Scoring Notes: Recent Episodes
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A review of Rock Paper Pencil, a screen protector and pencil tip combo for the iPad that improves writing ability and reduces glare, making the device feel more like interacting with paper.
Prime Day — or Prime Big Deal Days — Amazon's retail-palooza, is here (again). It can be a good time to purchase items that will update and upgrade your setup, especially if you have some downtime. Here's what's on our desk.
Recent updates abound in Dorico, MuseScore Studio, Sibelius, and across the Apple operating systems. Whether you use all of these products or just one of them, we help you get current with the latest features and improvements.
Dorico 6.1 brings added functionality to condensing and proofreading, a new piano library, a playback template overhaul, and much more.
MuseScore Studio 4.6 brings improvements in engraving, workflow and playback. Full support for custom SMuFL fonts, improved staff hiding functionality, and increased options for bar numbers and chord symbol display are among the highlights.
Sometimes in Sibelius, a lyric hyphen that occurs at the end of a system will collide with the preceding syllable. The best fix is the least obvious one.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS Tahoe (macOS 26): How Sibelius, Dorico, MuseScore Studio, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system and hardware.
Notion Mobile 3.5 is now available on Linux as well as natively on Windows ARM devices. Features and improvements include support for simultaneous time signatures, better enharmonic options, and global chord symbols.
Paul Beck, principal librarian of the Milwaukee Symphony, discusses his experience both as a freelance music preparer and salaried performance librarian, and offers practical advice for anyone seeking freedom — and responsibility — as a freelancer.
Sibelius 2025.8 is a maintenance update that mainly corrects or refines elements of the application that were introduced or updated in the previous release. Additionally, Sibelius First is now easier to obtain, without registering with Avid.
The Scoring Express Choral & Vocal suites for Dorico and Sibelius make their debut, including hymnal, octavo, and piano-vocal templates with exceptional layout and engraving settings.
In recognition of the coming end of official support for Finale, the price for the Scoring Express templates for Finale — all three versions, plus the bundle — are permanently reduced from their previous prices.
We open the Scoring Notes mailbag, contemplate the musings of our audience, and try to leave no question unanswered in this fun and informative podcast episode.
A quick and fun trip to Seattle in the middle of a surprisingly busy summer, meeting living legends in the world of music notation software and technology.
Sibelius 2025.7 brings more control to automatic music spacing, along with UI improvements to the status bar and voice colors, and other fixes. In addition, the various tiers of Sibelius are more aligned into the user experience.
The last in a series of several articles about the end of Finale's support. How to archive your work, update the Finale files, and exporting to MusicXML and PDF. And, some thoughts about alternatives to Finale.
The second in a series of several articles about the end of Finale's support. This focuses on how to use Finale for at least a while longer, after the period of official support has ended.
The first in a series of several articles about the end of Finale's support. This focuses on what to expect as the support period comes to an end, how to use your Finale license to obtain other software (including other versions of Finale), and how you can continue to download and authorize Finale.
Dorico 6.0.22 extends the proofreading feature introduced in Dorico 6 by allowing the user to mark an identified item as ignored. Many other improvements and bug fixes abound in this update.
An opportunity awaits for you to check an item off of the bucket list and ask a question directly on the Scoring Notes podcast. Plus, a classic episode from the archive, about related technology.
It's time to "summer-ize"! We consolidate your reading, re-listening (to podcasts), and reductions (in price), all in one place, so you can spend more time at the beach.
Speed up your workflow by using the Execute Commands plug-in to automate a sequence of Sibelius commands. This step-by-step tutorial shows you how.
An opportunity awaits for you to check an item off of the bucket list and ask a question directly on the Scoring Notes podcast.
We recap the 2025 MOLA Conference from the University of Michigan, with a summary of the tech fair and conference sessions on broadening access, copyright, professional development, IMSLP, and much more.
Hosted by The University of Michigan, the 2025 MOLA conference brought together music librarians, publishers, vendors, composers, performers, and technology enthusiasts to share knowledge and connect with each other.
Dorico 6.0.10 is out with updates in various areas application-wide. Additionally, more than 50 bugs have been fixed in categories such as chord symbols, proofreading, tempo, text, and the user interface.
The Scoring Express templates for Dorico are updated for Dorico Pro 6, including improvements to the way Paragraph Styles, chord symbols, and system-attached items are handled.
A quick way to reset accidentals to the default state specified in Sibelius's Engraving Rules, if you've manually changed an accidental to diverge from what would ordinarily appear.
NotePerformer has discontinued support for third-party VST3 instruments. NotePerformer 5.0.1 no longer includes the Playback Engines (NPPE) extension, which was the main focus of the NotePerformer 5 update.
The MuseScore Studio 4.5.2 update brings stability improvements, bug fixes, and some minor feature improvements. It also introduces playback support for partial ties at repeats and jumps.
NotePerformer 5 is available, with new instruments added to NotePerformer core, and a complete overhaul of the architecture for NPPE, its system for integrated playback of third-party VST3 instruments.
Daniel Spreadbury returns to the podcast to discuss Dorico 6, its evolution over time, the influence of Finale and its users, and its bevy of new features for music composers and preparers, especially those that are unique to the product — like the proofreading tool and cutaway scores.
Dorico 6 is out with engraving leading the way in this update. Cutaway scores and proofreading are two of the headline features, but there are robust advancements in chord symbols, text, playing techniques, user workflows, and much more.
What do we mean when we refer to the "weight" of paper? We sort out the definitions of paper weights, sizes, and the various means and methods of calculating them — pound for pound.
Creating single-note tremolos with triplets that both look and play back correctly is possible in Sibelius, but it takes some advanced moves to get there.
Avid has released Sibelius 2025.4 across its desktop and mobile platforms. This is a small maintenance release to refine certain workflows related to Dynamic Parts, along with other bug fixes and improvements.
Sibelius allows you to import files directly into another existing Sibelius file or template, but the feature doesn't work if you have irregular time signatures or a non-standard pickup bar. Fortunately, there is a way, using a very special plug-in.
Dorico has a remarkable set of features to assist with producing PDF files that are reliably organized, but you need to know how to finesse the settings to get a consistent set of results.
From electric guitars to samplers to drum machines and beyond, the music we love is only possible thanks to the technology used to create it. In this episode, our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz unpack four inventions that changed music forever.
The owners of Avid are buying the Boston Celtics, and they wasted no time integrating Sibelius with the legendary basketball franchise.
The Music Type Foundry introductory sale is extended by one week. Each MTF SMuFL font is available at Notation Central at a special discount of 25% off through April 7, 2025.
A recent visit with Michael Good inspires a trip down the podcast archive with some of the most notable people in the field of music notation.
The MuseScore Studio 4.5.1 update brings stability improvements and bug fixes, as well as some minor feature improvements.
BlankSheetMusic is a free service that offers an array of browser-based tools to print blank sheet music paper.
MuseScore Studio 4.5 features improvements in the areas of percussion, engraving, text handling, and input. Several features are designed specifically to appeal to Finale users switching to MuseScore.
The Sibelius 2025.3 update addresses issues related to decondensing parts and hidden notes, and fixes some other longtime bugs and workflows.
Steinberg has issued an update to their advisory about the end of its eLicenser service, confirming the date and easing the path for customers who haven't yet updated products like Dorico 3.5 and earlier that rely on the older technology.
A conversation with Brian McBrearty, forensic musicologist, whose job it is to apply musical knowledge to questions around copyright, explain musical facts, and put them into context so that a court can arrive at a decision with the best information available.
Five of the premium Music Type Foundry fonts have been newly revised and re-released exclusively on Notation Central, the first time in three years that these fonts have been made available.
From the 2025 NAMM Show, a conversation with John Barron, the international product specialist for Dorico, about the opportunity to address customers from both the notation and audio sides of the music community.
From the 2025 NAMM Show, a conversation with Martin Keary, the head of software for Muse Group, about MuseScore, collaborations with other app makers in the future, and recent MuseScore development efforts.
Sibelius 2025.2 introduces a new "decondensing parts" option, where Sibelius will create two new Dynamic Parts from a single staff, rename them for you, and show only the music relevant to each player, using a new "staff filter" feature.
From the 2025 NAMM Show, a conversation with Oriol López Calle, the founder of My Sheet Music Transcriptions, about his service, approaches to transcribing and music preparation, and rapid technological innovations in the field.
Before music notation software, there was hand engraving. And before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news. But going to a theatre to watch a newsreel about music engraving?
From the 2025 NAMM Show, a conversation with Sam Butler, Avid’s director of product management, about Sibelius's new decondensing parts feature, the TEC award for the Android version, and the direction of the industry.
At the 2025 NAMM Show, Steinberg's John Barron discusses Dorico's renewed presence at the show, and its recent updates and developments.
At the 2025 NAMM Show, Muse Group's Martin Keary takes in his first appearance at the show, discusses recent and future MuseScore developments, and expounds on his philosophy of software design and the user experience.
At the 2025 NAMM Show, Oriol López Calle, the founder of My Sheet Music Transcriptions, talks about his thriving service, approaches to transcribing and music preparation, and rapid technological innovations.
At the 2025 NAMM Show, Avid's Sam Butler reflects on the past year of progress and industry news, the path forward, and breaks down Sibelius's marquee new feature, decondensing parts from a score staff.
A whirlwind day of NAMM 2025 coverage with an overview of the show, and the people and products being showcased on the floor of the exhibition.
As the 2025 NAMM Show gets underway, Avid is previewing a new decondensing parts feature in Sibelius, and speech-to-text AI technology in Pro Tools. Steinberg is launching a sale with up to 40% off products, including Dorico.
MakeMusic has made all of its Finale fonts available for anyone to download, for free, independently of Finale itself. This includes not just the "Finale" SMuFL fonts introduced in Finale 27, but the older fonts as well, such as the Maestro, Engraver, and Jazz fonts.
Steinberg has released Dorico 5.1.80, a minor update to Dorico 5, with improvements on how VST plug-ins are accounted for during the application launch sequence, as well as more than 40 bug fixes.
The 2025 NAMM Show will take place from Thursday, January 23 through Saturday, January 25, 2025, at the Anaheim Convention Center. We’ll have coverage from the show; here’s what to expect.
Notable personnel changes at MakeMusic and Avid: Grégory Dell'Era has left his position as president at Alfred Music and MakeMusic, and Justin Tokke's position at Avid as senior product designer for Sibelius has been eliminated.
Today, we can enjoy lossless streaming anywhere we go… but getting here wasn’t easy. Our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz chart the 150-year history of audio mediums, from cylinders made of tin foil and wax, to vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CDs, and mp3s.
Graphical MIDI Tools (GMT), the ingenious plug-in for Sibelius that allows the user to manipulate MIDI information in the score in a graphical manner, is now available in a free tier, with basic features that may be used for an infinite time.
[[“Feature“,”Lite Edition”,”Full Edition”],[“Automation Tabs“,”2″,”12”],[“CC controllers“,”#7 (volume) and #64 (panning)”,”All CCs”],[“Pitch bend automation“,”\u274c”,”\u2705″],[“Tempo module“,”\u274c”,”\u2705″],[“Transport bar“,”Basic”,”Full”],[“Phantom notes“,”\u274c”,”\u2705″],[“Hit points“,”\u274c”,”\u2705″]]
Music scanning technology has existed for decades, and yet in many ways is still barely out of infancy. But that could soon change as classic algorithm-based desktop programs converge with newer mobile apps and web-based machine learning tools.
MuseScore Studio 4.4.4 addresses issues in the areas of engraving, usability, import and exporting, and stability. In addition, a built-in check for corrupt files has been implemented.
A review of six music scanning products that run the gamut from machine-learning web tools, to mobile apps, to desktop software: Newzik, Soundslice, PlayScore 2, Sheet Music Scanner, SmartScore 64 Pro 64 NE, and ScanScore Professional.
Using PDF Expert and its new Copilot AI assistant to wade through thousands of pages of the Dorico and Sibelius references, with promising results.
All the Black Friday deals in the world of music notation software and related technology, so you can make the most of your holiday spending budget, and still have plenty of time to take advantage of some serious savings.
We take stock of the year's updates to the music notation software products MuseScore, Dorico, and Sibelius, and then do some Black Friday shopping for deals in related (and not-so-related) technology.
Dorico 5.1.70 brings updates in the areas of note input, printing, project templates, and tuplets. Additionally, more than 40 bugs have been fixed.
Cubase 14 offers a Dorico-based score editor that can be capable of producing a score that looks like it belongs on a music stand.
The Scoring Express templates for Dorico and Sibelius now come with more video help tutorials and, in the Theatre & Studio templates, a corresponding annotated example file. Various new features and fixes are also part of this update.
The Notation Express plugin that connects the Stream Deck to Sibelius is improved to reduce the frequency of pop-up messages the user receives during a session. Sibelius Ultimate 2024.10 is required. There are several other updates to both the Dorico and Sibelius profiles.
Sibelius 2024.10 improves MusicXML importing, adds a new feature for quickly notating glissandi, and brings official macOS Sequoia support, among other improvements and bug fixes.
MuseScore Studio 4.4.3 addresses issues in the areas of stability, score interaction, file saving and reopening, text layout, engraving, playback, MusicXML import, and accessibility. Various issues related to Qt have also been addressed on Windows.
Notation Express Keypad is a series of familiar numeric keypad layouts running on Stream Deck Mobile Pro, to make controlling Dorico and Sibelius from your phone quick and fun.
Dorico 5.1.60 adds support for macOS Sequoia, accommodations for Finale-like behavior during note input, and improved MusicXML import by supporting system and frame breaks by default. Among other improvements, condensing on larger flows has been made faster.
Composer and music tech professor Ben Fuhrman joins us to discuss the collegiate educational experience from a music recording and production perspective.
Cantorum is a font that allows the user to easily input plainchant notation into Dorico using simple combinations of letters and numbers.
Wouldn't you like to have Stream Deck profiles for Cubase and Logic Pro? You can — on Notation Central, we're partnering with SideshowFX to offer their profiles to customers.
MuseScore Studio 4.4.2 addresses stability issues, fixes a problem with online functionality, improves playback quality, and includes several other enhancements and fixes in various areas.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS Sequoia (macOS 15): How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore Studio, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system and hardware.
The MuseScore Studio 4.4.1 update addresses 50 bug fixes and stability improvements, including some caused by the switch to Qt 6, the cross-platform application development framework.
MuseScore Studio 4.4 introduces integrated support for a new percussion playback library, Muse Drumline, tailored for marching band composition and arranging. Engraving improvements abound in the areas of hairpins, dynamics, accidentals, beams, text, and more.
MakeMusic has ended development and availability of Finale, its flagship music notation software, and has partnered with Steinberg to offer Dorico Pro at a deeply discounted exclusive price.
Sibelius 2024.8 brings more features to Android, and new playback features in all mobile Sibelius platforms. The Sibelius Cloud Sharing experience is also refreshed, with transposition, printing, downloading, full-screen view, and page layout views among the enhancements.
A Muse Hub update transforms the application from a delivery method for in-house products and playback libraries to a platform that offers purchasing third-party playback options in MuseScore Studio, audio tools, and audio samples.
Ties in Finale can be a knotty endeavor, but we won't string you along. Untangle them, and their methods of entry, editing, and manipulation, in this installment of the Conquering Finale video tutorial series.
Dorico 5.1.50 brings better automatic chord symbol playback, and engraving improvements for barlines, bar numbers, hairpins, instrument changes, and multi-bar rests, among other areas. In addition, more than 50 bugs have been fixed since the last release.
