator in the form of a percentage at the right-hand end of the status bar, just to the left of the buttons used to switch between document views. Once sounds are loaded, the progress indicator disappears.
While Sibelius is loading sounds in the Sibelius Player, Sibelius itself no longer appears to periodically hang for a moment, making the application more responsive while loading sounds.
Sibelius will no longer incorrectly start playback before all the samples have finished loading (Sibelius Player only)
The Loading Sounds progress dialog no longer opens on top of every other window belonging to any application, and it now has a Cancel button, allowing you to dismiss the progress dialog. Cancelling the Loading Sounds progress dialog cancels playback only, allowing sound loading to carry on in the background
Changing the settings for the click track in the Mixer now invalidates the playback routing right away, to ensure that the click track plays back using the new sounds the next time you play back
Removing an articulation from a note no longer causes the playback of subsequent sound ID changes to be wrong until you close and re-open the score
Staves using variant sounds (e.g. violins 2 rather than violins 1) now correctly trigger articulations and playing techniques belonging to the variant sound, rather than falling back incorrectly on techniques belonging to the non-variant sound
Sibelius no longer crashes when playing back after having changes playback configuration (Mac only)
Deleting the last user-defined playback configuration will no longer disable the playback devices that were used in that configuration until you restart Sibelius
The Mixer now shows the first four characters of instrument names written in East Asian characters, rather than only the first character.
The meters in staff strips on the Mixer now show the velocity of each note, scaled according to the volume fader’s position, to more accurately show the effective volume
Clicking the ASIO Setup button in Audio Engine Options now correctly launches the ASIO control panel (Windows only)
Sibelius no longer hangs or crashes on start-up if Use virtual instruments and effects is switched off in Audio Engine Options
A problem that could cause Sibelius to crash when trying to parse regular expressions used for repeats playback has been fixed
Printing:
Using key tips to access the combo boxes on the File > Print page of Backstage no longer causes the page to close immediately
Changes made via the Printer properties link in File > Print no longer update the default system-wide printer settings (Windows only)
Changes made via the Page Setup link in File > Print or via the Page Setup buttons in Document Setup and Multiple Part Appearance are now correctly remembered on subsequent visits to File > Print
Sibelius no longer crashes when you print a range of pages having first scrolled through the pages in the print preview (Windows only)
Choosing Normal from the combo box controlling the type of print job now resets the orientation and manual duplexing combo boxes back to their most basic settings
The Copies spin control in File > Print now updates correctly to show the number of copies chosen for the selected part in the table at the top of the Print page
Switching on Print View menu options now correctly includes handles and text frames on the print-out if they are visible
If you choose File > Print in the Finder with a Sibelius file selected, Sibelius now opens and prints the file (Mac only)
Parts now print in score order
A problem whereby some weights of some font families would appear wrong in the print preview has been fixed (Mac only)
Ties and slurs no longer print as a thin line, rather than the correct tapered line, at some combinations of staff size and page size
The positioning of the zoom slider below the print preview has been improved
Printing multiple copies no longer always prints collated, despite choosing to print uncollated (Mac only).
Manual duplexing no longer chooses the incorrect page size if you set the page size from the Page Setup dialog (Mac only).
Keyboard shortcuts:
The , key on the numeric keypad now works correctly to add e.g. rhythm dots to notes on European keyboards
Edit > Special Characters has been removed in the non-English versions of Sibelius because its keyboard shortcut conflicted with the Tempo text shortcut (Mac only).
Exporting audio:
You can now choose between exporting audio at different bit depths (16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit) in File > Export > Audio
Cancelling the loading of sounds during audio export now works correctly
The Exporting Audio progress dialog no longer appears in front of all other windows, including those belonging to other applications
Exporting audio files no longer renders Sibelius unresponsive after the export has completed (Mac only)
Exporting graphics:
The Graphic selection radio button is now chosen by default when you choose File > Export > Graphics with a graphic selection in the score
Noteheads, clefs and other symbols are now exported correctly in SVG files
Changing the target folder for graphics export in File > Export > Graphics now correctly checks whether any existing files will be overwritten before you click Export
The checkboxes on File > Export > Graphics are now updated correctly when the choice of export format is changed
Further improvement to the display of the exported resolution of bitmap graphics on the File > Export > Graphics page
Choosing File > Export > Graphics when you have made a graphics selection in Panorama no longer crashes Sibelius
The Anti-aliased option in File > Export > Graphics now works correctly for bitmap graphics formats
Exporting MusicXML:
Sibelius now always encodes the voice and staff correctly for lyrics in exported MusicXML files
Sibelius now exports Expression text objects that mix various fonts using separate word elements within a single direction element in MusicXML files, improving their appearance when imported into Finale
Cross-staff beaming now exports rhythms at the start of bars correctly in MusicXML files
Ideas:
The performance of loading and indexing ideas has been improved, so Sibelius now starts more quickly, and opening and switching between scores is also faster than before
A problem whereby corrupted ideas data would prevent Sibelius from saving a score correctly has been fixed
Sibelius no longer crashes when you capture an imported graphic as an idea and then export the score to a previous version of Sibelius
Sibelius no longer crashes when adding or deleting ideas from the library
Layout and formatting:
A problem whereby it was not possible to drag staves freely when the Sibelius window was close to a 4:3 aspect ratio has been solved
Clicking Deselect All in Layout > Hiding Staves > Show Empty Staves now works correctly
Notes and chords are now respaced to take account of the appearance and disappearance of accidentals when moved up or down chromatically
ManuScript language:
The performance of ManuScript plug-ins has been optimized (Mac only)
ManuScript plug-in dialogs without a button chosen to explicitly have the focus by default now correctly put the focus on the default button, or failing that the button that closes the dialog returning “true”
The Missing Fonts dialog no longer appears when opening a score via ManuScript with the “quiet” flag set
The ManuScript variable Sibelius.OSVersionString now returns “Mac OS X 10.7 Lion” if Sibelius is running on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
Sibelius 7 Sounds:
The following improvements to Sibelius 7 Sounds require a separate installation, which you can download here.
The first staccato note after a non-staccato note is no longer too loud in Sibelius 7 Sounds
The problem whereby some woodwind and brass sounds do not sound when a score is first played back has been fixed
New Orchestral Snare patch, including hits, rolls, rim shot and side stick hits
The range of the Crotales/Antique Cymbals patch has been extended downwards by an octave
The jazz saxophone, trumpet and trombone patches now include a smart knob to control whether the doit or fall should happen at the start of the note or at the end of the note
The Low EQ smart knob for the piano patch now works correctly
The range of the F Tuba has been extended to match the range of the B flat Tuba
The range of the Marimba has been extended downwards by an octave
The volume of the clarinet patches has been reduced to balance more pleasingly with the other woodwind patches
The Organ Swell patch now uses channel expression to control dynamic, so it can play continuous changes of dynamics
The staccato notes for baritone sax have been balanced
The unmeasured tremolo effect for strings has now been balanced to match the volume of other notes played by strings
The ranges of the recorder patches have been extended upwards to match the ranges of the default instrument types in Sibelius
Bassoon, clarinet, flute, oboe and strings patches have been adjusted to ensure the first staccato note sounds correctly
Additional control for legato has been added for the strings patches by way of new smart knobs in the Mixer
The panning of the oboe patches has been improved
Soft notes on the piano no longer sometimes start with an audible click
Other fixes:
Clicking Make Current in Review > Versions > Edit Versions no longer crashes Sibelius if there are unsaved ideas in the current score.
The score view no longer goes blank during long operations (e.g. running plug-ins, doing Layout > Staff Spacing > Optimize)
Sibelius no longer locks an imported MusicXML file until the application quits
If a score’s name minus its file extension happens to be the same as the name of a folder in the same path, the default filename in Save/Save As is no longer blank (Windows only)
Notation > Graphics > Graphic now defaults to the user’s default Scores folder rather than the root of the hard disk
The Dolet 6 for Sibelius plug-in no longer crashes when exporting chord symbols (Mac only)
Attempting to quit Sibelius while the Try Sibelius dialog is showing no longer causes Sibelius to crash (Mac only)
Worksheets created with the Show today’s date option switched on now show the date correctly (Mac only)
Loading an XF format MIDI file no longer makes Sibelius appear to hang
Quick Look is now working correctly for Sibelius 7 scores (Mac only)
The arrow buttons on the Keyboard window no longer sometimes remain pressed when clicked
The first score you open now correctly updates the display on the Axiom Pro keyboard when using HyperControl
Various problems with HyperControl relating to having several scores open at once have been fixed.
Changes to the default positions of rests in voice 1 and voice 2 on the Notes and Rests page of Edit Staff Type are now saved correctly
Imported graphics no longer change color when selected
Comments now once again show a selection outline when selected.
Sibelius no longer hangs when a message is sent from the Licence Server if the user doesn’t immediately click OK to confirm receipt of the message.
The default choice of keyboard language on the Keyboard Shortcuts page of Preferences is now correctly set to the appropriate language automatically.
Send to Sibelius from PhotoScore no longer causes the Open PhotoScore File dialog to appear repeatedly (Mac only).
Creating a bracket/brace in a score with only one staff no longer causes a crash.

