Avid has released the latest updates to Sibelius, their flagship notation software, and Sibelius First, its friendly sibling. The new version features bugfixes, general improvements, and the following enhancements:
- Create beautiful glides and slides that follow your every move with Magnetic Glissandi. This means Sibelius automatically places your glissandi lines as you enter them into the score, positioning them between the two notes. As you compose, Sibelius automatically updates the positioning of the glissandi lines, saving you the manual steps of positioning the lines on creation, and subsequently when editing the notes, too.
- Creating multiple gliss lines at once is fast and simple to achieve with Sibelius 8.6.
- New features to the Inspector give you more control over the new glissandi lines. In your score, select a new glissandi line, and open the Inspector (Ctrl+Shift+I/Cmd+Shift+I).
- Additional tweaks for writing guitar notation.
- Share scores and collaborate more effectively with vast improvements to MusicXML.
- Sibelius is now over 10% faster starting up.
- Auto-save now works much more reliably.
- When opening older scores in Sibelius 8.6, rests in parts are now where you expect them to be positioned.
- Sibelius no longer crashes when doing “Paste as Cue” followed by “Undo.”
- When sliding notes from one page to the next, your selection is now followed so it’s clearer to see what’s happening.
- Annotating when the Inspector is open is now much smoother.
- The Inspector now resizes vertically when undocked.
Application Manager 17.5 is now included with Sibelius, which introduces a new Open button that enables you to open Sibelius directly from the Apps tab. The Open button only appears if you have an active Avid Upgrade and Support plan or subscription, and Sibelius is up to date.
Sibelius 8.6 and Sibelius First 8.6 are free updates available to all registered users.