The Stream Deck Mobile app has been updated so that it can connect directly to the computer via USB, instead of relying on WiFi.
Summer is here! We have everything you need to catch up on your summer reading, re-listening (to podcasts), and reductions (in price, via a cool sale).
Proper score formatting can make a dramatic difference in readability. We take a look at two of those formatting techniques — condensing scores and adding oversized time signatures — and how to incorporate them into MuseScore.
Sibelius 2024.6 introduces native Apple silicon support for the first time. Other improvements in this release include updates to MIDI copy and paste; ManuScript updates; and a number of bug fixes in the areas of clefs, ties, score subsets, and house styles.
Using the EastWest Hollywood Choirs library and their built-in WordBuilder 2 engine, you can assemble words, enabling your choir passages to sing text in Sibelius.
Hal Leonard and Muse Group have officially launched MuseClass, a music education-focused product featuring an automated assessment tool called AutoGrade. MuseClass is designed for use with grades 6-12 in a US music education environment.
The 2024 MOLA Conference in Cleveland was a rocking success. The second annual tech fair began a four-day convergence of performance librarians, publishers, technology vendors, industry experts, and more, in this important area of music preparation and production.
Discussions from the 2024 MOLA Conference, along with an excerpt from the opening tech fair session, "Putting Technology into Practice in the Music Library".
Sibelius is available on Android and Chromebook. As with the mobile versions already on iOS and iPadOS, subscribers to a Sibelius tier have access to Sibelius across any device, desktop or mobile.
The 2024.5 Graphical MIDI Tools (GMT) update adds support for graphical hit points directly to the GMT interface, which can be used to complement the existing hit point feature in Sibelius.
A tutorial for using MIDI time code via the free VidPlayMTC tool to synchronize video with playback in Finale on Mac and Windows, resembling an in-app video player experience.
Apple's transcript feature in its Podcasts app on iOS, iPadOS, and Mac makes it easy to view and follow along with a transcript of your favorite podcast.
The MuseScore Studio 4.3 release is centered around enhancing playback and setting the table for future updates. There are additional improvements in the areas of clefs, key signatures, guitar tablature, MusicXML, sharing to MuseScore.com, and more.
Sibelius doesn't make it obvious or easy to place movement-ending text like "attacca" below the system, but it is possible. Here's how.
The Lelandia music fonts for Sibelius have been updated. This is a minor update, with a few fixes for clefs and dynamic text.
The X (formerly Twitter) accounts of NYC Music Services, which include Scoring Notes, NYC Music Services, and Notation Central, will no longer be actively used or monitored, effective immediately.
Sibelius 2023.8 adds an option for repeating the most recently executed command via the Redo function, improves the automatically generated chord symbol completion feature, and resolves a number of outstanding items.
Finale's possibilities are truly astronomical, and its settings can seem like a black hole. Jason Loffredo boldly navigates the Finale frontier of space — music space, that is — with a down-to-Earth explanation of its constellation of features to help you reach for the stars.
Avid has announced that it will be acquired by the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) in a $1.4 billion deal.
Finale has a dedicated tool for resizing the noteheads, notes, staves, systems, or pages of your score. We'll show you all the ways to use it, plus other ways to scale the size of items like accidentals, mid-measure clefs, grace notes, lyrics, and chord symbols.
Using Sibelius Effectively: A Guide to Sibelius Ultimate condenses years of experience and expertise using Sibelius into a thoughtful, practical 80-page ebook. Written in an easy-to-follow, engaging style, its focus is on helping you produce quality music notation.
MuseScore 4.1 includes the ability to customize ornaments, harp pedaling, guitar capo, better dynamics, an upgrade to the playback engine, new auxiliary channel strips in the mixer, and performance improvements.
Summer is here! We have everything you need to catch up on your summer reading, re-listening (to podcasts), and reductions (in price, via a cool sale).
Elgato has released Stream Deck Mobile 2.0, a major update to its mobile platform that supports iPads natively, including the full 32-button layout for Stream Deck XL profiles like Notation Express XL for Sibelius and Dorico.
Sibelius 2023.6 introduces automatic chord symbol completion based on built-in AI technology and trained on several data sets of classical music. As you enter chord symbols, Sibelius will suggest the most likely chord based on the surrounding music.
Faber Music has published Behind Bars: General Conventions, the first section of Elaine Gould's industry-standard music notation reference book, as a separate paperback edition.
Wallander Instruments has released NotePerformer 4.1.0, addressing several issues in both the core NotePerformer product and the NotePerformer Playback Engine (NPPE).
The 2023 MOLA conference in Berlin began with the first-ever Tech Fair on June 2, 2023: a full day of panel discussions, vendor exhibits, demonstrations, and spontaneous cross-currents.
Dorico 5 is out with the inclusion of more SMuFL music fonts; speedier note input workflows; playback enhancements such as scrubbing, space and stage templates, pitch contour emphasis, MIDI trigger regions, and Groove Agent SE; an instrument editor; and a host of other worthwhile enhancements.
The Scoring Express Jazz package of templates and libraries for Finale is now available, adding to the popular Chamber and Theatre & Studio packages, and bringing it on par with the versions already available for Sibelius and Dorico.
Apple will be releasing iPad versions of their digital audio workstation (DAW) Logic Pro as well as the non-linear video editor (NLE) Final Cut Pro.
Lelandia is a newly created music font available for use in Sibelius that you can get from Notation Central. Lelandia was migrated from Leland, which is the default music font used in newer versions of MuseScore. Leland is inspired by the look of the SCORE engraving program, created by Leland Smith.
Sibelius 2023.5 introduces the ability to hide individual notes that appear in the same chord in one voice and create dynamic parts sourced from one staff. The update also adds the option to export and view a list of keyboard shortcuts, as well as other improvements.
NotePerformer 4 is available, adding to its own modeled sound library the ability to play back many of the most popular, premium orchestral sample libraries in same user-friendly way as one can with the built-in NotePerformer sounds.
Detective Jason Loffredo is back with the Conquering Finale video series. His "Special Tools Investigation" will dissect each one of these tools, perform forensic analysis, and present evidence that you have access to a powerful array of engraving tools for individual notes and measures.
You may know all about writing music. But what about your rights and music? Attorney and music publisher Jim Kendrick expertly steers us through the intersection of creativity, copyright, and technology. A transcript of one of our most informative podcast episodes.
MOLA is presenting a webinar called Pedals, Pitches, and Pixels: An Introduction to Harp Notation. This session will be jam-packed with resources about writing for the harp and how to get results in the software, with information from top players, librarians, and music preparers.
Have you ever listened to an episode of the Scoring Notes podcast and wished you could ask a question directly on the show? Now's your chance to do so, and we may feature it on our next episode.
The MOLA 2023 conference will see the debut of the Tech Fair, on Friday, June 2, 2023. The fair will be an opportunity for technology-focused presentations and exhibits, especially those relevant to performance librarians, publishers and musicians.
Steinberg has released Dorico 4.3.30. This update solves a problem whereby closing a project that used the HALion Sonic 7 instrument would cause the MediaBay server to shut down; several other fixes are included.
"Part"-y on with this installment of the Conquering Finale video tutorial series, where we discuss linked parts, how they work, and how to manage them effectively within your Finale documents.
Finale has long been at its most powerful when combined with third-party tools. If you have basic coding skills and have ever wished you could automate Finale yourself, check out RGP Lua, a free plug-in that uses Lua scripts to interact with Finale documents.
Please show your support and head over to the NYC Music Services page at the FedEx Small Business Grant contest, and click the big orange button that says "Like This Entry". Thank you!
Sibelius 2023.2 refines score subsets and dynamic guitar staves, allowing them to behave more independently for greater flexibility. Elsewhere, the ManuScript language can export audio in all bit depths and sample rates.
Graphical MIDI Tools for Sibelius is updated to version 2.1. This significant update adds a transport bar directly to the GMT interface. It also adds several new editing and navigation features.
John Mlynczak has been appointed to lead NAMM as its next president and CEO. John has previously held executive positions with Hal Leonard and Noteflight, the web-based music notation and creation tool.
Steinberg has released Dorico 4.3.20. This update focuses on bug fixes and a few small improvements to the Key Editor, MIDI import, and text enclosures. Dorico for iPad is also updated.
Real estate is valuable, and that's true with digital real estate. Adding a second portable display is easier and cheaper than you might think, and is a good investment in your productivity when working with music notation, or any software.
In music scores and parts, page numbers and headers are some of the most underappreciated and overlooked elements of what appears on the page. When you stop to think about it, it's no mystery why that's the case.
A review and chronology of a visit to the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. It is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for anyone, from the music neophyte to the most credentialed professional musician.
Elaine Gould, senior music editor at Faber Music and author of the music notation reference Behind Bars, will retire at the end of September 2023. As a result, Faber has announced that the company will be hiring for the role of managing editor in contemporary music.
Nepomuk is a text font inspired by the type commonly found in music plate engraving from the late 19th to the mid 20th-century. It's available on Notation Central. Learn all about its origins and design.
How many versions of Handel's Messiah are there? It's hard to say, but by using Dorico's flows and condensing features, it's possible to prepare a version to suit your particular performance.
Sibelius 2022.12 introduces score subsets, which make it possible to have different configurations and layouts of the score, independent of the full score and parts. There are new barline options in this update, too.
MuseScore 4 is out. It's the first update in nearly two years, with major improvements to the user interface, layout, engraving, playback features — and a brand-new sound library to top it all off.
The Notation Central Black Friday sale continues with November 2, the premium music font with more than 1400 symbols for Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico, which mimics the slightly weathered look of traditional music engraving.
MakeMusic has released Dolet 8.2 for Sibelius, its latest version of the free plug-in that writes MusicXML files, and the first version of the plug-in to be released under the permissive MIT License.
Steinberg has released Dorico 4.3.10. This update focuses mostly on bug fixes, although there are a few improvements to the Key Editor. Dorico for iPad is also updated.
MakeMusic has released Finale version 27.3, adding native installation of eight of the most popular and powerful JW Tools. Longstanding issues affecting voiced linked parts and other areas have also been addressed.
We kick off the Notation Central Black Friday sale with Scoring Express, the collection of professional templates based on the same templates we use at NYC Music Services, for 22% off.
All the Black Friday deals in the world of music notation notation software and related technology, so you can make the most of your holiday spending budget, and still have plenty of time to take advantage of some serious savings.
Dorico 4.3 is out with more powerful controls in the Key Editor and a robust system for automatically generating notes on staves from chord symbols. There's also improvements in the areas of engraving, note input, and editing, and the iPad version is updated, too.
Perfect page layout is essential to creating quality output from music notation software. Finale offers a multitude of options to format the music on the page, but understanding where the options are is important in the quest to conquer Finale.
Need to make a clarinet part in a different transposition than the original part? Or a treble clef baritone part linked to the bass clef euphonium part? Here are the step-by-step instructions to set it all up in Dorico.
A transcript of one of our most popular podcast episodes. If you’ve ever needed to open a music notation file in a different program, you’ve relied on MusicXML. Michael Good tells us how it happened.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS Ventura (macOS 13) and Apple Silicon-powered Macs: How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system and hardware.
Sibelius 2022.10 adds a command for making a part from a selection of instruments in the score, or one instrument that's part of a group. This update also automatically stylizes dynamic text when entered in the Expression text style.
Ian Blick shows how to score a song using Emvoice One and Dorico, how to add vibrato using a plug-in inside a DAW to give the sung line more expression, and also how to use the audio from a video file to synchronize with Dorico.
When Aaron Copland thought of the Far West, he probably didn't have Wisconsin in mind, but Milwaukee was the perfect location to "road test" the new edition of Rodeo.
Need to make a clarinet part in a different transposition than the original part? Or a treble clef baritone part linked to the bass clef euphonium part? Here are the step-by-step instructions to set it all up in Finale.
Sibelius 2022.9 adds an additional way of labeling staff names that effectively allows groups of instruments and individual staves to be named separately, a long-requested feature.
When creating parts from a grouped instrument, Sibelius will only create one part with all of the staves, instead of individual parts for each staff. Here's how to create separate parts from an instrument with more than one staff.
Need to make a clarinet part in a different transposition that the original part? Or a treble clef baritone part linked to the bass clef euphonium part? Here are the step-by-step instructions to set it all up in Sibelius.
Let's get up to speed on some recent developments in the music notation software industry, like software updates, Michael Good's retirement, the next W3C group meeting, Sibelius team licensing, and more.
The importance of the Staff Tool in Finale cannot be underestimated. This very large series of videos will be well worth your time, because a deep understanding of how staves work is a critical part of "conquering Finale."
Sibelius 2022.7 adds dynamic guitar staves, which dynamically link a guitar notation staff with a guitar tab staff in the score at the same time. The update also includes more instruments, more templates, and other improvements and fixes.
The Score System Divider plug-in, included with Finale, inserts or removes system separation marks between staff systems on the same page. Here's how it works, along with a little history of this useful creation.
A review of Odla, a hardware controller for MuseScore and Dorico, that aims for "music you can touch" by directly modeling the five-line staff itself.
The Dorico 4.2 update makes it easier to edit the music on drum sets and other percussion kits directly in the Key Editor. Among other improvements, Dorico 4.2 also improves the way the Key Editor works in linked mode.
The next update to Finale, v.27.3, will for the first time include a set of powerful plug-ins from developer Jari Williamsson, without requiring you to separately download and install them.
Summer is here! Time for us to take a short break, and time for you to explore Scoring Notes.
Measure numbers in Finale are a bit complex, incredibly flexible, and maybe a little over-engineered. But with this video tutorial series, you don't need to choose between the red or blue pill when it comes to working with measure numbers; you can have it all.
Steinberg has released Dorico 4.1.10. This update focuses mostly on bug fixes, although there are a few new feature improvements in the areas of staff spacing, flow headings, printing and playing, and the user interface.
Here's a video tutorial from Thomas Goss of Orchestration Online on the subject of correctly labeling instrument names and numbers in your score, and its importance to the orchestra staff and librarian, with a complete transcript.
We're very excited to announce the availability of all-new Scoring Express professional music notation templates for Dorico and Finale, as well as updates to the Sibelius versions.
From June 3-6, 2022 in Philadelphia, MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians held their 40th annual conference, and by all accounts it was a huge success.
Three music conferences, one weekend, all in the Scoring Notes universe: MOLA, NAMM, and League of American Orchestras. We'll be at MOLA presenting sessions and talking to the best orchestra librarians in the business.
Dorico 4.1 further refines the Key Editor, improves the user interface with more color options, overhauls the way lyrics are treated, prints selected flows in a layout, and adds new effects plug-ins and a library export function. Plus, a lifetime unlock option for Dorico for iPad.
With Dorico for iPad 2.3, users can access all the app’s premium features with a single in-app purchase via a new "Lifetime Unlock" option. This update also keeps pace with the newest version of Dorico on the desktop (version 4.1).
MakeMusic has released Dolet 8.1 for Sibelius, its latest version of the free plug-in that writes MusicXML files that can then be read and used in more than 200 applications that support the interchange format.
Sibelius 2022.5 is out, making it easier to apply a header or footer on a per-section basis, such as a song or movement. Also added is the ability to define or change the content of a wildcard directly in the score.
Measure for measure, this video tutorial series sets the bar for working with Finale's Measure Tool. From the basics of the Measure Attributes dialog and custom barlines, to beat and note positioning, group barlines, display options, split measures, and more, it's all here!
