What’s New in Sibelius October 2024
We’re excited to announce the immediate availability of our October 2024 release of Sibelius across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. This follows a year of releases so far that have spanned copy and paste for MIDI between Sibelius and Pro Tools; a new way to remotely control Sibelius with Sibelius Connect; native support for Apple silicon; a brand new way to use Sibelius on your Android phones, tablets, and Chromebooks; new slick ways to view, playback, transpose, and share your music online, and more!
If you have a current subscription or upgrade plan, you will find the update waiting for you in your account at my.avid.com/products. From there, you can download the installers for Windows and Mac, and also find links to Sibelius on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. This release is packed full of useful improvements, and we can’t wait for you to check them out:
MusicXML Import improvements
In Sibelius 2024.10, we’ve included a huge number of improvements in MusicXML import. Bringing a score from another music notation application, such as Finale, Dorico, or Musescore, is now easier than ever, and creates a much more faithful representation of the layout of the original score. Example of MusicXML improvements from 2024.6.1 to 2024.10. (Score courtesy of Andrew Bishop.) Sibelius will now recognize multirests, instrument and part names more reliably (including the ambiguous ‘Bass’ instrument), page and staff margins are more accurate, as are rehearsal mark styles, and more. We’ve also added the ability to import .mxl files in the advanced File > Import workflows, allowing you to import any MusicXML file into your existing Sibelius template.
Example of MusicXML improvements from 2024.6.1 to 2024.10. (Score courtesy of Andrew Bishop.)
Sibelius will now recognize multirests, instrument and part names more reliably (including the ambiguous ‘Bass’ instrument), page and staff margins are more accurate, as are rehearsal mark styles, and more.
We’ve also added the ability to import .mxl files in the advanced File > Import workflows, allowing you to import any MusicXML file into your existing Sibelius template.
Migrating from Finale
The above improvements in MusicXML file import will be music to Finale users' ears! Since MakeMusic announced the end of Finale in August, we’ve had thousands of Finale users be interested in switching to Sibelius. We recently had the pleasure of visiting composers, orchestrators, and copyists around Broadway in New York, and it’s been inspiring to see how much Sibelius is now being used to create the scores for Broadway shows.
Meeting top music engravers in New York discussing all things Sibelius. From left: Robert Buonaspina, Justin Tokke, Philip Rothman, Joseph Trefler, Sam Butler (Photo courtesy of Robert Buonaspina.)
Finale users
Migrating from Finale to Sibelius is easy. We recommend you export both a MusicXML and PDF file (for reference) from Finale, so you can bring your music across.
To learn more, please visit our dedicated pages for everything you need to know about moving from Finale to Sibelius:
New Notate Glissando feature
New to Sibelius 2024.10 is a feature to quickly notate glissandos. These are entered using two new commands found in the Note Input tab:
- Notate Glissando: Diatonic
- Notate Glissando: Chromatic
After selecting two notes, either individually or using a passage selection, Sibelius will use the starting note and replace it with a run of notes up to the last note.
Slurs are retained, as well as any articulation on the last note, too.
Diatonic runs respect the key you’re currently in. The chromatic runs will be notated with sharps on the way up and flats on the way down. Groupings in simple and compound time are by beat.
This is a great addition to Sibelius and will make writing scales a breeze, especially on mobile, where writing anything above a nonuplet wasn’t previously possible.
Tuplets remain selected after changing voice
Some users who had early access to this update hailed this as a headline improvement! It’s the little things that make a big difference.
Now, when changing the voice of a tuplet, the notes and the tuplet number are all selected, allowing you to perform further editing. Previously, these were deselected, which was inconsistent with other similar editing actions.
Licensing robustness
Many of you have been following our progress to stabilize the licensing for Sibelius and Media Composer. We’ve made huge strides on the cloud side and have seen a significant reduction in cases with licensing issues. In this release, we’ve now added a couple of changes in Sibelius on desktop to ensure Avid Link is running in the background when Sibelius needs to renew the license, or when it needs to get an updated entitlement. We’re expecting an updated version of Avid Link soon, too, which will have further improvements in this area.
macOS Sequoia support
We’re pleased to announce full compatibility with macOS 15 Sequoia, Apple’s latest version of their operating system. If you’re on an older Mac that’s compatible with Sequoia, you can go ahead and upgrade. If you’re on the lookout to buy a new Mac, it’ll come with Sequoia pre-installed so you can rest assured that both Sibelius and Avid Link 2024.10 and later will be supported.
Updated support from within the desktop app
Thank you to the many new users of Sibelius coming on board every month. In this release, we’ve updated our online resources to help you to find the most relevant information. You can find these in the Learn tab of the Quick Start.
Bug fixes and other improvements
As always, we include a whole host of smaller improvements across Sibelius on app platforms:
- The correct note is now displayed in the Status Bar after moving a note up/down chromatically on a TAB staff.
- Show bar rests option in Engraving Rules is no longer lost after closing a score when the score has this switched off and the part has this switched on.
- Switching parts with 'W' and navigating the score with Page Up/Down is no longer captured by Enhanced Redo (Ctrl + Y / Cmd + Y).
- Running the ‘Tuplet’ command from Command Search or from the list of Commands in Sibelius Artist now works as it should.
- On Sibelius for mobile, the text now wraps in Command Search, allowing you to see the whole command’s name when searching for it.
- Sibelius now respects the DPI scaling more accurately on Windows, so you can use 125%, 150%, and so on. You may see visual artifacts when changing this while Sibelius is running, however these should get resolved after restarting your computer or logging out and in again. Sibelius doesn’t natively support some of the scaling, so it’s best to use what is recommended on your system.
- The following Command IDs now work too:
keypad_*(Windows)_/(Mac)
keypad_-(Windows)_*(Mac)
keypad_/(Windows)_=(Mac)
keypad_-(Mac) - We’ve improved the stability of Sibelius as well, so it no longer crashes in rare cases when closing a score.
And that’s it! We hope you enjoy these new features in Sibelius, and we can’t wait to show you what else we have been working on.