What’s New in Sibelius March 2024

We’re really excited to bring you the first upgrade to Sibelius in 2024! Those of you who attended the NAMM, TMEA, and the Music and Drama tradeshows of the last two months will recognize a number of these new additions, and hopefully have had time to check them out. We only previewed a limited set of new features at the shows, so I’m pleased to be able to announce the immediate release of several new features and improvements in this packed upgrade.

While this release is mainly an update for Sibelius on Windows and Mac, we do have an update on iOS and iPadOS too. You can find all the links to these updates in your account through this link.

COPY & PASTE MIDI BETWEEN SIBELIUS AND PRO TOOLS

The first of the three headlining features of this release is the new ability to freely copy and paste music between Sibelius and Pro Tools. This feature is available to all tiers of Sibelius and Pro Tools, so if you’re interested to try it but don’t have either Sibelius or Pro Tools, you can download Sibelius First or Pro Tools Intro using the links below.

Get Pro Tools Intro for free

Get Sibelius First for free

To learn more about this amazing new feature, head over to the dedicated Resource Center article.

Also in this release…

RESIZEABLE KEYPAD

Following our previous release where we updated the Keypad to not only bring the modern look and feel from mobile to desktop but also introduce a new platform to enable us to add features to the Keypad to all platforms, this time we are introducing two further enhancements to the Keypad that have been a long time coming.

Firstly, it’s resizable! This has long been a request of yours, so we’re pleased to introduce it. Now you can click and drag any of the four corners to resize the Keypad. Whether you choose to enlarge the Keypad to fill your whole screen or shrink it smaller than the default size, we hope that our composers using smaller screens (those that support high-DPI scaling) find this particularly useful.

You can resize the Keypad with new commands too:

• Make Keypad larger
• Make Keypad smaller

These commands change the size of the Keypad by increments of 10% and will stop at the predefined minimum and maximum sizes. You can also reset the Keypad’s size by typing in “Reset Keypad size” into Command Search, or by simply double-tapping on the Keypad’s title bar to make it snap back to default size.

As before, you can drag the Keypad off onto another screen to free-up space on your main monitor. If you have a touch-enabled screen, you’ll find it easy to tap on a larger Keypad and make use of the touch gestures we’ve put into the Keypad over the recent years. As mentioned above, the Keypad on desktop has all the richness of the Keypad on mobile, so for a refresher, check out this previous article where we introduced those groundbreaking features on mobile.

The Keypad’s size and position are being saved and loaded for each score. If you’d like to set the position and size of the Keypad and other panels so they always appear in a certain position for every score, go to File > Preferences and then choose “Set Custom Size and Position” from the Files page.

CUSTOM ARTICULATIONS MAKE AN APPEARANCE ON THE KEYPAD

Another often-requested feature is for the Keypad to display the custom articulations on the fourth Keypad layout “Articulations.” Finally, in 2024.3, the wait is now over. In all previous versions of Sibelius, you’d have to squint at the little rectangles while trying to remember what you had defined in the Symbols dialog, and of course you’d have no idea what these would be when receiving a file from a fellow musician. Now you can simply define your custom articulations in the Edit Symbols dialog (as before), and they will appear in the Keypad.

These articulation symbols will scale as you resize the Keypad too, and will display the colorful symbols if you use graphics in your custom articulations.

INTRODUCING “SIBELIUS CONNECT” - REMOTE CONTROL FOR SIBELIUS

In Sibelius 2024.3, we’re introducing a brand new way to control Sibelius! Using Sibelius Connect, you’ll now be able to remotely control Sibelius by using apps running locally or from a mobile device or tablet.

Remotely controlling Sibelius and triggering features in a sequence has been somewhat possible with software like Scott Stevens’s Soundflow integration or Philip Rothman’s Notation Express plugins for Stream Deck. If you’re keen to speed up your workflows in Sibelius, I recommend checking these two out as they will save you so much time writing and laying out scores.

For security reasons, this feature needs to be enabled before it can be used. To do this, go to the Input Devices page of File > Preferences and then enable “Allows Sibelius to be remotely controlled by another application,” as shown below.

You can leave the port number 1898 unless specifically requested by the app that you’re connecting to Sibelius.

Once enabled, run the app that you’d like to control Sibelius, like the Stream Deck app, for example. Depending on the app you choose, you may at this point have to trigger one of the commands by pressing one of the buttons on the device or app (it doesn’t matter which one). This will send the initial request to pair with Sibelius. After that, you’ll see this pop-up appear, allowing you to confirm the connection.

You can now control Sibelius remotely! It’s enormous fun, so if this is your first time, it certainly won’t be your last.

Are you a developer looking to write an integration? You can find full details of the technical specifications in the Sibelius ManuScript Language Reference, in File > Plug-ins within Sibelius.

OTHER SMALLER IMPROVEMENTS

As with every release of Sibelius, we’ve had time to fix a few bugs and add some little featurettes along the way:

• Key Signature changes are now imported when opening a MIDI file
• Sibelius no longer adds an extra blank bar when importing a MIDI file
• In addition to the ability to resize the Keypad, we’ve tweaked the colors, allowing the buttons to stand out more prominently.
• The changes to the Keypad continue to support our accessibility improvements. As you’ve come to expect, the tooltips of the custom articulations match the symbols' name and will read it out when using a screen reader.
• The Keypad also now shows the correct accidental for notes that are on transposed instruments.
• The Keypad could, in rare cases, disappear. But now it should no longer wonder off.
• Tremolo marking is now retained when using the Chord tool on the Keypad, then undoing.
• Japanese translations have been improved in a number of places in the app.
• Adding Special Page Breaks at the beginning of a score is now consistent when selecting the initial barline or the page break layout mark.
• Doing “Reset all note spacing” now accounts for accidentals.
• We've updated to the latest version of Qt5, so the engine continues to purr along.

…and that’s it! We can’t wait to hear how you get on.