WALNUT CREEK, CA. (Top40 Charts/ Morgan/ Dorado Public Relations for Sibelius USA) - Sibelius Software begins shipping Sibelius 5 today, the latest version of the world's best-selling music notation software used by more than 180,000 musicians and educators worldwide.
Sibelius 5 represents a major upgrade to the powerful yet easy-to-use software that has revolutionized how music is written and taught around the world. In the past year alone, the product has been used on Grammy and Oscar-winning productions including 'Casino Royale', 'The Last King of Scotland', 'The Beatles LOVE and Dixie Chick's Taking The Long Way' – winner of Best Album and Record of the Year. In education, Sibelius is now used by more of the world's schools, universities and music conservatoires than any other music notation software.
Sibelius 5 is packed with exciting new features that sets it even further apart from the competition:
Ideas Hub – A first for any music software. Ideas Hub makes it easy for users to capture, tag, find and bring together their musical ideas. Composers can quickly capture snippets of music they have written, tag them with keywords – such as, �violin', �tremolo', �minor' etc – and then find them again in an instant. Ideas can then be pasted from the hub into a score, and are automatically transposed into the right key and range, as well as the right tempo. Ideas Hub also comes pre-loaded with over 2000 professionally written ideas that cover all genres of music, from classical through hip-hop. These are perfect for inspiring music students, and for users wishing to try their hand at new styles of music.
Stunning new built-in sounds & playback – Sibelius 5 comes with Sibelius Sounds Essentials as standard – a 2GB collection of sounds selected from top-name libraries by Garritan, SonicVox and Tapspace. As well as these new built-in sounds, Sibelius 5 offers full VST & Audio Units support for the first time. This enables users to playback their scores using renowned sample libraries such as the East West Quantum Symphonic Orchestra or Vienna Symphonic Library. Playback is handled by Kontakt Player 2, the latest version with much improved performance.
Sibelius 5 enhances the realism of playback by handling accents, articulations, hairpins etc. better than ever before. A further improvement to playback is SoundWorldTM; a revolutionary new way of categorizing sounds that ensures Sibelius always chooses the most suitable sound available on any device.
Panorama offers a clear, wide view of music that enables faster composition, easier revisions and, in education, clearer analysis of entire pieces. Instead of being chopped up into systems and pages, the music is shown in a single, infinitely-wide strip – far easier to read and navigate around. Users can now just think about the notes, and forget about page layout until ready to print.
Easy cues & instrument changes makes creating instrumental parts faster than ever before. Users to simply select any section of music they want to cue, copy it to the clipboard, and use the new Paste as Cue feature to produce a perfect cue. Sibelius 5 even suggests cue locations, and will proofread them before printing. Changing instruments mid-staff, for example a clarinet to alto saxophone, is also simplicity itself thanks to the new Instrument Change feature.
Sibelius 5 also offers users complete and easy layout control, covering bar and page numbering, blank pages, sheet music margins and more – making it easier than ever to produce beautiful scores.
An elegant new music font – RepriseTM – produces an astonishingly realistic simulation of hand-copying, plus Sibelius 5 can show chord symbols and allow teachers to write the names of notes within noteheads. Sibelius 5 also enables functional analysis and includes extra music symbols for writing early music and avant garde.
Sibelius 5 also offers many new plug-ins, including tools for splitting, joining and modifying tuplets, cleaning up played-in music, fitting music to video and transforming one scale into another, for example minor to pentatonic. The total number of available plug-ins for Sibelius is now over 80, and with Sibelius 5, users can now undo plug-ins.
Managing Director of Sibelius Software, Jeremy Silver comments, 'In this extensive and innovative upgrade we've given our users greater freedom to view, write and hear music in any way they want, and made sure that using technology like VST instruments in Sibelius is simplicity itself, with the program doing all the setup work for you. We listened to what our users told us they need and we've also tried to anticipate what might help them in the future. All in all we've created the most elegant and powerful version of Sibelius ever.'