Sibelius Changelog

What's new in Sibelius 2019.4

New in Sibelius 2018.11 (Dec 13, 2018)

New in Sibelius 2018.6 (Jul 19, 2018)

New in Sibelius 8.7.2 (Nov 26, 2017)

New in Sibelius 8.7 (Sep 29, 2017)

New in Sibelius 8.6.1 (Jul 21, 2017)

New in Sibelius 8.6.0 (Jun 5, 2017)

New in Sibelius 8.5.0 Build 552 (Dec 3, 2016)

New in Sibelius 8.3.0 Build 62 (May 5, 2016)

New in Sibelius 8.1.0 Build 91 (Jan 22, 2016)

New in Sibelius 7.5.1 Build 209 (Jul 7, 2014)

New in Sibelius 7.5.0 Build 155 (Apr 16, 2014)

New in Sibelius 7.1.3 Build 77 (Sep 28, 2012)

New in Sibelius 7.1.2 Build 46 (Apr 11, 2012)

New in Sibelius 7.1.0 Build 54 (Dec 20, 2011)

New in Sibelius 7.0.3 Build 63 (Oct 25, 2011)

New in Sibelius 7.0.2 Build 8 (Sep 9, 2011)

New in Sibelius 7.0.1 Build 45 (Aug 22, 2011)

New in Sibelius 7.0.0 Build 23 (Jul 31, 2011)

New in Sibelius 6.0.3 (Sep 3, 2009)

New in Sibelius 5.2 (May 24, 2008)