Ian Blick illustrates how to make the Emvoice One voice synth emulate the voice of a trained singer, adding more realism to a score which has been produced in Dorico Pro.
If you use music notation software — or any software where you need to edit text — you will very quickly encounter the concept of point size. But have you ever stopped to consider what point size actually means?
Before you do any work on parts, you'll want to get one basic parameter from the librarian: the paper size their orchestra prefers for their instrument parts. Here's a video tutorial from Thomas Goss of Orchestration Online on the subject, with a complete transcript.
The latest update for Sibelius for Mobile adds transposing for both staff and system selections, along with other improvements. Separately, Avid is once again bringing back upgrades for perpetual license users who have older versions.
Robert Puff, one of the foremost music preparers working in concert and commercial music, and music notation software expert whose advice was available on his highly-regarded industry web site Of Note, died on Thursday, April 21, 2022.
There's nothing like a good run through the alphabet, from A to Z, and then some. Here's what pressing each of those 26 letters does in Dorico.
There are lots of ways to get things done in Sibelius. But what could be more elementary than the ABCs? Here's what pressing each of those 26 letters does on their own.
As we head into a holiday weekend, it's time to enjoy another notable occasion: the fifth anniversary of the re-launch of Scoring Notes.
Dorico for iPad 2.2 adds Open in Place, bringing a more desktop-like file opening and saving process to the app and making it easier to handle files when moving between different devices.
For a limited time, all NorFonts distributed through Notation Central are on sale at up to 60% off. This is the beautiful and growing catalog of music and text fonts by Nor Eddine Bahha, who has fully embraced SMuFL font design, giving Dorico and Finale v27 users more distinctive options.
A complete video tutorial series on everything to do with repeats in Finale. From setting up basic repeat structures, to endings, bracket adjustments, text repeats like D.S. al Coda, complex scenarios, and more, it's all here!
Saving users from the tedium of actually thinking about music, today Avid and MakeMusic both released new versions of Sibelius and Finale, their flagship notation software, respectively, that composes music automatically. A secret Dorico project is also underway.
The most recent updates to PlayScore 2 support lyrics, guitar chords, and multi-measure rests. A count-in feature, better rehearsal instrument support, and more improvements are also included. Plus, a preview of what's to come.
The 1.2 update of Ambitus, the font for pitch incipits, scales, and range diagrams that can be used in any word processor or music notation software, adds octave lines and parenthesized notes.
Dorico 4.0.30 is out. It reinstates the tempo and MIDI pitch bend editors in Play mode, fixes a performance issue with VST plug-ins, and improves engraving features in the areas of barlines, staff labels, and chord diagrams.
Here's a solution to correct when a cautionary time signature is uncomfortably hanging outside the edge of the page margin in Sibelius.
Sibelius 2022.3 adds support for Windows 11 and macOS 12. The UI graphics have been changed, the manuscript papers are updated with some helpful new behaviors, and the ManuScript plug-in language gains more functions.
Ambitus is a font that can be used to quickly create musical hints, like vocal ranges or initial pitches of instruments like timpani (“pitch incipits”). It can be used in standard word processors as well as in music notation software.
Dorico 4.0.20 is out with improvements to the jump bar, a quick tool selector for the Key Editor, and easier synchronization in the Library Manager, among other fixes. On Mac, Quick Look and full Spotlight support is added.
A reliable way to actually create true 100% black output in PDFs from Finale, and a Keyboard Maestro script to automate the process for an entire set of parts.
Finale version 27.2 runs natively on Apple silicon Macs for the first time. All default documents and document styles in v27.2 are now SMuFL-based, and, in a welcome surprise, there is a fully revamped SMuFL-compliant jazz default file and document style.
A complete video tutorial series on everything to do with chord symbols in Finale. Manual input, MIDI input, staff analysis, chord definition, alternate and capo chords, suffix editing, fretboards, positioning, styles, document options, and playback — it's all here!
Steinberg has released Dorico 2.0 for iPad, a major update to the app that shares many features with its desktop counterpart. Many of the additions in Dorico 4 are now available on the mobile platform, as well as a bonus: freehand annotation for marking up scores in Read mode.
Steinberg has released Dorico 4.0.10, the first revision to Dorico 4, with nearly 100 bug fixes and several improvements, mainly in interacting with the Key Editor.
Notation Express for Dorico 4 has been completely rebuilt to take advantage of Dorico 4’s ability to communicate directly with Stream Deck.
The latest update to Sibelius for Mobile for iOS and iPadOS supports dynamic parts for the first time. The update also includes a few usability enhancements.
How a music printing project gets done flawlessly, from beginning to end, thanks to expert communication and attention to detail from the music preparer — and a few tricks on the printing side.
MakeMusic has released Dolet 8 for Sibelius, its latest version of the free plug-in that writes MusicXML files that can then be read and used in more than 200 applications that support the interchange format.
Dorico 4 is available. This massive update brings features first seen on the iPad, like a Key Editor in Write mode and a revamped Play mode. From smart MIDI import to a library manager with granular house style control, to better score setup and more, this update touches every corner.
Conquer the powerful Lyrics tool in Finale and you'll be a master. We start with the "Type Into Score" feature and go on to much more in this series of video tutorials. Hyphens, spaces, lyric elisions, editing, clearing and deleting lyrics, copying and cloning lyrics… and that's just the first of eight videos.
Still using Dorico 3.0? We provide a helpful analysis for the smart shopper in light of Steinberg's "PSA" about the pricing for the forthcoming Dorico 4 release and a limited-time money-saving opportunity if you intend to upgrade.
Music engraving dates back well before the computer age, but it's easy to forget that the computer-aided portion of the history spans back a good long time. We summarize that history and explore a few key moments leading up to the present.
Get three free months of Backblaze, the simple and affordable backup solution for Mac and PC. Check off that new year's resolution early by getting serious about backing up all your hard work!
The StaffPad “Audio Update” brings new features like audio staves, tempo mapping, adaptive audio to keep your audio in sync with your score tempo, royalty-free production sounds and loops, and studio-quality effects, along with more improvements.
A major upgrade is out for Graphical MIDI Tools for Sibelius, which allows the user to manipulate MIDI information in the score in a graphical manner. It has been completely overhauled as an application that runs within Sibelius to provide a piano roll window.
Avid has introduced a new licensing system with the intent of making it easier for a single user to activate and use Sibelius on multiple computers. Sibelius 2021.12 for both desktop and mobile apps is out; headlining the improvements is a new way of entering percussion notation.
Dorico 4, to come in early 2022, will be the first application to use Steinberg's new identity-based licensing system, which will enable single-user activation on two computers simultaneously.
Understanding how expressions work in Finale is essential for creating dynamics, tempo indications, and so much more. These detailed video tutorials cover every aspect of expressions, including design, placement, positioning, playback, as well as how to transfer them between files and get creative with their use.
Sibelius Ultimate comes with wide range of instruments for playback, but did you know that you can mix Sibelius 7 sounds and third party sounds in the same score? Here's how — plus, a coupon code for more tutorial videos.
Avid is bringing back discounted upgrades, or "reinstatements", for Sibelius customers with a perpetual license to get current with the latest updates and support — but the offer is only good through December 31, 2021.
MakeMusic is seeking beta testers for its free Dolet 8 plug-in for Sibelius. Although Sibelius has its own built-in MusicXML export function, Dolet exports MusicXML differently from the native Sibelius feature. This is the first update to Dolet since 2016.
All the 2021 Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers in music notation software and related tech products that we know about, all in one place!
The latest update to Sibelius for Mobile brings step-time note entry via a MIDI keyboard. Support for pickup bars, merging bars, and better keyboard integration round out this update.
The Finale v27.1 update brings deeper SMuFL integration into Finale. It is now possible to convert legacy non-SMuFL-based documents to SMuFL-compliant documents, and to import font metadata directly into Finale's document settings. Plug-ins and libraries are also updated to use SMuFL.
Maestria is a technology that allows Newzik to not just display a score, but also to understand it musically. The resulting score is a LiveScore, which includes the ability to view the score as with any other, and also the ability to play it back and export it.
The W3C Music Notation Community Group held its 2021 annual meeting. The major discussion topic was the status of MNX, the new music notation format. In addition, the group reviewed recent achievements such as MusicXML 4.0, SMuFL 1.4, and a new documentation generator.
Apple's Shortcuts, with its easy drag-and-drop interface, is the future of automation on all their platforms. Learn how to use it to automate actions in apps like Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico.
Fender Musical Instruments Corp. announced that it intends to acquire PreSonus Audio Electronics, subject to regulatory approval. PreSonus is best known to Scoring Notes readers for Notion, its music scoring software for Mac, Windows, and iOS.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS Monterey (macOS 12) and M1-powered Macs: How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system and hardware.
Sibelius has come to the iPhone, with all of the same features that appear on the iPad version. Panorama view is enabled on mobile along with some other improvements, and Cloud Sharing gets a new setting to allow downloading.
If you have found yourself stymied in your quest for the One True Way when customizing your chord symbol suffixes in Sibelius, we can help. Chord symbols are highly customizable — you just need to know where to look and understand how it works.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with Windows 11: How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion are faring on Microsoft's latest operating system.
Sibelius 2021.9 brings updates in the areas of searching, the Keypad, ManuScript, and a handful of other areas, including features first seen on the iPad version.
Smart Shapes in Finale are lines, trills, slurs, octave lines, hairpins, pedal lines and other objects that "smartly" adjust their positioning based on the layout the score and the items to which they are attached.
How to prepare learning materials like quizzes or scale sheets using music notation software, whether you're printing traditional worksheets or creating assignments for students to complete in the software directly.
In Finale, an “articulation” is any character from a font set (or a shape) that gets attached to a note or rest. Learn everything you need to know and more about how to create, change, swap, and position articulations, along with some info specifically for Finale v27 and SMuFL articulations.
Bob Zawalich takes us on a tour of a mega-plug-in library of routines that can be treated the same as commands in Sibelius, and gives an overview of the kinds of things these commands will enable you to do without having to go directly into ManuScript code.
A solution to the persistent issue of PDFs generated from Sibelius files on a Mac appearing incorrectly when printed from Adobe Acrobat.
From the creator of MusGlyphs and MusAnalysis comes MusFrets — a text font that allows the user to type guitar chord diagrams into a word processor or other software.
The popular PDF Batch Utilities, available from Notation Central on a pay-what-you-wish basis, have been updated recently to fix several issues that appeared on macOS Big Sur (macOS 11).
Dorico for iPad 1.1 removes the 12-player limitation for subscribers. There are many smaller but notable tweaks and bug fixes in this update, totaling nearly 50 in all.
In Finale you can use up to four different independent lines of notes and rests, known as “layers”, per bar. We layer on the knowledge in these tutorials, starting with the basic properties of layers and how to navigate between them, and then move on to hiding and showing layers and working with their advanced options.
Sibelius for iPad has arrived. We take a comprehensive first look at what you can expect from the experience, including multi-touch gestures, the revamped Create menu, and new pitch correction and chord input tools.
Dorico for iPad has arrived. This major release for Apple’s tablet platform brings over all the familiar elements of the desktop music notation software program, along with some new features and ways of working.
File this in the (official) rumors department: We appear to be in for a major week in the world of music notation software. Both Dorico and Sibelius plan on making major announcements within a day of each other.
You hear it at the start of every Scoring Notes podcast episode. But have you ever wondered who wrote the theme and how this bouncy tune came to kick off every discussion we have about music notation software and related technology?
When it comes to expert Dorico users, there are few that are more so than Leo Nicholson. Spanning 29 separate videos and lasting a total of just over two hours, his "Dorico Basics" course is designed to guide you through all of Dorico's fundamentals, and more.
Finale's Tuplet tool is just the starting point of this helpful series of videos that deals with everything to do with tuplets. From default and custom positioning and nested tuplets, to custom font and placement styles, we show you how to "tupletify" your music in Finale.
If you're an engraving stickler, the default appearance of octave lines in Sibelius will leave you feeling frustrated for several reasons. Here's how to improve how they look and "go with Gould".
It's summertime! Time to get outdoors, hit the beach, relax, and … go to school! At Notation Central, there are video tutorials, templates, and ebooks in the Sibelius Summer School Sale going on through June 30, 2021.
A review of Finale version 27. Headlining the new features are deep support for two open standards: Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL), and MusicXML. Tighter SmartMusic integration, playback improvements, and user interface enhancements round out what's new.
MusGlyphs has been updated to version 2.1 with the introduction of MusGlyphs Text, a version that allows the user to type ordinary text and musical symbols without needing to switch between two different fonts. Other updates include enclosures, more time signatures and clefs, straight flags, and more.
Extend your keyboard shortcuts on a Mac by using BetterTouchTool, an app which allows the user to define a trigger, and then associate one or more actions that will be launched when that trigger is detected.
Finale's HyperScribe tool is a method of recording music into the software in real-time. We will show you how to get the setup correct and give you a few pointers for getting the most accurate transcription possible, along with lots of power user features.
Newzik has announced Maestria, a new optical music recognition technology that uses artificial intelligence to become more accurate over time, as well as a new product called LiveScores, which use Maestria to create interactive scores.
MusAnalysis is a font that allows inputting of Roman numerals, inversion numbers, voice leading lines, functional analysis symbols, and lines directly into a music notation program (or other software), using either lyric or text entry.
StaffPad, the pen-and-touch music notation app, has been acquired by Muse Group, the company that owns Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, and Audacity. StaffPad co-founder David William Hearn will remain in charge of the product. Audio staves and transcription are planned for future updates.
Time to get even speedier with this series of videos on Finale's Speedy Entry tool. Everything from notes, rests, ties, tuplets, grace notes, chromatic alterations and many advanced notation options can be controlled from the Speedy Entry frame.
The company that owns MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar has announced its acquisition of Audacity, the popular free audio editing software. The company is now called Muse Group, and its portfolio also encompasses MuseClass and Tonebridge.
A live video presentation of the Scoring Notes podcast on the topic of music notation software is just one of many sessions planned for the MOLA 2021 Annual Conference.
Finale's Simple Entry tool is actually very powerful. Learn how to enter notes, rests, dots, ties, accidentals, grace notes, tuplets, and much more — even articulations, expressions, clefs, time signatures and key signatures, all right from this tool.
Composer Jessie Montgomery interweaves classical music with vernacular songs, improvisation, and language, presenting exciting challenges for a music copyist or engraver. Here are some of those challenges and how the results were achieved.
Using an iPad as a score reader in performance is great, but its backlight looks weird from the audience. Fortunately, there are tools and settings on your iPad that can help, in apps like forScore and Newzik.
MusGlyphs is a font that makes it easier to type a wide variety of musical symbols directly into a word processor, combined with text fonts, without needing to adjust baselines or point sizes.
When preparing music, you always make sure what goes on the page is pitch-perfect. How about what goes on the bill? A transcript from our popular podcast episode on the topic of how to charge for your time and skill.
Articulations in Sibelius are toggles — like on/off switches on a lighting panel. Once you know that, you can add and remove them more easily than you may have thought.
You can do just about anything with time signatures in Finale, if you know how to tame the beast. In this video tutorial series, start with the basics and then learn about composite, alternating and independent time signatures, how to make them film score "oversize" style, pickup measures, and more.
Have you listened to some contemporary music with irrational time signatures and now want to make use of split tuplets, like 2/3 of a triplet? Today we're going to look at creating these in Sibelius and Dorico.
