What’s new in Sibelius June 2024

We’re thrilled to announce the immediate availability of our June release of Sibelius. This is packed with a number of improvements, and also provides native support for Macs with Apple silicon chips.

If you’re new to Sibelius, you can get started for free at www.avid.com/sibelius where you’ll find links to the 30-day trial or our free version of Sibelius, Sibelius First.

If you’re a current subscriber or have a perpetual license of Sibelius with an active update plan, the update is waiting for you in your account at https://my.avid.com/products or you can download it directly on your computer in Avid Link.

Native support for Apple silicon

Sibelius 2024.6 now includes support for Apple silicon chips. At the time of writing, this covers Macs with the M1 to M3 range of processors. If you have a Mac with one of these chips, you’ll now find Sibelius will run natively. If you have an Intel-based Mac, you won’t see any change. The installers for Sibelius 2024.6 will include a universal binary, allowing your computer to run the appropriate binary for the computer’s architecture.

Sibelius, when run natively on Macs with Apple silicon processors, will show some marginal performance improvements. Before this, Sibelius would run with the help of Rosetta 2, that would translate the Intel binary so it could run on Apple silicon. Rosetta 2 was pretty efficient so Sibelius ran really well under it. When running Sibelius natively now, you’ll see improvements on startup time up to 30%, and when processing large-scale score changes on huge scores you should see improvements up to 50%. For smaller scores running the majority of commands in Sibelius, it’s likely you’ll find it just as fast as before.

Virtual Instruments and Effects

Now Sibelius is running natively on macOS, you will need to make sure your plugins are up to date and are built to run natively too. Audio plugins that aren’t updated won’t appear in Sibelius, which will result in your scores not playing back properly or at all.

To know whether your plugins support Apple silicon too, you’ll see them appear in Sibelius’s Play > Setup > Playback Devices dialog. If they aren’t there, then check the manufacturer’s website to see if there’s an update.

If you still rely on the older plugins, you can run Sibelius using Rosetta. To do this, close Sibelius and go to the Applications folder and select the Sibelius app. Go to File > Get Info and you’ll see there’s a “Open using Rosetta” option:

Thankfully, many popular plugins have been updated already, such as Kontakt (AU only), NotePerformer and Spitfire.

What else is new in Sibelius 2024.6?

As with every release, we pack in as many improvements in as we can, and this release is no different.

Copying MIDI between Sibelius and Pro Tools

In this release, we’ve also included a number of smaller improvements to the way Sibelius copies and pastes MIDI.

• When pasting Time and Key Signatures from Pro Tools, the initial time and key signatures are now included.
• Pasting MIDI from the clipboard now ignores muted notes
• The "Round metronome marks" option in MIDI Import Options is now persistent
• When pasting MIDI from the clipboard or when importing a MIDI file, system text is no longer duplicated
• Key signatures are now positioned correctly after pasting MIDI
• Tempo changes aren't included at every time signature change, unless needed
• Options to filter key switches in MIDI Import Options now no longer allow the values to cross

In Pro Tools:

• Select key, meter, ruler data individually or all at once to selectively paste
• You can now paste with or without notes, bringing across song structure independently from the music

To read about the great improvements in the Pro Tools 2024.6 update, also released today, click here.

ManuScript

We’ve added full support for the various ways of respacing within Sibelius via ManuScript plugins:

2 new Bar instructions, that explicitly choose the behavior:
bar.RespaceIncludeHiddenNotes
bar.RespaceIgnoreHiddenNotes

Note: bar.Respace remains unchanged. It's behavior is determined by the user preference.

3 new selection object instructions that respace the music on a given selection:
selection.Respace
selection.RespaceIncludeHiddenNotes
selection.RespaceIgnoreHiddenNotes

The Split Bar & Combine Tied Notes plugins have been updated

Sibelius no longer crashes with running a plugin that uses the CloseWindow command

We’ve corrected a few ManuScript Commands in the documentation and no longer refer to the “short name” twice where we actually meant the file name instead.

Smaller improvements and bug fixes

• Blank clefs now appear when hidden objects are shown in the score, circled here:

• Unison ties are now correctly positioned

Subsets

• Page numbers are now retained in a Score Subset after relaunching Sibelius
• Copying music within a Score Subset now works correctly after adding a new instrument
• Muting instruments in the mixer within a Score Subset now works as expected

House Styles and editing instruments

• Importing House Style no longer corrupts instrument ensemble definitions. We’ve also unlocked Import House Style in Sibelius Artist.
• The Edit Instruments dialog now correctly pre-selects the instrument you have selected in the score once more.

General improvements

• The preference to Respace multi-voice passages during note input and editing now works as it should when Auto-Optimize is on.
• Sibelius no longer crashes after adding clef changes while re-inputting pitches.
• Hidden accidentals no longer show when they shouldn’t
• We’ve fixed a few translation errors on the Film Orchestra Manuscript Paper.
• The About box credits now scrolls the list of names once more on desktop
• Following on from the fix we made in 2024.3.1 where tied-to notes are updated when changing enharmonic spelling of the first note in a tie chain, we've tweaked this so you can't apply it to more than one note at a time. This avoids problems when respelling a range and multi-item selections.

And that’s it! We hope you enjoy everything that’s in this update, and we can’t wait to hear how you get on. Work has already started on our next round of upgrades, so keep an eye out for news.