Sibelius 5 Offers New Sounds, Audio Unit Support

Sibelius Software on Thursday announced the release of Sibelius 5, a new version of the company’s popular music notation software for Mac OS X and Windows. Various versions exist for professionals and students; the full pro version costs $599.

Sibelius 5 — which was actually launched earlier this month, but just announced as shipping on Thursdaqy — is billed as “the world’s best-selling music notation software.” It helps you write musical scores, create audio files that can be converted to MP3, listen to your music using built-in instruments, print out your scores and much more.

New in version 5 is the “Ideas Hub,” where composers can capture snippets of music they have written, tag them with keywords and find them again when they need them. The Ideas Hub has been seeded with more than 2,000 ideas written by professional composers, with the goal of inspiring users.

Also new in this release are new built-in sounds and playback — a 2GB collection comprising virtual instruments created by Garritan, SonicVox and Tapspace. The software also now supports full Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plug-in support, as well as support for Apple Audio Units. Playback is managed using Kontakt Player 2 from Native Instruments.

Other enhancements to Sibelius 5 include better handling of accents, articulations and hairpins; SoundWorld, a new way of categorizing sounds; Panorama, which offers a wide view of music; easier cues and instrument changes, along with suggestions for cue locations; better layout control; a new music font called Reprise, designed to replicate hand-copying; the ability to display chord symbols and the ability to allow teachers to write the names of notes within noteheads. Extra music symbols are included for writing early music and avant garde compositions.

Sibelius 5 adds new plug-ins, such as tools for splitting, joining and modifying tuplets, cleaning up played-in music, fitting music to video and transforming one scale to another.

A demo version of Sibelius 5 is available for download.

System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.4 or later, 350MB hard disk space, 512MB RAM, DVD-ROM drive. Sibelius 5 is a Universal binary.