In lots of ways, the data you create in forScore after importing scores is more valuable than the scores themselves. So when you upgrade to a new iPad, you'll want to take every piece of your forScore library with you. It’s not hard to do.
Sibelius's Commands feature extends the program's capabilities in many ways. If you're willing to dig in a little more, there are some tools available for you to extend it even further by building powerful automations directly within Sibelius.
Have you ever read Elaine Gould's Behind Bars and wished that you could ask her anything about music notation? You may have that chance at the ASMAC music preparation webinar on March 17, 2021.
To make a SMuFL-compliant font for use in applications like Dorico, you might think you can just put the symbols in the right places, and the font makes itself. It turns out there's a lot more to it than that — but it can be done.
Learn the key to key signatures in Finale — actually, several of them. Start with the basics and document options, then move on to keyless signatures, independent and mid-measure key signatures, and programming metatools for speed and power.
The Sibelius 2021.2 release continues the ongoing evolution of the Find in Ribbon function into an increasingly comprehensive launch bar, now called Command Search. This update also expands Sibelius's scripting and plug-in capabilities.
Steinberg has released Dorico 3.5.12. Although the odometer has barely budged, this update is significant for its official support for the latest Macs with an M1 processor under the Rosetta 2 translation environment. 3.5.12 includes a few fixes for all users, as well.
Join us for the Scoring Express Webinar, a free one-hour session where you’ll see what Scoring Express does, how to use it, and professional tips on making the most of it in your work.
Even if you've discovered the setting in Sibelius to display numbers on every bar in the parts, you're left with positioning options ranging from bad to mediocre. Let's fix this, once and for all.
Learn how to use Finale's Clef Tool and harness all of its power, including mid-measure clef changes, positioning, spacing, customizable clefs, and more.
The Score Manager is command central for your Finale document. Get to know every control on the dashboard, from file info to managing and changing instruments, setting transpositions, setting sound libraries, tablature, and more.
A little planning ahead can speed up your music preparation workflow without compromising on quality. Here's a step-by-step guide for making your next project more organized, for the benefit of copyist and client alike.
Composer and educator David MacDonald describes in detail how he teaches composition using the iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and a suite of apps, and why he can't imaging returning to the dead-tree way of doing things.
Join us for the Scoring Express Webinar, a free one-hour session where you’ll see what Scoring Express does, how to use it, and professional tips on making the most of it in your work.
A journey through engraving the entirety of The Rite of Spring from scratch into Dorico, to learn more about both Stravinsky's masterful composition and how to use the music notation software. Includes Dorico files.
Master the humble Selection Tool in Finale and you will save precious seconds every time. Multiplied by a few hundred or a few thousand times each time you use it, and it adds up.
Using Sibelius Effectively: A Guide to Sibelius Ultimate condenses years of experience and expertise using Sibelius into a thoughtful, practical 70-page ebook. Written in an easy-to-follow, engaging style, its focus is on helping you produce quality music notation.
MuseScore has released version 3.6. This release is primarily focused on engraving improvements and also introduces a new, SMuFL-compatible music font called Leland, designed by Martin Keary and Simon Smith, inspired by the legendary SCORE program.
A review of four leading optical music recognition, or "music scanning" apps, and how they work with music notation software: PlayScore 2, ScanScore, PhotoScore Ultimate, and SmartScore 64 Professional Edition. Plus links to sample files from each app that you can download and test yourself.
Navigate through Finale in the Conquering Finale video tutorial series, and learn about everything from its tool palettes to view modes.
The Scoring Express Theatre & Studio templates for Sibelius Ultimate are optimized for the demanding situations of theatrical, show, and studio use, when time is at a premium and everything needs to be presented as clearly as possible.
As December — and 2020 — nears its end, we take a moment to wish all of our Scoring Notes readers a very happy holiday season and new year.
Daniel Spreadbury returns to Scoring Notes to talk about the common set of font specifications known as the Standard Music Font Layout, or SMuFL. We get into the history of music fonts and how we got to where we are today with this essential component of music notation software technology.
Scoring Express is a collection of professional templates for Sibelius based on the same templates used at NYC Music Services. Each Scoring Express package contains manuscript papers, house styles, music and text fonts, and plug-ins — all installed in one go.
Sibelius 2020.12 is available. The new feature in this release is the long-awaited ability to import Sibelius files directly into an existing Sibelius file or template. There are other improvements in the areas of plug-ins and fonts.
Noteflight, the web-based music notation software that allows musicians to create, share, teach, sell, and purchase music, continues to innovate with updates and new product offerings, so that professionals and educators can take their inspirations and collaborate, no matter the circumstances.
Samuel Z. Solomon's book "How to Write for Percussion" is a wealth of information, guidance, opinions, and reference material on an important subject, accompanied by nine hours of quickly-paced companion videos.
All the 2020 Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers in music notation software and related tech products that we know about, all in one place!
In Sibelius, when working in a file with a score and parts, you can unintentionally break the link between the wildcards used for title and composer text. It can cause a whale of a problem, but fortunately there's a way to escape.
In this video tutorial, David MacDonald demonstrates his current workflow for creating graphic elements using the basic drawing tools in Adobe Illustrator and placing them in his scores in Sibelius.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS Big Sur (macOS 11) and M1-powered Macs: How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system and hardware.
A handy Sibelius plug-in, Replace Line Style, is the easiest way to quickly change the style of a line — such as replacing dashed crescendo hairpins with solid ones.
Managing properties of objects in Dorico is powerful and flexible. You can change properties in two modes: a global mode where the properties are immediately propagated, and a local mode where they are set in the active layout only.
Learn about Name Mangler and Moom, two apps for Mac users that automate common tasks of file renaming and screen re-sizing.
"Vote" is a public service announcement, visual art, and musical statement. It's a special arrangement of "America the Beautiful" that is apparent to anyone who "reads" music.
Learn how to import only certain elements of a Sibelius house style — such as lines, symbols and noteheads — without otherwise changing the appearance of your score.
Dorico supports creating empty staves either at the end of a part layout — sometimes referred to as "Hollywood-style" parts — or simply in order to create custom manuscript paper.
You can customize your color scheme in Sibelius in lots of ways — including making it resemble another software product entirely, if you like.
What are the best practices when preparing a score with the expectation that it will be read from a screen, not paper? This is an excellent question — one whose answer today may likely change in the coming years.
How often do you export PDFs from Sibelius? More often than you access the fretboard? Yet the fretboard has a default shortcut, and Export PDF doesn't. Let's fix that.
Sibelius 2020.9 is available with enhancements to the Focus on Staves feature, enabling new layout and formatting workflows for scores and parts. There are other improvements to MIDI and MusicXML importing, ManuScript, and accessibility.
Beginning in the 3.5 update, Dorico officially added support for note input using pitch-before-duration, fulfilling a request of many users coming from other notation software accustomed to this entry method.
Samara Ginsberg's multi-part cello arrangements of TV and movie themes have created a sensation on social media. We learn more about Samara's approach to arranging, using music notation software, and her experience playing from charts of all kinds.
A plug-in creates tuplets in Sibelius that appear to cross barlines. You can specify a tuplet starting position, a tuplet ratio and size, and some other tuplet properties, such as a tuplet bracket and number that will span the entire tuplet.
A recent release of Zoom brings high fidelity audio to the popular videoconferencing platform. The new mode improves audio quality in ways that make the platform work much better for musicians by disabling Zoom’s aggressive dynamic compression.
A plug-in automatically corrects the default length of the single slashed grace note in Sibelius, resulting in a more pleasing appearance.
We have a two-part podcast interview with composer Christopher Willis. We talk with Chris about his score to the movie "The Personal History of David Copperfield" and its fresh take on familiar musical ideas, and break down Chris’s music preparation process on a film from orchestration to copying.
Dorico offers a wide selection of horizontal lines, vertical lines and end caps, and its predefined library is comprehensive. And with the power of Dorico's line style editor, the possibilities to design your own custom line are virtually unlimited.
A comprehensive roundup of the variety of tips and plug-ins to help the notation and playback of harp passages in Sibelius.
The Norfolk Text font for Sibelius is updated with the same numerals in the most current version of the Bravura font, for a more consistent appearance both internally and with other applications that use Bravura. This is most noticeable on tuplets.
An obituary of Mary Elizabeth by Bob Zawalich. Mary Elizabeth, known as "ME", was a composer, author, teacher, and Sibelius beta tester, among many other things. She was someone that most Sibelius users likely never heard of, but she played important roles in making Sibelius what it became.
Graphical MIDI Tools (GMT) is a Sibelius plug-in that ingeniously superimposes a sequencer-like frame on any given selection, and then gives the user the ability to draw in automations to manipulate the data. Moreover, there are additional windows to adjust velocity and note duration in piano roll-like fashion.
Dorico 3.5.10, the first minor revision to Dorico 3.5, brings finesse and refinement to a wide range of the notation app’s functions in the form of feature enhancements and bug fixes.
The Mozarteum University has provided videos from everything filmed from their music engraving conference. The playlist is available on YouTube and contains 26 videos totaling approximately 17 hours of material.
Dorico has a tool called Manual Staff Visibility which allows the user to easily hide or show staves throughout a score, to mitigate instances where a page will show too much white space as a result. Learn how to use it in your score.
It's possible to make a really beautiful, usable application that produces terrible scores, and it's possible to create a terrible application that produces beautiful scores. The goal is to put those things together into a beautiful application that produces beautiful scores.
You've downloaded dozens or hundreds of Sibelius plug-ins — now how do you squeeze even more speed out of them and quickly access your favorites? One solution is Bob Zawalich's My Plugins plug-in — "the plug-in's plug-in".
When it comes to learning how to use music notation software, there's no substitute for customized, individual tutorial sessions. That's why we're excited to offer instructional training for Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico through Notation Central.
Summer is here! Time for us to take a short break, and time for you to explore Scoring Notes.
What do you get when you combine a catchy children's tune with a young person's guide to the orchestra and a lovable finned friend?
The Convert LV Symbols to LV Ties plug-in replaces LV (laissez vibrer) up and down symbols in Sibelius with native LV ties, which were introduced in the Sibelius 2020.3 update.
Numbers with Rings is a sophisticated font that can bring the beauty of many enclosure styles to your scores. Learn how to use it by setting up your document to work with it.
MakeMusic has released Finale version 26.3. In addition to a fully-translated Spanish version, this release brings support for Dark Mode on Mac, better performance while editing and scrolling, MusicXML improvements, and a handful of bug fixes.
Intelligent figured bass is one of the new features in Dorico 3.5, and that’s no empty boast. Dorico’s insistence on understanding the meaning of music symbols provides some very powerful capabilities. Let’s dive right in with a real-world task: adding figures to a Bach chorale.
Sibelius 2020.6 brings a more sophisticated method of importing MusicXML files directly into a pre-existing template. There are new options for changing the default colors, along with other updates in the areas of accessibility, ties, exporting, and more.
A clever font makes it easy to enter harp pedal settings in a musical way, in any notation program, without needing to remember the order of the pedals.
Tristan Noon's e-book Notes to Notes: The Ultimate Guide to Business in Film & TV Music is a comprehensive and approachable guide to the music business, conveyed from the perspective of real-world experience.
A simple yet powerful custom-designed Stream Deck profile for Zoom that can mute, unmute, start and stop video, screen share, recording, chat and more. Also, a Notation Express update for Dorico 3.5.
Introducing the Scoring Notes podcast, where we'll explore music notation software and related technology, talk with the interesting individuals in our field who create music with these products, and the talented people who create those tools.
Steinberg has released Dorico 3.5, a major upgrade to its scoring program. Pitch-before-duration note input, semantic figured bass, line style editors, and condensing for section players are among the dozens of new features and improvements.
We speak with Robert Piéchaud, creator of the premium November font for Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico, about the many qualities and features of the font and his efforts in music font design.
The Sibelius plug-in Create Tuplets Different Units automates the entire process of creating a tuplet where the "numerator" and "denominator" do not share an equivalent unit, such as two quarter notes in the space of three eighth notes.
We interview jazz pianist, educator, author, and musicologist Nor Eddine Bahha, whose passion for typography led to the creation of his music and text fonts, available at Notation Central.
It sounds so simple, right? Two quarter notes in the space of three eighth notes. Except… there's a bit more to it in Sibelius and Dorico.
An interview with composer, new music notation specialist and arts administrator jef chippewa about his neueweise fonts for Finale and Sibelius and his work, philosophy, and approach to music notation.
Escobar Digital is an aggregator for the digital sheet music subscription service nkoda, allowing scores from small publishers and self-published composers to appear in the nkoda catalog alongside larger publishers.
When it comes to making your score look exactly the way you want, the right fonts can make all the difference. At Notation Central, you'll find music and text fonts from a variety of foundries that are up to the task.
The impressive plug-in Flip Selected Notes makes it easy to flip or force the stem direction of notes and beamed groups in Sibelius.
If you're still using Sibelius 6, 7, or 7.5, or an expired license for Sibelius Ultimate, and need to get current without moving to a subscription, the best option to update your perpetual license is through a reseller.
PDF-MusicBinder takes the tedium of setting up PDF files for accordion-style and booklet printing and turns it into a one-click process. PDF-BatchStitch combines multiple PDFs into one file with the option to set the number of copies per file.
PDF-Batch Booklet quickly imposes many booklets or 2-ups from single-page PDFs at once. Available for Mac & PC.
PDF-BatchScale quickly scales many PDF files to any size PDF. Originally intended to scale sheet music of different sizes, PDF-BatchScale can be used for any purpose.
It's time for Scoring Notes Snacks, where we take music notation software topics and make them into bite-size portions. This one is about dynamic text in Sibelius. Learn how to quickly enter and modify dynamics with common shortcuts.
Introducing Scoring Notes Snacks, where we take music notation software topics and make them into bite-size portions for you to enjoy. Our first snack is a video about articulation metatools in Finale.
If you're one of the many using Zoom to share your creations with others or teach music remotely, here's how to configure Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, and Musescore to allow your collaborators to not only view your score, but to hear it as well.
A summary of the changes in music notation software product licenses, policies, and sales in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Also information on the 2020 W3C Music Notation Community Group meeting.
Accurate measurement is crucial to the creation of quality music notation. Learn how to use the built-in tools in the free Acrobat Reader and Preview desktop apps to measure anything in your PDF, from staff size, to margins, to text.
Sibelius 2020.3 is out with true support for L.V. "laissez vibrer" ties for the first time as well as improvements in many areas such as house styles, accessibility, and automatic staff spacing.
Notation Central is a marketplace for music notation technology, with fonts, utilities, templates, plug-ins, and more, helping you create music at the highest level.
In Sibelius, typing the Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key in combination with another key often means "do this, but bigger." Get to know the keyboard shortcuts where this applies.
Dorico's separation of modes of working — Setup, Write, Engrave, Play, and Print — is unique among the various desktop music notation programs. But what if we open one window in Write mode and another in Engrave mode at the same time?
Stream Deck Mobile is now on Android. On iOS, Siri Shortcuts are now supported. Stream Deck powers Notation Express, putting powerful notation software features at your fingertips for Sibelius, Dorico, and Musescore.
Remembering Anton Coppola, conductor, composer, founding artistic director of Opera Tampa, and "maestro", and the work of engraving the piano-vocal score to his crowning achievement, the opera "Sacco and Vanzetti".
"Divisions of a beat are beamed together in all meters, in order to simplify reading beats," says Elaine Gould. Here's how to change the default beam grouping in Sibelius so that it matches your musical intentions.
