Sibelius

A very good program for composing and transposing music. I recently wrote both my GCSE compositions on Sibelius and found it was easy to use, most of the time. You can write in full score, for a diverse rance of instruments, from the recorder to the digeredoo, and add lots of notation, and musical devices like glissandos. This suprised me, as some other programs like this don't alow for things like dynamics. It does take a while to get your head round the controls, but once you get the hang of it then its easy to create and modify your music. Another usefull thing it does is back up your scores every time you shut the program down. This means you never lose any work, ...  Read the complete review

(For those of you who don't know, Sibelius is a score writing program. This is basically like a word processor, but for music ; with it you can create music that looks exactly the same as what you would find in any sheet music you buy from a publisher - in fact many publishers actually use Sibelius (eg. Faber, Hal Leonard) It's only really a tool for professional musicians, or diehard home music enthusiasts - and it's aimed more at the classical school of composition as opposed to popular music. Check out the website www.sibelius.com and download the scorch plugin to get some ideas as to what it does.) There has already been much praise ...  Read the complete review

Sibelius is just so far in advance of other scorewriters. If Chandler were describing it he would say something like, "Sibelius is just a dot in the distance to Noteworthy Composer." Sibelius can do everything (ok it won't make your tea while you use it). Quintuplets, septuplets, old music, cross-bar beaming, etc. etc. Basically we are talking publishable quality music. And writing on a change of dynamics will change the dynamics in MIDI playback, which doesn't happen in a sequencer. You might think this type of functionality will make the interface complicated and unwieldy, but in fact Sibelius has one of the most intuitive interfaces of ...  Read the complete review

I have used the Sibelius Music software now for around six years. I now have version 5 of the software (I think I started with version 3). I have found the software exceptional for its purpose. Over the years I have tried other software including Sibelius' main rival Finale, but have found none of them to have the same capabilities that Sibelius has. That said, when I recently upgraded from Sibelius 4 to 5 I found a lot of trouble in getting used to the new layout. Changes had been made and I'm not altogether sure that they are very user-friendly. I have found the integration of virtual instruments to be particularly difficult now. Like most things, ...  Read the complete review

Sibelius is a niche product. And as you can imagine niche products are expensive. Sibelius is no exception. At almost £500 the user can notate scores to their hearts content and use almost any combination of rhythm and instrumentation to achieve this. This is helped by the library of different techniques and expressions that you would expect. Sibelius does it's job effortlessly and after a challengingat best learning curve you can start to create marvellous sounding pieces effortlessly. Then turning them into a professional looking score with different formatted parts is east and can be completed in a number of minutes, instead of having to rewrite certain parts as you ...  Read the complete review