We’re back with another update for Sibelius across Windows, Mac, iPhone, and iPad. This release features new staff naming that allows you to number and name individual staves, plus a new way to navigate through objects in your score. And, as with every release, we’ve also included some smaller featurettes and bug fixes.
If you’re new to Sibelius, you can check out all of these features by downloading the Sibelius Ultimate trial for desktop, and our free iOS app that gives you a 1-month free trial, too.
For those with a subscription to Sibelius or a valid Updates + Support Plan, you will find the desktop update waiting for you in Avid Link, or you can choose to download from your account. On iOS, the App Store may have automatically updated Sibelius already for you, but you can always check by heading to the App Store to see if the update is available to you.
Staff names
For a very long time, it’s been impossible to add labels to staves to denote player numbers or otherwise. You could fake it with extra line breaks in instrument names, or even go to the great lengths of creating a new symbol that combined a clef with a number superimposed to the left.
Now, though, we’ve created a new method to add staff names, so those workarounds are a thing of the past. We’ve reused the existing paradigms already in Sibelius, so creating and editing these should be familiar. You can now easily achieve the following in your score:
To add a staff name, simply double-click to the left of a stave, just like you’ve been able to do when adding an instrument’s name in:
You can then type in the numbers and text you need. To make this easier to find, we’ve created new click areas that appear just to the left of the stave. These are toggled on and off with View > Invisibles > Hidden Objects or by searching for “Hidden Objects” in Command Search.
Now, you can easily find the locations to double click, and you’ll notice they appear for both empty staff names and also empty instrument names, too (solving years of frustration!).
These new staff names can differ when either Full or Short instrument names are used (which you can toggle from Appearance > Instrument Names and Staff Names). Simply add the staff names at the beginning of the score, and then set them again on one of the subsequent systems:
To reset these later in the score, add an Instrument Change, and you’ll get a fresh set of staff names, too.
The wonderful advantage of what we have now in Sibelius is that the staff names follow the staves they are attached to, and instrument names will avoid them with new Magnetic Layout options. For the first time, you’re able to set and control the Magnetic Layout properties of instrument names. We’ve also fixed up the vertical positioning of the instrument name, so it will always be in the middle of the staves in that group.
The new staff names have their own text style that inherit the defaults of instrument names. This allows you to set the overall look for both the instrument names and staff names, while retaining independent controls of the style and formatting as needed:
ManuScript plug-in support
We've added access to the following read/write variables within the ManuScript Language:
View Tab Objects- ViewAnnotations
- ViewAttachmentLines
- ViewBarNumbers
- ViewComments
- ViewHandles
- ViewHiddenObjects
- ViewLayoutMarks
- ViewPageMargins
- ViewPlaybackLine
- ViewReplayMarker
- ViewHighlights (this variable was already implemented, but was no longer writable)
- FullStaffName
- FullStaffNameWithFormatting
- ShortStaffName
- ShortStaffNameWithFormatting
Instrument Change Object**
- FullInstrumentName
- FullInstrumentNameWithFormatting
- FullStaffName
- FullStaffNameWithFormatting
- ShortInstrumentName
- ShortInstrumentNameWithFormatting
- ShortStaffName
- ShortStaffNameWithFormatting
File format
It’s important to know that we’ve introduced the new staff names without changing the internal file version. This allows you to open a file created in v2022.9 in v2022.7 without having to export as a previous version. However, since earlier versions don’t know about staff names, they will simply be missing from the score.
Select next/previous matching object
In Sibelius 2022.9, we’re introducing a new way to select the next or previous similar object. Much like how you can select more of what you have selected in the score, particularly useful for selecting all lyrics on a system, say, you can now select the next and previous matching object of the same type in your score.
There are keyboard shortcuts set up for these, which you can find and set in File > Preferences and choose Keyboard Shortcuts. In the Selection category, you’ll see four new features:
Select next matching object horizontally- Mac: Cmd + Shift + .
- Win: Ctrl + Shift + .
- Mac: Cmd + Shift + ,
- Win: Ctrl + Shift + ,
- Mac: Cmd + Shift + Option + .
- Win: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + .
- Mac: Cmd + Shift + Option + ,
- Win: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + ,
The “horizontal” features search left to right on the selected staff, and the “vertical” features search all staves top to bottom and then left to right. They both loop round.
These can be used to search for the next chord symbol, or even rehearsal marks. Try it! It’s a great way to navigate through large scores.
Other improvements and bug fixes
We've also been beavering away on other improvements for this release. These span a wide variety of areas of the program, so there should be something in here for you.
Dynamic Guitars- Lyrics no longer appear on both dynamic guitar staves
- You can set independent staff names to dynamic guitar staves
- Sibelius no longer crashes when trying to extract a dynamic guitar part
- When sharing a new score, the Dashboard now closes after accepting the terms and conditions, if it wasn't manually opened
- Auto-optimize is now not triggered when changing the value of a rest Text
- The Repeat (D.C./D.S./To Coda) text style is now in the "Tempo" category within the text gallery
- Line breaks within text are now carried over from desktop to mobile
- On mobile, “Filter Page Numbers” is now correctly labeled “Filter Page Number Changes” in Command Search
- Dynamic Parts are printing with the correct page size, once more
- When closing a video in full screen, then removing it from the score no longer causes Sibelius to hang
- With some video files, it was not possible to change the size of the video window
- The Add Video dialog now shows all supported file formats (no changes have been made to the supported codecs at this time)
- If your MIDI keyboard has sliders, faders, and pan pots, these are now supported once more. Check in File > Preferences to see if your keyboard is listed in the Input Map dropdown in the Input Devices page. This will allow you to control Sibelius from your MIDI keyboard. If yours is not listed, choose “MIDI Keyboard” and it will work with limited support.
- Changing a passage selection on a 1-line staff when viewing vertical pages no longer causes Sibelius to jump back to page 1
- Hidden key signatures no longer add a double barline when added on top of an existing special barline.
- We’ve added “sfz” to the Playback Dictionary. It triggers an increase in dynamic and attack by 200% for that one note.
- We have included a new example score: Lili Boulanger’s Vieille prière bouddhique. It’s great to show off how flexible and precise Sibelius can be when laying out dense and complex large-format scores.
- Sibelius should no longer crash when exporting to MP3
- Fixed a bug where the “used” gallery in Sibelius First would get scrambled
- Lastly, we’ve added back a new reliable crash reporting system across Windows, Mac, and iOS. If Sibelius crashes, you’ll be able to opt into sending the crash report into us, where we’ll collect and analyze the crashes as they happen. This will enable us to ensure the future of Sibelius is even better and more stable than it is today.
And that’s it, folks! Thank you for getting this far. We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements in this release, and we can’t wait to show you what we’re working on next.