MakeMusic has released Finale version 26.2.2. This maintenance release includes several notation improvements in advance of MakeMusic's forthcoming musical content sharing mechanism, and some other fixes to MusicXML export/import and elsewhere.
Notion is updated. Notion iOS 2.5 supports document handling, MP3 and SMP Press export, template saving, and more, including handwriting, MusicXML and MIDI import enhancements. Notion 6.6 for Mac and Windows brings over some of these improvements and addresses compatibility issues.
A handy tool for keeping current on your Sibelius plug-ins was itself recently updated, so now is a good time to check to make sure you're running the latest versions.
Some highlights from the "Music Engraving in the 21st Century: Developments and Perspectives" conference at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, including a keynote by Elaine Gould and other presentations.
Steinberg has released Dorico 3.1.10 with more than 50 bug fixes. Helpful improvements include additional popover commands in clefs and ornaments. A number of other areas have also been addressed.
Musescore 3.4 is available with usability and accessibility improvements. On the Musescore.com side, the five-score upload limit has been removed, and all users can now upload an unlimited number of scores.
Notation Express for Musescore is here. Just like their Sibelius and Dorico counterparts, which also see updates, it’s a fully customized profile for the Stream Deck console and Stream Deck Mobile app for iPhone that makes powerful Musescore features easy and fun to use.
When you want to back up your Sibelius scores in a different format or work on scores you created in Sibelius in another program, there are lots of options and formats to export to, like MIDI, PDF, or MusicXML. But what if you want to work on many scores at once and need to convert folders of scores?
A series of notation conventions has been established over the years to identify editorial content. For the creators of critical editions, we take a comprehensive look at Dorico's formidable set of tools for making editorial marks.
StaffPad, the music composition app that uses handwriting recognition as the means of music entry, has been released for iPad and completely rebuilt for Windows, with a bevy of new features, improvements, and add-ons compared to the previous version. In addition, there is a new free digital music stand app for performers, called StaffPad Reader, providing a synced performance experience across multiple tablets.
The 2020 NAMM Show is over, and we had a ton of news coverage, product reviews, interviews, photos, and videos. Whether you missed any posts from the past few days or just want to relive the excitement, here's a wrap-up of all our activity from sunny Anaheim, California.
At the 2020 NAMM Show, we spoke with Avid's Sam Butler and Sarah Rossy about the Sibelius development process and the emphasis on adding support for accessibility in recent updates.
Our 2020 NAMM Show coverage continues as we talk with Jason Wick, senior manager at MakeMusic, about the latest Finale developments and what to expect for the future.
Our 2020 NAMM Show coverage continues as we speak with Daniel Ray, who is in charge of Musescore's product strategy, about how the product has fared in the nearly two years since the Ultimate Guitar acquisition, its recent progress, and its future.
Our 2020 NAMM Show coverage continues with an interview with Noteflight's John Mlynczak. We discuss Noteflight's embedded music creation tool, improved MusicXML recognition, Hal Leonard's ArrangeMe platform, and the new Lifetime purchase plan for Noteflight Premium.
Our NAMM 2020 coverage continues with an interview with Steinberg's product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury, in which we talk about the Dorico 3.1 update, its new features and improvements, and the release of Dorico SE, a free version of Dorico.
Sibelius 2020.1, released to coincide with the opening of the 2020 NAMM Show, introduces automatic staff spacing, dashed and dotted ties, ties into notes, new house styles, accessibility improvements, and more.
Dorico 3.1, released to coincide with the opening of the 2020 NAMM Show, introduces condensing changes, lines, bracketed noteheads, a new dynamics lane for playback, local chord symbols, Hi-DPI support on Windows, user-defined chord shapes, and loads more.
In thinking of ways to spend fewer hours in Sibelius adjusting slurs that encompass the opposite stem direction on outer notes, I happened upon the settings in Engraving Rules, and experimented in search of better defaults.
The Mozarteum University in Salzburg will be hosting a new conference entitled "Music Engraving in the 21st Century: Developments and Perspectives" with an active a three-day agenda beginning January 17, 2020.
The TV quiz show Jeopardy! is having a "Greatest of All Time" tournament. One of the games sported a "Music & Legend" category. We've posted the answers and questions here, along with a Scoring Notes bonus: For each clue, we've provided the score to the composition.
The 2020 NAMM Show will take place from Thursday, January 16 through Sunday, January 19, 2020, at the Anaheim Convention Center. We’ll have blog coverage from the show; here’s what to expect.
Plug-ins can be solutions to various problems or ways to make it easier to accomplish tasks. Bob Zawalich looks back at the end of another productive year in the world of Sibelius plug-in development and gives a preview of what's to come.
Wow, what a year it has been! It's time once again to reflect on the past year on Scoring Notes and in the world of music notation software and related technology — and to look forward to what's ahead.
It’s the holiday season, so what better way is there to celebrate than by creating a sparkling Christmas tree directly in Finale. And yes, this tree sparkles and the lights twinkle as well.
Proving that getting saxophones to balance properly is as difficult to do in NotePerformer as it is in real life, NotePerformer 3.3.1 is out, fixing that problem and a handful of other issues from the 3.3 release.
We look at grouped playing techniques in Dorico 3, where multiple playing techniques can be grouped together with a connecting arrow or line.
We take a look at UE Now, a new partnership that allows musicians to purchase high quality scores from Universal Edition, delivered instantly to the Newzik app for performance and study.
Sibelius's magnetic glissandi automatically snap to notes. What's more, you can change the playback style of a glissando or disable its playback entirely without affecting its notation.
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.12. This year-end update tidies up a number of items such as accessibility, MIDI import, UX/UI, printing, PDF export, and plug-ins, but also drops support for Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
We have a video interview with Lisa Dempsey Kane, orchestral librarian at The Juilliard School. We spoke with Lisa about her career and what it's like working in professional and student orchestras, bowing tips, MOLA, the role of digital technology, music prep advice, and much more.
Wallander Instruments has released NotePerformer 3.3, an update to its plug-and-play sound library. It brings official Dorico 3 support, support for macOS 10.15 Catalina, and a number of other fixes and improvements.
We've sorted through the best 2019 Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers in music notation software and related tech products so you don't have to!
MakeMusic has released Finale version 26.2. This maintenance release is squarely focused on bug fixes and other improvements rather than new features. The most significant item in 26.2 for Mac users is full support for macOS 10.15 Catalina.
There's no way to get around note entry. One way or another, you have to get the notes onto the staff. Thankfully, there are several features in Dorico that can make real-time MIDI entry a regular part of your workflow.
Guitar fingering, string indicators, tablature, chord diagrams, bends, and pre-bends come to Dorico for the first time in version 3. Here's our extensive video review.
MuseScore 3.3 is now available. Redesigned palettes, accessibility enhancements, a new Roman numeral font, and updates to the plug-in framework are among the improvements in this update to the free, open-source music notation software.
The Create Trailing Pseudo-Grace Notes plug-in for Sibelius automates a detailed method for creating grace notes at the end of a bar using tuplets, as a workaround for Sibelius's limitations in that area.
A tempo map is a MIDI track containing tempo information in beats per minute. Finale generates a tempo map when it parses a track, but its tempo handling won’t behave as you might expect if you’ve worked in a DAW or other notation software. Here are some common problems and solutions.
In this installment of DJA's Notes by Darcy James Argue, we learn the basics of well-prepared lead sheets, scores, and parts from a jazz/big band perspective — so that you can communicate musical intent in the most clear, familiar, and unambiguous manner.
It is not unusual to encounter grace notes at the end of a bar — that is, before the barline. Entering this variety of grace note in Sibelius is a chore, but there is an approach which involves using tuplets to achieve good results.
Steinberg has released Dorico 3.0.10 with nearly 100 bug fixes and support for macOS 10.15 Catalina. In addition, a free 30-day trial of Dorico 3 is now available.
The downloadable Sibelius plug-in Fill With Tied Notes fills the bars between the first selected note or chord in a staff and either a second selected note, or the end of the selection, with tied copies of the first selected note, using the pitches, voice, and notehead styles of the first notes.
Notation Express for Dorico 3 supports comments, harp pedaling, the Edit Lyrics window, increase/decrease dynamics, extend to note and selection, harmonics, and condensing (some features are XL only).
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS Catalina (10.15) at this time: How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system.
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.9. It introduces an impressive new way of importing MIDI data that can make working with such files in Sibelius much easier and faster.
In version 3, Dorico comes equipped with a dedicated tool to help create correct and beautifully rendered harp pedal diagrams. It has options for graphic diagrams, diagrams using note names, and partial pedal changes.
Three significant improvements to lyrics have been made in Dorico 3. Syllabic pasting, a new Edit Lyrics dialog, and adjusting lyrics on a line-by-line basis make working with lyrics faster and easier.
Steinberg has released Dorico 3 with a first for any music notation program: automatic condensing of individual players into a full score layout. Guitar notation, harp pedaling, harmonics, grouped playing techniques, and comments are just a few of the dozens of new features and improvements in this major paid upgrade.
The first in our series exploring the major new features in Dorico 3, condensing is the process of combining the parts of multiple players on a single staff. This is a crucial step in the preparation of usable conductor’s scores because it helps save precious vertical space and improve legibility.
When a player has finished playing for the remainder of a piece, this is indicated "tacet al fine". Learn how to consolidate remaining multirests in a part and display this instruction in Sibelius.
The Edit Instrument Names plug-in for Sibelius can now handle various formatting conventions and apply preset formatting patterns to names, and you can multiselect instruments and apply formatting to all selected instruments at once.
Quickly apply a sudden dynamic change such as "ff sub." in Sibelius, Dorico, and Finale — and do it correctly.
Notation Express XL for Sibelius and Dorico is available: a fully customized profile for the Elgato Stream Deck XL console that puts powerful features at your fingertips by pushing a button on the expansive 8x4 grid, with lots of new features.
Introducing the Scoring Notes Product Guide: At-a-glance information about Dorico, Finale, MuseScore, and Sibelius with the date of their latest update, the most current version, supported operating systems, and quick links to the most recent news and reviews, all in one place for the first time.
When the need arises to parenthesize notes, you might resort to methods such as manually placing text or symbols. What you may not know is that placing notes in parentheses in Sibelius is much easier than that (and downright fun, too).
In the course of preparing a new edition of Copland's Three Latin American Sketches, here are three improvements that should not be overlooked when preparing a new edition, aside from the improvement in readability that an engraved part will bring. Also: Remembering Vivian Perlis, 1928-2019.
MuseScore 3.2 has been released. Single note dynamics, more flexible automatic placement, percussion sticking, changing durations, and more improvements are featured in this latest update, along with design refinements and better performance.
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.7, its latest update to Sibelius. 2019.7 contains no new major features, but there are some MusicXML improvements and fixes in the areas of stability, fonts, PDF export, and playback.
Summer is here! Exciting World Cup matches, warm weather, refreshing drinks and long days abound. What else abounds? Time to catch up on the Scoring Notes archives, of course!
Tone clusters are a shorthand notation for several adjacent notes played at once. In this comprehensive post, we'll discuss many different ways to represent tone clusters in a notated score, and how to achieve those results in Sibelius.
At NYC Music Services we've made a demo of Notation Express available for anyone to try. The demo includes just a small subset of the hundreds of functions in the paid version, so you can see how it all generally works and do a few useful things with it.
Avid has announced price adjustments to all of its software products as of July 1, 2019. Perpetual and subscription licenses will continue to be offered. For existing users of Sibelius Ultimate, not much is changing, but you'll want to be aware of the differences.
There are preferences and then there are the Preferences, with a capital P — settings in an application that can significantly shape your regular work. Whether or not Dorico is your preferred program, let's find out what Preferences it offers.
Steinberg’s handwritten music font Petaluma was made into a derivation for Sibelius called Pori. What if you want to use the Pori chord symbol fonts in Finale? We're providing a custom chord library that will load up nearly every chord symbol you might want to use, along with the steps to set it up in your Finale document.
A quick roundup of the annual conference of the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association (MOLA) as it pertained to music notation software and related technology, hosted by the Atlanta Symphony from June 7-10, 2019.
The Norfolk and Pori angled slash chord (ASC) fonts for Sibelius have been updated so that they are as easy as possible to use while adding even more features for power users. The baseline of the ASC fonts will better align with non-slashed chords, Scandinavian and Nashville Number System support is also added, and there are a number of other new features for chords in legacy mode.
I'll be attending and presenting at the 37th annual conference of the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association (MOLA), hosted by the Atlanta Symphony from June 7-10, 2019, at the Loews Atlanta Hotel.
Notation Express is now available for iPhone and iPad. Notation Express is the custom-designed profile for the Stream Deck console — and now the Stream Deck mobile app — that makes powerful notation features in Sibelius and Dorico accessible via an easy-to-use touch interface.
Essential to any good printed part layout is the page turn. The easiest way to check for good page turns on-screen is to view the music as a two-page spread. We'll quickly run through how to view music this way in all the major desktop music notation applications as well as in Adobe Acrobat and Mac Preview.
A review of Guitar Pro 7.5, a software program that has both DAW and music notation features and is solely dedicated to fretted instruments such as a guitar, bass, or ukulele.
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.5, its latest update to Sibelius. The release contains no new features, but it brings a number of important improvements and fixes mostly in the areas of audio, playback, and printing.
The space is the unit of measurement that defines the appearance of all other notational items. These basic settings in Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico matter as much as anything to affect how your music appears.
MakeMusic has released Finale version 26.1, the first significant update since Finale v26 was released in October 2018. Articulations get further attention in 26.1, and there are also a few new MusicXML features.
forScore has released forScore 11, the first major update to the iOS score reader since 2016. It's largely an evolutionary update, but the improvements are thoughtful, practical, and welcome.
Notation Express for Dorico is here. Just like its Sibelius counterpart, it's a fully customized profile for the Elgato Stream Deck console that makes powerful Dorico features easy and fun to use.
The W3C Music Notation Community Group met in Frankfurt during the 2019 Musikmesse trade show on April 4, 2019. Topics of discussion included SMuFL 1.3 and 1.4, MusicXML 3.2, the DAISY Consortium on Braille music, and MNX.
Steinberg has released Dorico 2.2.20, a maintenance update to its scoring program, mostly fixing bugs and adding a few improvements too.
The plug-and-play NotePerformer sound library for music notation software is on sale. Normally available for $129, Avid is selling NotePerformer — which will work with Finale and Dorico, as well as Sibelius — at a special price of $78 through April 30, 2019.
Figurato is a specialist font for figured bass notation. It allows for easy input of multiple vertically stacked numbers and accidentals. It can be used in all major commercial desktop notation software, regardless of whether the program supports figured bass notation natively.
Major updates to the Pori and Norfolk fonts for Sibelius are here. The full Pori suite — the Sibelius-compatible derivative of Steinberg's Petaluma handwritten font — is now available. There are more angled slash chord symbol fonts for Pori and Norfolk, and lots of other goodies, too.
Sibelius 2019.4 introduces loop playback and a new scrubbing option. In addition, you can now mark up a score in Review Mode, finding instruments and plug-ins has gotten easier, and there are a couple of engraving and notation iterations.
Dorico's various dialog boxes, known as editors, allow users to easily customize areas of notation for specific types of scores. We explore the notation of a Handel secular cantata and an “ars subtilior” virelai. In both instances, Dorico is up to the task.
Finale users know that Jari Williamsson's plug-ins are practically essential for working efficiently in Finale. JW Fit Music is another valuable tool that will make page layout easier and quicker, automating several steps to get good results.
