Major Upgrade to Sibelius Coming

Sibelius has announced Sibelius 4, a major upgrade to the music notation software. Sibelius 4 enables users to compose to video and instantly revise instrumental parts. The inclusion of more than 1,700 worksheets and curriculum resources also provides music educators with a range of educational content to augment their curricula and save valuable preparation time.

For anyone who needs to produce separate instrumental parts for bands, orchestras or other ensembles, the Dynamic Parts feature gives the user the ability to make revisions to a score and update all of the relevant parts simultaneously. This will also work in reverse: making changes to an individual part and having them automatically update the full score -- saving hours of arranging and transcribing time, and ensuring greater overall accuracy. In addition, the new Auto Layout feature ensures that the parts are not only properly page-formatted and ready to print, but it also allows the user to quickly copy formatting from one part to another.

The unique Worksheet Creator saves music educators countless hours of preparation by providing more than 1,700 ready-to-use worksheets, exercises, music pieces, posters, reference material and other resources. Using a variety of templates, teachers can also create their own worksheets, print them out and distribute to their students. Students can complete the worksheets via computer or even publish them on the new SibeliusEducation.com web site for instant viewing, playback and printout from any location. An answer sheet is also provided that will save teachers hours of correction time.

Sibelius 4 also allows users to compose to video on screen. You can import a digital video file to a Sibelius score, and then compose along to the video as it plays within a video window. Whether users are writing music, playing back, fast-forwarding or rewinding, they can always see exactly what's happening in the video at any point in the score, and vice versa. "Hit points" can also be added to mark important visual events in the score, which makes it easy for the music to track the action of the video.

Additional new features of Sibelius 4 include the ability to copy and paste music straight from the software program into other programs such as Microsoft Word, rather than exporting a graphics file. The Helsinki music font has been added to give music publishers an elegant, plate-engraved appearance, and Optical rules position ties and beams perfectly. There are 11 new plug-ins covering everything from harmonizing tunes, to copying groups of slurs and articulations.

For the first time, Sibelius is offering an extensive built-in help menu with more than an hour of tutorial videos that review main features clearly and simply -- helping new users get up and running even faster.

Sibelius 4 will ship in August and carries an MSRP of $329 for the educational version and $599 for the professional package.