Product Reviews

If you need to produce musical scores and you care about their presentation, Sibelius is the software to use. It produces attractive scores with unsurpassed flexibility to accommodate a huge range of notation and performance techniques. It can be daunting on first use, but the excellent manuals and video tutorials quickly reveal an extremely polished, friendly interface with lots of time-saving features.

Sibelius Software had pretty much nailed its core notation tools in version 3. Version 4, which we reviewed in What's New: Software, Shopper December 2005, focused on ancillary features such as part extraction, video support and teaching aids. Version 5 is in a similar vein.

The most impressive new features are Native Instruments' Kontakt 2 virtual instrument and a 3GB sample library for playback of scores. Previous versions provided similar, but more basic playback. A maximum of eight simultaneous instruments meant that different parts of large scores had to share the same sound (all woodwind on a clarinet, for example). In version 5, sound quality is greatly improved, and Kontakt 2's 16-instrument limitation can be circumvented simply by loading more than one instance of it. Using multiple instances increases the load

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on the computer, but our Core 2 Duo PC with 1GB of RAM comfortably managed to play a complex orchestral score with 31 parts using two Kontakt 2 players. Orchestral sounds are very well catered for, and expansion libraries are available for world music, choral and rock and pop instruments. Meanwhile, support for VST plug-ins means you can substitute any specific sounds with other VST instruments, and there are sophisticated options for instrument playback preferences.

The other new features are simpler, but arguably no less important. The Ideas Hub is a powerful clipboard-cum-sketchpad for musical motifs and is the ideal place to store ideas that don't yet have a home in the score itself. Panorama is a new way of viewing scores without worrying about page layouts. It presents scores as an extremely wide page and makes note input easier. We're particularly pleased that bar numbers can take repeat marks into account, which is not standard practice but a sensible choice for pop music arrangements. A new Paste as Cue command generates correctly labelled and resized notes into individual parts to help performers follow other instruments in a score. These are not dynamically linked to the original notes to reflect further changes, but a Check Cues option locates differences for manual correction.

There is still some room for improvement. Automatic formatting of scores is generally excellent on the horizontal axis, widening bars with lots of notes or to make room for lyrics, but is less reliable on the vertical axis, where dynamics markings can clash with low notes, for example. However, it's easy to fix these issues, and, in general, Sibelius does a remarkable job of balancing flexibility with sensible default settings. Its improved playback quality means there's little reason to consider using anything else.