Sibelius has built-in tools for marking up your score, which can actually be quite useful in professional situations. In this post we'll explore Sibelius's commenting feature, how to use it, and how to make the most of it through plug-ins.
It's common to have a conductor's score with winds and brass on shared staves, and individual parts for players. Although Dorico does not yet offer an automatic solution to creating both, it is relatively easy to achieve satisfactory results using its powerful layout features.
At NYC Music Services we've released a brand new tool for Sibelius users to dramatically speed up their work. It's called Notation Express and it's a fully customized profile for the Elgato Stream Deck console that makes powerful Sibelius features easy and fun to use.
Jeremy Levy first fell in love with Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” as a high school student; now he's premiering and recording his arrangements of the work for jazz band. Learn about his process and pick up some Finale tips along the way from this top orchestrator and arranger.
Finale comes with eighteen standard default clefs. If you need something beyond the standard assortment, you can modify any of these clefs or replace them entirely with another symbol.
Before accepting her special Tony award in 1976, Mathilde Pincus said, "People think of us as music copyists, but we're much more than that, and we're trying to change our image." She succeeded.
Did you know that, with just a little bit of effort, you can route your MIDI from Sibelius, Finale, or Dorico through Logic Pro? This tutorial will walk you through the steps.
We've been "road testing" a new edition of the full ballet of Copland's Billy the Kid with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra to make the music the very best it can be before it's published.
Dorico makes it quite easy to preface a score with reference pitches, such as timpani tunings or handbells. In this post we'll walk through the process of creating reference pitches using flows and frame chains.
The Chord Symbols As Polychords plug-in for Sibelius takes pairs of selected chord symbols and creates polychords, which are two full chords stacked on top of each other, represented by a horizontal line between the two chords.
Steinberg has released Dorico 2.2.10. We explore what's new in this update, which introduces improvements across all areas of the program and addresses a number of bug fixes as well, making it a solid iteration of the program and a worthwhile update to the massive 2.2 release.
The 2019 NAMM Show is over, and we had more news coverage, interviews, photos, and videos than ever. Whether you missed any posts from the past few days or just want to relive the excitement, here's a wrap-up of all our activity from sunny Anaheim, California.
At the 2019 NAMM Show, we summarize the meeting of the W3C Music Notation Community Group, and provide complete video coverage of the meeting, including discussions about MusicXML, SMuFL, and MNX.
At the 2019 NAMM Show, we visit with Steinberg’s product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury and product specialist John Barron to talk about Dorico's past, present, and future, after a busy year of major updates and rapid progress in the software.
At the 2019 NAMM Show, we visit with PreSonus’s Jim Boitnott and Chris Swaffer, and talk about the latest Notion developments, including Notion 6.5 — the seventh free maintenance update for Notion 6 — which was released earlier this month on January 15, 2019.
At the 2019 NAMM Show, the GVIDO music reader was on full display. We visit with GVIDO representatives to talk through the version 2.0 GVIDO software update and explore how GVIDO is evolving in the market.
At the 2019 NAMM Show, we visit with Noteflight's John Mlynczak, and discuss the web-based music notation software that allows musicians to create, share, teach, sell, and purchase music.
As the sun set on the first day of the 2019 NAMM show, I talked with Mark Adler, MakeMusic's director of production, and Jonathan Tschiggfrie, product manager of audio and notation, about the show, Finale v26, and more.
Sibelius 2019.1, released to coincide with the opening of the 2019 NAMM Show, introduces a new Review Mode, adds some playback enhancements and integrates Avid Link, the new way for users to manage their Avid account, licensing, and subscriptions.
In this second of two posts in a series, we explore working with master pages in Dorico: adding custom master pages, inserting master page changes, and creating additional master page sets.
MuseScore 3 is officially available. This is the first major new version of the software since MuseScore 2 in 2015. The most notable improvement in MuseScore 3 is the new automatic placement facility, and there are many other improvements, including a timeline, a score comparison tool, and much more.
The 2019 NAMM Show will take place from Thursday, January 24 through Sunday, January 27, 2019, at the Anaheim Convention Center. We’ll have blog coverage from the show; here’s what to expect.
We spent time with each of the leading iPad score reader apps — forScore, Newzik, nkoda, Blackbinder, and Piascore — to assess the current state of the category, and to help musicians decide which of the excellent options best suits their needs.
Take maximum advantage of the new articulation features in Finale v26 with this script that automatically splits precomposed articulations (such as the combined accent-tenuto) into separate articulations that automatically stack and position correctly.
One of Dorico's most helpful features for score layout is the introduction of master pages. In this first post in a series, we explain the basics of how master pages work and how to edit them.
As another year comes to a close, it's time once again to reflect on the past year on Scoring Notes and in the world of music notation software and related technology — and to look forward to what's ahead.
Bob Zawalich, Sibelius guru and plug-in developer extraordinaire, gives us a personal tour of how many new and updated plug-ins came to be over the past few months, meeting friends along the way.
Avid has released Sibelius 2018.12. Coming less than three weeks after the release of Sibelius 2018.11, today's release is largely intended to fix bugs that appeared in last month's release, and it also addresses several other issues.
A review of Stream Deck, a customizable control surface with 15 keys that connects to your computer. If you have dozens of key commands in Dorico, Sibelius, Finale, or other programs, Stream Deck can operate all of those commands with style.
NotePerformer 3.2 is out with improvements to its plug-and-play sound library. Most significantly, for Dorico users, multiple articulations will now work with any new scores. The update also includes a number of performance fixes for all users.
There are plenty of holiday shopping guides — but none, I assure you, with this unique list of recommendations. I've assembled a list of some of my favorite products that I think you will enjoy as well, and relate to the task of creating music notation (more or less!).
At NYC Music Services, we've released seven new free chord symbol fonts for Sibelius. Four of the fonts are part of the Norfolk family. The other three fonts are the inaugural members of a new font family called Pori. Pori is a derivative of Petaluma, the handwritten font that first appeared in Dorico 2.0. One of the Pori fonts is something very special.
MuseScore has announced the beta release of MuseScore 3.0. This new version of MuseScore is a separate application from MuseScore 2.x and will be the first major release of MuseScore since it was acquired by Ultimate Guitar earlier in 2018.
Avid has released Sibelius 2018.11, the latest update to its music notation software. Although there are no significant new features in this release, Sibelius 2018.11 has been rewritten in the latest version of the Qt cross-platform application framework. There are a number of other fixes and improvements in 2018.11.
Steinberg has released Dorico 2.2, another enormous update to the program. New features have been added or rebuilt in the areas of trills, group bracketing, repeat markers, jazz articulations, tempo track import/export, real-time MIDI recording, flow headings, tacets, and a new music symbols editor. Many more improvements have been made in other areas, and there are a good 100 or so bug fixes, besides.
If you're looking for a few deals this holiday weekend, we've sorted through some of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers in music notation software and related tech products.
Keyboard shortcuts are essential tools for pro users on any platform. Although it's not possible to natively program global shortcuts in Finale, you can use FinaleScript to fill the gap.
Times New Roman is ubiquitous as the default text font in Sibelius, Finale, and many other programs. If you're looking for a different look but need the same font metrics as TNR so that the position of all of your text will stay the same, try the Tinos font.
The release of the iPad Pro 2018 edition presents some truly astonishing hardware that has the potential to replace a lot of what composers, performers, educators, and librarians are doing with notated music. Just don’t throw out your laptops yet.
NotePerformer 3.1 is out with some major updates. The main improvements are the vastly improved Finale implementation and the ability to override instruments directly from the NotePerformer mixer, but there's lots more for users of Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico.
In the Sequence Editor of JW Change, you can build a custom sequence that changes existing elements in Finale through a general user interface, greatly speeding up workflow.
The Society of Composers and Lyricists in New York is presenting a seminar entitled "Music Notation Tools and Tactics" on Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 7 pm. We have a free discount code for Scoring Notes readers.
Although it's more common to number bars in a score as if they are all played once straight through without factoring in repeats, often the bars are numbered according to the actual order in which they are played. Sibelius makes this easy to do.
In addition to using the default keyboard shortcuts in Sibelius and Dorico, you can program your own, and even override the default settings if you so choose.
We celebrate the 10th birthday of the Scoring Notes blog by looking back to October 11, 2008 and ahead the the future.
MakeMusic has released version 26 of Finale, bringing a number of improvements: new articulation options, better templates and libraries, Mac performance enhancements, and several other items and bug fixes.
Here's how to change the size of expressive text in Sibelius without affecting the size of music text used for dynamics.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS Mojave (10.14) at this time: How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system.
Today Steinberg released Dorico 2.1.10, a maintenance update to its scoring program. There are no new features in Dorico 2.1.10, but the update addresses a number of stability and performance improvements that users will appreciate.
Jimmy Fallon brought The Tonight Show outdoors to the Summer Stage at Central Park. Joining the show's house band The Roots were musicians from the New York Philharmonic, making for a unique 20-piece ensemble. NYC Music Services played a small but important role in printing the music that got on the stands.
You can move notes and rests horizontally in Sibelius, which we call “sliding” notes. This first appeared in Sibelius 8.2 and was refined in 8.3. If you don't know about this feature, you'll want to see this 90-second video.
MakeMusic has been previewing some new features of the upcoming Finale version 26 in the area of better default articulation positioning, including stacking, slur avoidance, and automatic tremolo adjustments.
A review of microtonal playback in Dorico, with audio and score samples by Thomas Nicholson.
Two plug-ins for Sibelius that could help you speed up some tedious text entry tasks: Add Fingering To Notes for Sibelius 7+ and ReInput Text.
Dorico's powerful correlation between written symbols and a diversity of possible tonal systems is an absolutely incredible breakthrough in contemporary composition.
The Tie Extended Stable plug-in for Sibelius replaces tied notes that would need to be dragged to reach their target with notes in different durations and different voices, whose ties do not need to be dragged because of their duration.
While I had the chance, I decided to take a few days to visit colleagues in London to catch up on all the latest. Fortunately (for me) they were working hard during the summer and hadn't skipped town. Enjoy this virtual travelog!
Dorico 2.1 is out, with two official new features — a notehead set editor and swing playback — and boasting a slew of other improvements in engraving, layout, notation, and playback that build on the 2.0 release.
MakeMusic has announced its intention to release version 26 of Finale, its flagship music notation software, focusing on "smarter default engraving, performance enhancements, new features, bug fixes, and refinements to included resources such as templates and libraries," according to the company. This will be a paid upgrade. No specific date or features were revealed at this time, but a release before the end of 2018 is likely, and MakeMusic will be previewing features to the public in advance of the release.
A video review of our favorite features in Sibelius since version 8.0 was released in 2015. If you haven’t yet updated from 7.5 (or earlier), or even if you have, you'll appreciate knowing what’s included.
Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.7, the latest version of its notation software. This is a workmanlike release devoted to fixing bugs, some of which newly appeared in the 2018.6 update, and some which have been around longer.
To make it easier to work with a large selection of many items scattered throughout a score, Bob Zawalich has created a new, powerful plug-in that could change the way you use Sibelius: Browse Selected Objects. Here's how it works and how to use it.
If you happen to have missed some of our news, tips, tutorials, and reviews from the last several months, don't worry — we've got you covered with this post with a summary of what's been happening so that you can take it to the beach.
Today MuseScore announced the release of MuseScore 2.3, featuring the brand new MuseScore Extension facility to allow additional packages of features to be easily delivered and installed without the need to update the program. These extensions can include new instruments and sounds as well as new palettes and other enhancements. In conjunction with MuseScore 2.3, MuseScore is releasing the first such extension, MuseScore Drumline.
Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.6, the latest version of its notation software. While the 2018.6 release is mostly geared toward unifying the different Sibelius tiers into one installer and the availability of the free tier for the first time, a few improvements made their way into this release in the areas of note spacing, grace notes, multi-text entry, tied notes, and more.
We review the nkoda sheet music subscription service, which launched earlier this month on the iOS App Store. With an incredible library of scores and parts, and a promising application, nkoda could quickly become an indispensable resource for composers, students, teachers, and performers.
Steinberg product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury has been in New York City this week promoting Dorico. We caught up with Daniel before his demo at Yamaha Artist Services. Listen to our engaging 40-minute conversation, in which we discuss his time in New York, the new features in Dorico 2, the development process, and much more.
Here's a quick take on a few developments of late regarding the upcoming free Sibelius First software, and two keypad apps for iOS that offer notation software support: Sibelius KeyPad for Mac and NumPad.
Wallander Instruments has released NotePerformer 3, a major update to its plug-and-play sound library for Sibelius. The update is the first major update since the release of NotePerformer 2 in March 2017. The update is free for all existing users, and the price for new users continues to be $129. For the first time, NotePerformer 3 has opened its doors to Finale and Dorico users as well, with a few caveats.
Dorico Pro 2.0, released today, is a major update to Steinberg's music notation software, with new features across the board in many areas. Smart staff management, slash notation, bar repeats, a new handwritten music font, a new system track, support for large time signatures, automation in Play mode, video support, and much more round out an impressive release.
Avid today released Sibelius 2018.5 to fix an issue in Sibelius where running some plug-ins would cause a memory leak that slowed Sibelius down until you restarted it. This most notably affected the Dolet MusicXML export plug-in, and only on Windows, not on Mac.
The Check Pizzicatos plug-in ships with Sibelius and it has saved me many minutes of work on many scores, and saved many minutes of rehearsal time. Its sole purpose is to locate suspect arco and pizz. markings in your score.
An essential element of Sibelius's dynamic parts feature is the ability to make certain changes in a part without affecting the score. This extends to the ability to have different names for instruments in parts than what they are in the score. This useful feature has its intricacies and comes with a few caveats, so we'll explain what those are and how to make the most of the available options.
Andrew Noah Cap gives a thorough review of Dorico's playback capabilities and the wide variety of needs it attempts to address — from engravers preferring simple playback, to those wanting adequate sound rendering without thinking too much about settings and post-editing, to those that expect playback and editing functionality that is comparable to MIDI editing within a DAW.
Neil Radisch collects tips from across many aspects of Sibelius into a tutorial on creating aleatoric music notation. Some are less commonly used Sibelius features, while others are hacks to stretch Sibelius beyond its originally intended use. You'll want to bookmark this post and keep it handy!
We prepare all of the orchestral music for Carnegie Hall's Link Up educational program, for students in grades 3 through 5. It's deeply satisfying taking a masterwork by a great composer like Stravinsky and revisiting it by setting the notes anew. It wasn't just the grade school students who were educated during this process!
Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.4.1, a maintenance release to the substantial 2018.4 release from earlier this month. A few bugs hitched their way along for the ride on that release, and those have now been fixed in the latest update.
The GVIDO music reader aims to change the way music is read by merging the old with the new. It's a dual-display hinged device that can show two facing pages with a large display size for each screen, using e-ink technology. Our hands-on review explores whether the product is ready for the consumer market.
It's hard to believe, but today marks one year of this blog as Scoring Notes. Last year, after more than eight years known as Sibelius Blog, we completely redesigned and renamed this blog to reflect how it naturally evolved into a site that features articles about a variety of products and perspectives about our field. Happy birthday to us!
MuseScore has released the 2.2.1 update to its desktop notation software, introducing a new default soundfont and other playback improvements, a handful of other new features, and hundreds of bug fixes and user interface enhancements. This is the first release of MuseScore since the company was acquired by Ultimate Guitar.
Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.4, a broad release with many new features and some longstanding requests addressed. Areas of improvement include multi-edits for text, a new note spacing rule affecting multiple voices and other cases, deleting and adding bars at the beginning of the score, smarter ties, and many more other enhancements. Avid also announced a new naming strategy where the pro-level version is now called "Sibelius Ultimate".
In this installment of DJA's Notes by Darcy James Argue, we learn the dos and donts of one- and two-bar repeats, numbering repeated bars, and how to lay out the music correctly so that the intent is clearly conveyed.
In this video tutorial, we’ll cover how to create composite time signatures in Sibelius, including what Elaine Gould’s Behind Bars book calls “meters of mixed denominators”, like 6/8 + 2/4. Finale and Dorico handle this with ease, but in Sibelius it takes a bit of effort.
Available for free from the Resources page on our NYC Music Services web site, the Norfolk family of fonts has been updated to correct several issues. The Norfolk family of fonts is a derivative of the beautiful Bravura font that has been expressly reconfigured to work within Sibelius.
nkoda, a London-based company, aims to bring a subscription model to sheet music. Development and licensing has been in progress for several years. In 2018 they finally plan on launching their product, with beta signups currently underway.
In this post, from the floor of the 2018 MOLA conference, we talk with Steve Reading from Scores Reformed, a publisher that produces new editions of out-of-copyright works.
At the 2018 MOLA conference, I spoke with Aurélia Azoulay, Newzik's head of marketing and international development and Netta Shahar, their orchestra specialist, to talk about how the app has progressed based on their real-world experience, including collaborations such as those with the l’Opéra de Rouen Normandie.
In anticipation of the 2018 Major Orchestra Librarians' Association (MOLA) conference, an interview with librarian Paul Beck about his life and work, and to hear in his own words what it means to perform the essential function of the librarian in today's musical world.
Originally appearing as a document that composer David MacDonald created for his weekly master class, this bullet-list of score preparation and production notes will improve the quality of your performance materials in no time. To it we have added relevant links from Scoring Notes and other sources.
I'll be attending and presenting at the 36th annual conference of the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association (MOLA), hosted by the Kansas City Symphony and held at the Crowne Plaza in downtown Kansas City, Missouri from March 16-19, 2018.
Unlike the other elements of a Sibelius score — which can be transferred through exporting and importing house styles — there has never been a good way to transfer your mixer settings between scores… until now. The UltraMix plug-in does that, and lots more, besides.
In this installment of DJA's Notes by Darcy James Argue, learn how to left-align chord symbols in all three major commercial music notation software programs, in order to avoid confusion on the stand.
Avid announced its board of directors has terminated the employment of Louis Hernandez, Jr., former chief executive officer, effective immediately, "due to violations of Company policies related to workplace conduct." Jeff Rosica has been appointed chief executive officer.
We present part 3 of our Dorico 1.2 review — a look at the new percussion features that arrived in December, along with refinements made in the latest 1.2.10 update.
DJA's Notes is a new series inspired by Darcy James Argue's Facebook posts, which offer some quick, basic steps to improve the appearance of notated music, especially from a jazz/big band perspective. In this post, learn how to group instruments correctly and change what the notation software may do by default.
Dorico 1.2.10 is available, bringing with it a variety of improvements in all areas of the program including engraving, playback, and workflow. This update, free to registered users, is likely the last update to Dorico 1.
Ultimate Guitar, the online community of millions of guitarists that creates and shares guitar tablatures, announced today that it has acquired MuseScore, the company that produces the free, open source desktop software of the same name, as well as a commercial sheet music sharing service.
Cloud Sharing (in Sibelius 8.7 and later) identifies a score using a hidden file ID that is created when a score is saved or exported in Sibelius. It is important to understand that if you make a copy of a score outside of Sibelius, the file ID will not change. Bob Zawalich discusses where multiple variant copies of a score are generated from a single score, and how to use Cloud Sharing with such a score.
Arranger Jon Burr takes us through some of the technical details that are helpful to know about as you're installing and working with Garritan libraries and Finale, in order to get everything working together correctly.
Our NAMM 2018 coverage continues with Steinberg's product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury and product specialist John Barron to chat about the past year of Dorico, and what's next on the horizon. Included: 45 minutes of audio.
Our NAMM 2018 coverage continues with Steve Morell, founder & CEO of NiceChart, the new online service that specializes in producing customizable sheet music on demand.
Our NAMM 2018 coverage continues with Soundslice, the impressive web-based learning software and music player — and, as of this week, a lot more, besides. In visiting with with founder Adrian Holovaty, we take a look at their new Channels feature, and an online music notation editor.
Our NAMM 2018 coverage continues with a summary and video of the meeting of the W3 Music Notation Community Group, where the next-generation MNX standard for encoding music notation was discussed.
Our NAMM 2018 coverage continues with a visit with several MakeMusic representatives to talk about SmartMusic and Finale, including a new web-based notation tool: Gear Fisher, Michael Johnson, Michael Good, and Mark Adler.
With its release coinciding with the opening of the 2018 NAMM Show, Sibelius 2018.1, the latest update to Sibelius, brings broad improvements to how users perform common tasks in Sibelius like placing slurs, hairpins, other lines, ties, special barlines, and a new note editing feature.
Our NAMM 2018 coverage continues with a report from Daniel Spreadbury's Dorico presentation at a gathering of the Society of Composers & Lyricists at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
We escape the urban jungle of New York City and head to the beautiful campus of the University of Nebraska to discuss collaborations, music preparation, and more with talented students in the music and theatre programs.
Composer, arranger, and orchestrator Jeremy Levy shares his pro tips on using the macro program Keyboard Maestro to make the most of Finale. Examples and sample scripts included!
The 2018 NAMM Show will take place from Thursday, January 25 through Sunday, January 28, 2018, at the Anaheim Convention Center. We'll have blog coverage from the show; here's what to expect.
A review of Logitech's newest device, the MX ERGO trackball, a highly recommended ergonomic, customizable pointing device that works with Mac and PC and can be configured on a per-application basis.
The latest version of the Dorico guide is now available to download as a PDF, encompassing improvements to the software up to Dorico 1.2. While missing a bit of the whimsy from the developers' Sibelius days, it is easy to follow and logically structured, making it a comprehensive, well-organized resource to help you make the most of the software.
From industry news, to tips and tutorials, to opinions and reviews in the field of music notation software and related technology, we're taking stock of 2017 at Scoring Notes.
We can rightly call Bob Zawalich "the dean of Sibelius plug-ins." His contributions to the Sibelius community are invaluable, and he's written a year in review for 2017 to take stock of the updates and new plug-ins available for use.
The Dorico 1.2 update, released earlier this month, brought with it an impressive set of new features and improvements. This is the second of multiple parts of our review of the update, covering the software's new fingering capabilities.
If you act fast, you can outrun Santa's sleigh and grab holiday deals available from Steinberg, Dorico, and Newzik, making spirits brighter across the world of music notation software.
The W3 Music Notation Community Group has released MusicXML 3.1, the latest iteration of the music interchange format which enables files created by applications that support the format to open and save files that are used by other applications.
Did you know that you can quickly solo staves for playback in Sibelius by making a passage selection and pressing P to play them?
In Dorico 1.2, you can notate a piece with any time signature displaying as any other time signature. In this tutorial by Florian Kretlow, we'll illustrate a useful trick that shows how to do just that, by using a piece from the core repertoire as our real-world example.
This is the second in a series of interviews with Elaine Gould, senior new music editor at Faber Music and author of the music notation treatise Behind Bars, in partnership with Music Engraving Tips. In this interview, Elaine talks about the ideas behind her writing the book.
Dorico 1.2, released today, takes another huge leap with major new features: cues, percussion notation, and fingering headline the release, with a large number of other improvements included. Our review spans multiple parts; this first one focuses on the groundbreaking implementation of cues, as well as new notation techniques and other improvements.
The first of a series of interviews with Elaine Gould, senior new music editor at Faber Music and author of the music notation treatise Behind Bars. Conducted by Justin Tokke in partnership with the Music Engraving Tips community group.
Have you ever encountered a situation in Finale where you knew that you had a phantom tie going into a note where none was supposed to exist? Learn how to fix this by watching this 2-minute video tutorial.
If you're looking for a few deals this holiday weekend, we've sorted through some of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers in our corner of the world.
Avid today released the Sibelius 8.7.2 maintenance update, improving a long-standing issue involving instrument changes, key signatures and multirests, among other fixes.
Finale 25.5, the fifth maintenance update to Finale 25, is now available. It adds support for macOS High Sierra, an alternative to the Clear key on Mac laptops, some MusicXML improvements, and more.
Here's an ingenious way to tame the comma beast: Consistent placement of breath marks in Sibelius by creating them as lines instead of symbols. Intrigued? Here's how to do it.
The sheet music reader Newzik has an ever-growing list of annotative features designed to make the app more useful in real-world use. Recently I asked Newzik's product manager, Matan Daskal, about the opportunities, limitations, and the future of Newzik and MusicXML.
David MacDonald has our in-depth review of Symphony Pro 5 — the latest offering of the iOS scoring app. The latest version's marquee feature is handwriting recognition with Apple Pencil support. See how Symphony Pro stacks up in a burgeoning marketplace of tablet-based scoring apps.
In this post, conductor and composer Claude Lapalme shows you how he composed a meter-less segment of a movement of a chamber orchestra work in Dorico, using its sophisticated note entry and engraving tools.
Catch up on some news items from the past couple of weeks in the world of music notation software and technology. We've got news about Dorico crossgrades, Sibelius updates, Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, a Newzik giveaway and Symphony Pro's new features.
Here's how to place fermatas on bar rests in Finale, and why placing them as articulations yields more consistent results than using expressions.
Ever find positioning commas (breath marks) tricky in Finale? Here's a way to set it up so that they're perfectly placed in the score and parts, every time.
A roundup of activity and news about Sibelius plug-ins over the last several months. Bob Zawalich takes us on a tour of new plug-ins, updates to existing plug-ins, speed issues, and other changes.
Sibelius 8.7 is now available, featuring the first iteration of the new Cloud Sharing service, allowing Sibelius users to share their scores online with anyone in a format that can be displayed in any browser on a modern device.
A summary of desktop notation software compatibility with macOS High Sierra (10.13) at this time: How Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion are faring on Apple's latest operating system.
The RSS feed serving Sibelius plug-in updates has been broken since early last week, leading all users of Sibelius 7 and higher to see an empty screen where a big list of plug-ins should be. Does it spell trouble for the next generation of services like Cloud Sharing?
In Dorico, tuplets can cross barlines easily. Learn how to apply this feature, with an easy tweak, to properly render certain Renaissance notations that have been difficult to achieve with other software.
Avid today announced Sibelius | Cloud Sharing as the primary new feature in Sibelius 8.7. Still in development, Sibelius 8.7 users will be able to publish Sibelius scores online in a format that can be displayed in any browser on a modern device.
Dorico 1.1.10 is the first update since Dorico 1.1 introduced chord symbols, pedal lines, and repeat endings. The update introduces improvements in all of those areas and more, along with other fixes.
We already showed you how to do it in Finale; now, here's a clever and useful way in Sibelius to have the part name, title, and composer consistently appear the same — and in the same place — on your title page and the first page of your part.
Here's a clever and useful way in Finale to have the part name, title, and composer consistently appear the same — and in the same place — on your title page and the first page of your part.
Sibelius center-aligns chord symbols by default. If you prefer that they be left-aligned instead, you'll need to change a few settings. Here's how to do it.
I often receive inquiries wondering if 9” x 12” paper was acceptable for orchestral use, or if 10” x 13” is necessary. Here are my thoughts based on experience preparing music for hundreds of orchestral projects.
Once and for all, correct Sibelius's incorrect default behavior of placing a brace on the glockenspiel and vibraphone staves.
StaffPad has been updated, adding several modest features along with bug fixes. The update, officially v. 2.4.29.0, adds support for cautionary accidentals, more printing options and a bar number staff, and hints at things coming later.
On a deadline and a tight budget, the notesetter pleads for mercy and longs for the ideal.
Avid today released Sibelius 8.6.1, a maintenance update to the Sibelius 8.6 update that introduced magnetic glissandi lines for the first time in the program. The 8.6.1 update further refines that feature and addresses some bugs brought about from earlier updates. A number of plug-ins are also updated.
Whether you're enjoying some lobster bisque, listening to Yo-Yo Ma, or simply tending to your Pez dispenser collection, the release of JW Yada Yada Tremolo for Finale 25 is an early Festivus miracle.
Scripting in Dorico is currently still in a nascent state. Even so, with this little bit of code, you can automate the creation of slash and rhythmic notation and learn more about how the program works in the process.
Summer is here! Time for rest, relaxation, and reading. After you dive into the ocean, dive in to the articles from your favorite blog from the first half of 2017!
Finale 25.4, the fourth maintenance update to Finale 25, is now available. It adds support for MusicXML 3.1, rounded corners for text enclosures, a new key signature display option and assorted bug fixes.
Despite its modest version number, Dorico 1.1 qualifies as a major release, and we cover it accordingly. Read our comprehensive review of the new major features, such as chord symbols, piano pedaling, linked dynamics, repeat endings, note spacing, filters, and much more.
OpenScore is a new crowdsourcing initiative to digitize sheet music by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven, and make them freely available for everyone to use for any purpose. MuseScore's Peter Jonas shares an update on the project's progress.
An early account of the Gvido music e-reader, as provided by Tony Rickard, music library manager of the Royal Opera House and past president of the Major Orchestra Librarians' Association (MOLA), from that organization's 2017 conference.
Ever since Sibelius 4 introduced Dynamic Parts feature in 2005, and Finale 2007 followed in due course with Linked Parts a year later, I've hardly ever needed to extract parts from a Finale or Sibelius file — and you shouldn't have to, either.
Medieval 2 is a new a comprehensive package that works within Finale to create early music notation. We caught up with Robert Piéchaud, Medieval 2's creator, to learn more about it and Robert's other projects.
David Newman's score to the 1996 Danny DeVito movie Matilda, with its energy, whimsy, and sweetness, is a favorite among film score enthusiasts. Learn what it took to prepare the music for a recent premiere with live orchestra.
Sibelius 8.6 is available, and its new engraving feature is magnetic glissandi lines — lines that snap to both their start and end note, updating their positions if the notes change. Other improvements and fixes are included in this update.
Watch a thorough tour of the new features in the forthcoming Dorico 1.1 update in action, including chord symbols, piano pedaling, repeat endings, filters, grouped dynamics, and much more.
Notion's latest update is out — version 6.2 brings tighter integration between the scoring program Notion and its DAW counterpart in the PreSonus family, Studio One. A handful of notation improvements are included along with other fixes.
Following up on our last post about getting a studio look to your bar numbers in Sibelius, we'll now show you how to achieve it in Finale by placing them on their own separate one-line staff.
Placing bar numbers on every bar of your score can save precious rehearsal time. Learn how to get a studio look to your bar numbers in Sibelius by placing them on their own separate one-line staff.
Sibelius isn't particularly well suited to having different headers in the same document for use in files with multiple sections. But with a little ingenuity, you can learn how to achieve this by setting up your text style in a particular way.
Chord symbols, repeat endings, editable note spacing, piano pedaling, enharmonic spelling improvements, and many more significant updates will be part of the next Dorico update, slated for sometime before the end of June.
MuseScore 2.1 is now released. Technical contributor Marc Sabatella takes us in-depth into 2.1's new features, including playback improvements, new note entry methods, a new "swap" feature, and better support for instrument changes.
