Welcome Finale friends! We are excited to help you in your journey with Sibelius. Here are the top five features that you may not be aware of, and we hope you will love about Sibelius.

Easy Migration to Sibelius

Sibelius makes it easy to migrate your existing Finale scores to Sibelius. Using MusicXML as an interchange format, you can export files from Finale and import into Sibelius using the built-in importer. Sibelius will attempt to preserve as much engraving information as is available in the format. Once your musical data is in Sibelius, it’s easy to modify and clean up as you need.

Special thanks to Andrew Bishop for providing these editions for demonstration. Check out the Andrew Bishop Orchestral Editions from Art of Sound Music.

Sibelius also has preferences for note entry which mimic Finale’s Speedy Entry, such as using the 5 key for quarter notes (crotchet). This can ease you into the new platform and keeps your muscle memory intact.

For more details on how to migrate your work to Sibelius, check out How to Migrate from Finale to Sibelius.

Trusted by the Industry

Sibelius is trusted by professionals from Broadway to Hollywood, to concert halls, to schools around the world, Sibelius has a long history of being a powerful tool for music making at the highest level.

Many rely on Sibelius for music composition, arranging, education, and more in the professional world. Using Sibelius is a reliable way to collaborate with others or prepare students for the future because of its standing among professionals.

Recently, we sat down with Fine Line Music Service, a London-based music preparation company, producing scores for some of the top films in Hollywood, such as 2023’s Oppenheimer. They had a lot to say about Sibelius’ place in their workflow despite being fluent in different programs over the years. “Sibelius works really nice and keeps getting better usually. I love working with it for many years now (after many years with a competing program).” You can read the full story here.

Regular Releases

The Sibelius development team is a tight-knit team with members across Canada, the Philippines, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. We work hard every day to bring new features and releases to Sibelius on a regular basis. Just as a taste, in 2024 alone we’ve already had four releases, and fifty feature releases since 2014!

We are dedicated to our users’ needs and invite you to bring them to us. Finale users have a unique perspective on the notation exactness, and we welcome the challenge to try and meet those needs with gusto.

Report Feature Requests or Bug Fixes

You can submit feature requests or bug reports with this form. Members of the Sibelius team and Avid’s intrepid customer research team will read them all and will be taken into consideration for future releases. We want to hear from you!

Sibelius for Mobile

First released in 2021, Sibelius for mobile is available for many platforms, with Android and Chromebook added in 2024. These features are essential for most modern musicians, but most notably teachers and students to meet the needs of the modern classroom. You can get started with the app for free and use it on:

• iPad
• iPhone
• Android phones
• Android tablets
• Chromebooks

This gives you the ability to read, edit, and play back your Sibelius scores on the go. It also has unique touch and gesture-driven controls with the Apple Pencil or an Android stylus, leading to a more efficient workflow than menus and keyboard shortcuts in a small form factor. Critically, the mobile app uses the same notation engine as the desktop app, so any engraving work will transfer seamlessly across all platforms using the same Sibelius files.

What’s more, it’s all included with your standard Sibelius Ultimate license! This is a huge boost for users constantly on the go, or for students using Chromebooks in the classroom.

Sibelius Cloud Sharing

Along with the desktop and mobile apps, the Sibelius ecosystem extends to the cloud and in the web browser. Sibelius scores can be shared with your classroom or colleagues with Sibelius Cloud Sharing.

These scores can be viewed in a web browser, either as a standalone viewer, or as an embedded viewer on your own website. We recently launched a brand new version of the score viewer with fresh features and a sleek, modern look. This gives you great portability of your scores, unique among notation software platforms.

Check out more info about Sibelius Cloud Sharing.

We’re excited to invite our Finale friends to the Sibelius family. We are currently offering a special crossgrade license for Finale users. See here for more details.

Welcome to Sibelius, and have fun!