Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5282 in Software
• Brand: Sibelius Software Ltd
• Platforms: Mac, Windows

Alf Clausen composer - The Simpsons
Composing for a weekly series does not allow me the downtime necessary to work around software issues ... Sibelius saves me time, and its intuitive operation and overall smoothness enhance the notation experience. (Alf Clausen composer - The Simpsons)

Manufacturer's Description
SIBELIUS is the complete software for writing, playing, printing and publishing music notation. It will make your life easier, save you time, produce fantastic results

Customer Reviews

Market Leader
Last year I favourably reviewed Finale 2005 which I was using heavily at the time. Since then I tried Sibelius 4 and, whilst I don't take back anything positive I said about Finale, I found that Sibelius really suits my working methods.

The two main differences from Finale are that in Sibelius pretty well all of the tools are available all of the time (as opposed to having to be selected one by one in Finale) so - as long as you don't get confused about what you're using - you can work much more quickly. This approach may not suit some users who may prefer Finale's slightly more plodding approach.

The other big (for me) improvement is that I no longer have to extract parts, so can switch between editing the music in score form or directly in the part - they're all part of the same file.

It took me a while to get used to the different approach to formatting pages (Finale's approach is more logical - Sibelius' more intuitive) but having now made the transition I wouldn't go back.

Ocean of Notes and Notations
I was wondering if there was any program that would do the job for musicians just like a word processor does for writers. Did a bit of research in the Internet and learnt the name 'Sibelius' in the first place. Read more about it, took a couple of classes and found out this is the program I was looking for. And bought the then latest version Sibelius 4.

I love to compose and arrange music. The composition and arrangement is all in my mind. Sibelius plays for me the notes I input for bass, drums, keyboards, violins, saxophones and etc. I can listen to how it sounds and rework to make it sound better. I can use it as a final audio script before going to a studio.

I even make backing tracks for covers and play guitar and sing along to entertain friends and myself. Though it's not suitable for professional entertainment use as sound samples are not of that high quality because the program is not designed for it. Recently updated to Sibelius 5. I'm expecting better quality sound samples and there is. Good news is Avid/Digidesign (the maker of ProTools) bought Sibelius company. So I'm hoping that I can do more and better in the future.

From dawn till dusk and vice versa, I just open Sibelius and swim in the ocean of Notes and Notations. I love it. It has been my life. "Thanks to you Sibelius for coming into my life !"

But strange. Sibelius 4 gave me the biggest headache in the world. NASA may fix any problem on rockets and satellites in space. But not Sibelius nor Apple that could fix the problem I experienced with this little software of their own. I use Sibelius on MacBook Pro which has Mac OSX 10.4.11, 2 GHz Intel Core Duo Processor and 1 GB Memory. I preferably use DLS Music Device rather than Kontakt Player. Suddenly one day, while playing Score, it started to make noise as in signal interference in transmission or no sound at all. I ran after both Customer Services like mad. Nobody could diagnose it for 7 months.

Whatever happens it happens for good. I had to end up upgrading to Sibelius 5. So desperate. But it's even better. And hope it won't give me the same headache.