Komp, the latest music handwriting recognition and scoring app for iPad, is now available after several years of development and a preview at NAMM. David MacDonald has a full review you won't want to miss.
Cory Davis from Dunvagen Music shares the detailed method that he used to create custom line ends in Sibelius for a new edition of Philip Glass's Music in Twelve Parts, by taking SVG files made in Illustrator and importing them into Sibelius.
After more than eight years, Sibelius Blog has a new name — and a new style. Come check out the re-launch of the blog as Scoring Notes, the site about music notation software, technology, and related topics.
Composer and orchestrator Jeremy Borum shares his tips and tricks about sheet music preparation that may help streamline your process to achieve the fastest and most accurate way to get from raw MIDI to a printed score, regardless of what DAW or notation software you use.
If you plan on visiting Musikmesse 2017, or even if you're just curious about what's happening, here's where to find the people and products from the world of music notation software at the annual Frankfurt music festival.
Finale 25.3 is the third maintenance update to Finale. It is primarily a bug-fixing and code-modernizing update, although a couple of new features are added in the areas of hairpins and MusicXML importing.
Support for chord symbols has been one of the most requested features currently absent in Dorico, and Steinberg has identified it as "the most important" area of focus. Here's some more information about what will be included, and when we can expect it to appear in the software.
In Sibelius, harp notation text objects are created in a variety of text styles and often contain a mixture of fonts. Learn how they are fabricated, how to filter them, and how to change their appearance.
If you work in Sibelius 8.5.1 and open files created in earlier Sibelius versions in which rests were manually moved to avoid notes, be aware that the position of those rests has shifted in the parts for your file, with no warning.
If your Sibelius score suffers from an ailment where the page numbers unintentionally deviate from the conventions of left and right numbering, we have both the diagnosis and the cure.
A roundup of some recent news including an extension of the Dorico crossgrade deadline, Finale third-party 64-bit plug-in updates, a MusicXML meeting at Musikmesse, beta testing for the Komp iPad app, and an update to NotateMe.
On the release of NotePerformer 2.0, a major update to the Sibelius-compatible sound library, we interview Arne Wallander, creator of the Wallander family of virtual instruments and NotePerformer.
Composer, orchestrator, and copyist Tristan Noon's new e-book, From DAW to Score, is now available. We have an exclusive excerpt from the book on our blog — and a special discount code as well.
A first look at the latest entrant into the world of music notation apps that support handwriting input: MusicJot, an iPad composition app that uses the MyScript music recognition engine.
The third Dorico update, version 1.0.30, is available, with some new features particularly in the areas of rests, barlines, bar numbers, tremolo and grace note playback, as well as other areas of the program. In addition, dozens of bugs and other performance issues have been addressed.
Cross-staff notes and accidentals have long been problematic in Sibelius — sometimes they stubbornly won't appear when they should, no matter what you try. Here's a way to finally get those pesky accidentals to show up.
Here's how to change the default appearance of octave lines in Finale and Sibelius, if, for instance, you'd like the octave line to simply read "8" instead of "8va".
The question often gets asked: How does one print and tape music accordion-style? In this blog post and accompanying video, learn the technique and tools you need to accomplish that very task.
In this guest post, Peter Jonas, software developer and OpenScore project manager for MuseScore, describes OpenScore — a collaborative sheet music digitization project by MuseScore and IMSLP.
If you have a passage in Finale with eighths and sixteenth rests (and vice versa) which you want to automatically combine into a dotted eighth rests, the solution is far from obvious — but it's possible, if you know where to look.
In Sibelius, if you expect recently opened documents to appear in the Quick Start dialog or in the list of recent documents in the Ribbon, but they're not appearing correctly, you may need to reset a setting.
A new plug-in automates the tedious process of creating special barlines and manually adding in fake "barlines" in certain instances where you don't want the barline to appear to be joined between staves.
Steinberg today launches a series of monthly live video tutorials for those wanting to learn more about how to use Dorico. The first of the Discover Dorico sessions begins today, January 26, at 11:00 am EST (US).
Our NAMM 2017 coverage continues as we talk with Sam Butler, Avid's senior product manager for Avid‘s music notation and learning products, about the road ahead for Sibelius.
Our NAMM 2017 coverage continues as we talk about MusicXML and more with Michael Good, MakeMusic's vice president of MusicXML technologies.
Our NAMM 2017 coverage continues with Soundslice, the web-based music-learning software with an innovative music player that syncs notation with real audio or video.
Our NAMM 2017 coverage continues with a preview of Komp, an in-development music notation app for iOS from Seattle-based Semitone, demonstrated at NAMM and scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2017.
Our NAMM 2017 coverage continues with an update on Newzik, the sheet reader app for iOS. We learn about how development is going and plans for the future of the app.
Avid today released Sibelius 8.5.1, a maintenance update to the recent Sibelius 8.5 update. 8.5.1 fixes a number of bugs introduced in 8.5 and adds a new percentage column to the Staff sizes list, making it possible to change a custom staff size by relative size as well as absolute size.
Our coverage of NAMM 2017 kicks off with a guest post from Doug LeBow at a Dorico presentation in Los Angeles at the American Film Institute, in association with the Society of Composers and Lyricists.
The recent StaffPad maintenance update offers improved MusicXML support and several instrument additions and fixes.
The 2017 NAMM Show opens one week from today in Anaheim, California. Music companies and representatives from around the globe will be showcasing their latest wares, and we'll be filing reports from the corners of music notation and technology to keep you informed.
Musitek's new SmartScore Music-to-XML music notation recognition utility — the same feature originally planned for inclusion in Finale 25 — can analyze scanned PDF files of music and send them directly to Finale, Sibelius, or Dorico, or save them as MusicXML.
Thanks to Bob Zawalich, Kenneth Gaw, Hans-Christoph Wirth, and Tom Curran, 2016 brought us more useful Sibelius plug-ins. Bob summarizes the year in plug-in development along with a list of all plug-ins newly created in the past year.
Have some down time during the holidays? Or looking to get ahead for the new year? Here you'll find many of the posts 2016, from industry news to tips and tutorials in the field of music notation software and related technology.
The second Dorico update, version 1.0.20, is available. New features and improvements abound, with arpeggios, more page layout options, better bar rest handling in voices, and a new playback options dialog among the many enhancements and bug fixes.
Just in time for the holidays, we've found a few presents under the tree! Three new Sibelius plug-ins from Kenneth Gaw will surely make the season bright: Intelligent Ties, Multiple Text Entry, and Complete Copy and Paste.
Finale 25.2 is the second maintenance update to Finale. It adds two long-requested options: instruments that transpose at the octave can retain their transposition in concert pitch scores, and a ruler to display bar numbers.
Some of the most requested bug fixes have finally been addressed in Sibelius 8.5, but there are also a couple of new ones to be aware of, too. Also a new plug-in from Bob Zawalich addresses a bug and improves the process of applying rehearsal marks and double barlines together.
The Sibelius 8.5 update introduces the long-awaited ability to change the staff size on a system-by-system basis. A refresh of the Inspector and various other fixes round out this latest update.
If you're eager to try out Dorico, the new scoring software from Steinberg, but you haven't yet committed to laying out the cash, you're in luck: a 30-day free trial is now available for download.
The first Dorico maintentance update is full of new features and bug fixes covering all areas of the program. Notable among them are the significant performance improvements, the addition of a transpose feature, customizable vertical staff spacing, and better selection techniques.
Have you been bad or good? We know you've been good, and that's why we've assembled this unique holiday shopping guide for 2016 of books, apps, gear and more that you won't find anywhere else — tailor-made especially for readers of our blog about music notation and technology.
Steinberg's Daniel Spreadbury delivered a 90-minute presentation of Dorico to attendees last evening at the Yamaha Artist Services Piano Salon in New York, covering the software's existing features and previewing those to come in the next update.
The latest StaffPad update brings support for the new Surface Dial along with useful improvements to writing recognition, working with selections and symbols, tuplet processing, and more.
Engraver Jeremy Hughes discovered a better-than-usual way to keep tempo text aligned to time signatures in both the score and parts in Sibelius, and we'll show you how to do it.
Avid has released a new version of Sibelius First, its entry-level edition of its Sibelius music composition software geared towards students, beginners, and other users who may not need the more advanced features found in Sibelius.
MakeMusic has released the first update to version 25 of Finale, officially known as v.25.1. This maintenance update mostly fixes bugs, but also adds several interface improvements and modest feature enhancements.
At long last, Steinberg has released Dorico, its new music notation and scoring software. Alexander Plötz takes a detailed look into the new software's philosophy, its features, and its feature. Andrew Noah Cap and Philip Rothman contribute additional content to this thorough review.
Steinberg announced that Dorico, its music notation and scoring software four years in development, will be available in one week, on October 19, 2016. A fully-launched Dorico web site and feature list go into great detail describing the program's capabilities.
A new plug-in for Sibelius gives users the freedom to create tuplets in any ratio, beyond the limits imposed by default in the software.
Dorico, the long-awaited music notation software by Steinberg, will be presented in special public showcases in October in London, Vienna, and streaming online.
A step-by-step tutorial on how to create feathered beams in Sibelius — first by spacing the notes evenly, and then by spacing them according to their speed, making for more realistic playback and display.
Elaine Gould's venerable music notation reference Behind Bars is now available as an e-book for Kindle, devices running the Kindle app, and Apple's iBooks for Mac and iOS.
As part of the recently concluded Normady Impressionist Festival, l’Opéra de Rouen Normandie performed a concert of student compositions, reading scores and parts entirely from the Newzik sheet music reader app.
A summary of notation software compatibility with macOS Sierra (Mac OS X 10.12) at this time.
Instrument families are typically grouped by joining barlines across staves. Here's how to customize these groups and restore missing barlines in Sibelius.
Harp pedal diagrams may look forbidding, but you can learn how to read them and place them in your score like a pro in Sibelius, Finale, and MuseScore.
Finale's nested dialog boxes involve a lot of clicking, but by using shortcuts to dismiss them all at once, you can save yourself a bit of time.
Notion 6 is now available, with new features such as cross-platform handwriting recognition, better layout control, more instruments, better video window controls, updated Music XML support, MP3 export, and MIDI over ReWire.
Avid yesterday released Sibelius 8.4.2, a minor update to the recent Sibelius 8.4 update. 8.4.2 addresses a few issues, fixing some crashes and other bugs, improving once again spacing between clefs, key signatures, time signatures and start repeat lines, and minor improvements to the size of ossia staves.
A new plug-in from Tom Curran automates the laborious task of transferring the structure of a sketch score, such as a piano-vocal or MIDI export, onto a full orchestral template. Tom describes how orchestrators and copyists can make use of this new time-saver.
Finale enters the world of 64-bit computing today with a new release focused on streamlining and modernizing the codebase. New features include ReWire support, correct transposed instrument note entry, dashed slurs, and more Garritan sounds.
Today we'll take you on a behind the scenes tour of our music prep shop, where we prepare, print, pack and ship music for an orchestral program that's performed by nearly 100 orchestras around the world each year.
Going behind the scenes in a new video from Steinberg's Dorico program, what's cooking for MuseScore 3.0, and learning more about an online music font comparison tool that could have big potential for Finale.
Bob Zawalich's Open Selected Parts plug-in for Sibelius not only makes it faster to open just the parts you want, but it also quickly closes unwanted parts at the same time.
Learn how to get harp notation that is pleasant to both the eye and ear by using several convenient plug-ins, in this guest post by Bob Zawalich.
CME delivers on its promise to make a version of its Xkey that connects to your computer or tablet wirelessly. Hands-on with the Xkey Air 37, the latest addition to CME's MIDI keyboard lineup that connects via Bluetooth.
Wolfgang, a font created by Musegraph and derived from the classic SCORE music engraving program, is now available for use in Sibelius.
Avid has once again lowered the price of an upgrade for users of Sibelius 7.5 or earlier who have missed the one-year window to upgrade, this time to $199 for one year of support and upgrades, or $299 for three years of support and upgrades.
Ah, summer. Time for long walks on the beach, cool refreshing drinks — and time to catch up on all your reading from the Sibelius blog from the first half of this year. From Sibelius updates, to industry news, products, tips and tutorials, there's lots here to enjoy.
Today Avid announced that the deadline to upgrade to Sibelius 8 from Sibelius 7.5 or earlier at an introductory price is being extended by one week to July 6, 2016.
Released today, Sibelius 8.4 includes the option of using more custom staff sizes in a Sibelius document. MusicXML import and export of the feature is supported. The Scorch iPad app has also been updated in tandem with the Sibelius 8.4 release.
After a week where a PDF importing feature unexpectedly ignited a firestorm on social media, MakeMusic decided to pull the feature — and all scanning capabilities — from future versions of Finale.
Finale's recently announced PDF-importing feature does not spell doom for composers, despite what you may have otherwise heard.
A take on the week's news in music notation and technology, from Sibelius upgrade plans to new Finale features, Logic Pro X updates, and a dual-screen e-paper music reader that may be in our future.
Bob Zawalich explains the concept of house styles in Sibelius and how to identify families of styles for use in your scores.
Avid announced a revised price of $299 for Sibelius customers using Sibelius 7.5 and earlier who wait until after June 30, 2016 to upgrade to the latest version of Sibelius.
Today Steinberg announced details about Dorico, the music scoring software more than three years in the making. This post covers the program's release date, pricing, and details about its modes of working, and other initial impressions.
Today's MOLA sessions featured Steinberg product marketing manager Daniel Spreadbury demonstrating the company's new scoring application to assembled audience members, my Finale and StaffPad presentations, and much more.
A report from the first day of activities at the 34th annual MOLA Conference in Helsinki, with presentations on music notation and an update on tomorrow's Steinberg product demonstration.
Clipboards, a new plug-in for Sibelius, lets you store the contents of selections into up to 30 numbered clipboards, and to paste from those clipboards into a score. The plug-in's creator, Bob Zawalich, walks us through how to use it.
Sibelius 8.3 is available. It introduces the ability to individually color notes, improves upon 8.2's sliding feature by more intelligently grouping rests, and improves the independent enharmonic spelling feature introduced in 8.2.
The 34th annual Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association (MOLA) conference will be held in Helsinki, Finland from May 13-16, 2016. I'll be presenting sessions on Sibelius (the software, that is), Finale, and StaffPad, and Daniel Spreadbury will be giving a keynote presentation on the new Steinberg scoring software.
Readers using Finale on Mac and the full version of the powerful TGTools plug-in bundle will be pleased to learn about an update that restores compatibility between TGTools and Finale 2014.5
A Sibelius plug-in by Bob Zawalich instantly converts straight rhythms to dotted ones, and vice versa.
Alfred Music, the educational music publisher and distributor, is now owned by Peaksware Holdings, LLC. Peaksware is the Boulder, Colorado-based holding company that owns MakeMusic, Inc.
To start off the week, we have a healthy roundup of news as it pertains to software updates for Sibelius, Dolet, SmartMusic, and MuseScore.
The latest StaffPad update brings support for pickup bars, D.C./D.S./Coda repeats, bar repeats, automatic drum kit notation, plus a host of miscellaneous improvements and performance upgrades that add up to a very solid update.
Sibelius 8.2 introduces the ability to enharmonically spell notes differently in a part and the score, a new sliding feature which moves notes and rests horizontally, and better placement of repeat barlines in relation to time signatures.
Sibelius 8.2 has not officially been made available, but details about its new features have already appeared on Avid's web site as well as that of a Japanese distributor.