Every two years or so, the hard-working team at Sibelius Software release a new version with exciting new features, and the new Sibelius 5 is certainly a major advance. Similarly, Neuratron’s music scanning program is under continuous development: the latest full edition, called Photoscore Ultimate, offers many great improvements. I will begin by discussing Sibelius 5.

The designers at Sibelius are always responsive to the requirements of their customers, who represent a demanding and diffuse market ranging from GCSE composition students to professional film composers and the major music publishers. Sibelius 5 offers numerous improvements and refinements, together with some exciting entirely new features including ‘Ideas Hub’, ‘Sibelius Sounds Essentials’, ‘VST & Audio Units’, ‘Panorama’ and ‘Instant Cues’. I am assuming that everyone is familiar with earlier versions of Sibelius and will therefore focus on the new features in this article.

Playback, VST and Audio Units

Sibelius 5 now comes equipped with ‘Sibelius Sounds Essentials’, offering over 150 pitched and hundreds of unpitched sounds, including a full General MIDI set plus many additional high-quality sounds. This means that the program is ready to produce high-quality score playback without requiring further equipment. Moreover, since these sounds are stored and operated within the computer itself, it is simple to make a CD recording of scores. But the most important advance concerning playback is that Sibelius is now fully compatible with VST (Windows & Mac) and Audio Units (Mac only). VST (Virtual Studio Technology) was originally developed by Steinberg, and rapidly became the standard interface for software sound samples and effects plugins to be used by computer music programs. There is an immense variety of VST and Audio Units software instruments available, and all are now directly playable through Sibelius. I tested out the supplied ‘Sibelius Sounds Essentials’, which offers an excellent set of sounds, and also linked in a VST piano called ‘TruePianos’: it played back flawlessly. Sibelius 5 comes with Kontakt Player 2 and a completely redesigned mixer to control the sounds; you can also incorporate effects such as reverb, chorus and EQ which may be chained and mixed. The sound world available within Sibelius is now only really limited by the power of your computer system and your budget, since some of the high-end instrument sample collections (such as the ‘Vienna Symphonic Library’) are pretty expensive. However, it is important to bear in mind that the instrument collection shipped as standard with Sibelius 5 will comfortably cover many people’s playback requirements. There are additional sound libraries available from Sibelius including ‘World Music’, ‘Choral’ and ‘Rock & Pop’. I tried out both the choral collection and the rock and pop sounds and it is wonderful to have your scores played back so realistically with all the articulation and dynamics faithfully observed.

Ideas Hub

This is another excellent feature. Now, when you have a musical idea, you can store it in the Ideas Hub and reuse later at any time by simply pasting into your score. There are also over 2000 ready-made ideas to use in a wide range of musical styles; these also offer valuable starter points to inspire further compositional work.

Panorama

Panorama view now lets you display the score in one single band of endless music rather than in a page layout format. This allows you to concentrate entirely on notational input without any layout distractions. Later you can simply switch to normal page view to add any layout features you might require. Bar numbers and instrument names are always visible in ‘Panorama View’ so navigating around the score is quite straightforward.

Other New Features

Sibelius 5 now offers automated cue creation by simply copying the music you require as a cue and then choosing ‘Paste as Cue’. Sibelius transposes the music if required, makes clef changes if necessary, and of course makes the notation smaller. You can also easily have instrument changes on the same stave when you have a single player switching instruments. Sibelius will alter the instrument name, switch the sound and also make any necessary transposition or clef change. These new additions to the ‘Dynamic Parts’ introduced in Sibelius 4 make creating instrumental parts extremely straightforward.

Note Input

Starting a score with Sibelius 5 is simple, with complete layouts available for almost every conceivable ensemble from classical orchestra and military band to jazz orchestra and salsa band. Sibelius 5, as in all previous versions, remains user-friendly despite its growing sophistication. Notes may be inputted from computer keyboard letters and commands or by mouse. Alternatively, input may be from a MIDI keyboard in step-time or using ‘flexi-time’ which allows ‘real-time’ live performance with Sibelius interpreting the notation. In addition, it is also possible to scan in music using the included Photoscore Lite feature with the option to upgrade (at extra cost) to Photoscore Ultimate, which I will examine later in this article.

In Conclusion

Sibelius 5 makes many improvements over earlier versions and this world-famous music notation program goes from strength to strength. It is also simple to export Sibelius 5 files into earlier Sibelius 2, 3 or 4 formats (also Sibelius Student Edition and G7) so that you retain compatibility with users who have not yet upgraded. The overall speed and simplicity of operation coupled with superb print quality are taken for granted, but there are also numerous features of this new version which I do not have the space here to mention. The program comes with excellent short videos, which explain all the main features clearly. You can also download a demo edition and see more details at www.sibelius.com.

Neuratron Photoscore Ultimate

Sibelius comes with Neuratron Photoscore Lite edition as standard. This is a program designed to scan in music and recognise and interpret the signs and symbols to then be loaded into Sibelius for further editing as a standard score file. While Photoscore Lite is useful, a far more powerful version is available from Neuratron called Photoscore Ultimate, and this was the version I examined for this review. The ability to scan, analyse and interpret music so that it can be imported into a notation program is a very sophisticated process. Photoscore has been improving with each new version; now, with Photoscore Ultimate, it even adds the exciting ability to scan in handwritten music.

The music scanning procedure is straightforward. You simply place the score page in a scanner, adjust various settings following simple guidelines, and a three-stage process commences. First the pages are scanned, which allows Photoscore to take a ‘photograph’ of the score. Next the program ‘reads’ the scanned pages and interprets the music. Finally there is the editing stage where you compare the original scanned version with the interpreted version and correct any errors before saving and sending into the Sibelius (or other) program.

First I tried scanning several pages of vocal score with piano and main vocal line taken from a musical. This was very straightforward, and I was extremely impressed with the results. Overall there was very little editing required, and the reading of the music and text was very accurate. I then tried reading an orchestral score with smaller staves: once again the results were pleasing, with not much correcting necessary. I also experimented with the handwritten score-reading, but found this less successful. There were too many errors in the results, and I feel it would actually be quicker to notate again into Sibelius than try scanning from hand-written scores. It may be that my style of music handwriting was not up to scratch, but I still feel there is quite a bit of development to make this aspect really useful.

Photoscore is able to read 5-line staves both standard and small, 4 and 6-line guitar staves and also 1, 2 and 3-line percussion staves. It can read notes (including appoggiaturas, cue-sized and cross-stave notes) and rests with up to four voices per staff. It also reads accidentals and articulation mark, clefs, key signatures, time signatures and tuplets/triplets. Photoscore reads the format of the page, including the page size, staff size, margins, and where systems end. In addition it reads slurs, ties and hairpins, text including lyrics, dynamics, fingerings, instrument names, tempo and technique markings, and guitar chord diagrams. It reads up to 64 staves per page and 400 pages per score – which should be enough! Overall this is an excellent tool and should save hours of note inputting. While reading handwritten music still has some way to go before it is truly usable, reading standard printed scores by Photoscore Ultimate is very efficient. Anyone needing to scan in music on a regular basis would be well advised to purchase this software. You can find out more at www.neuratron.com, and a demo version is available for download from the website.

Overall, today’s musicians are very fortunate to have great software like Sibelius 5 and Neuratron Photoscore Ultimate available, making composing, arranging and editing much more approachable at all levels.

Tony Cliff BMus MPhil ALCM, a freelance teacher, lecturer, composer, arranger, pianist and private teacher, belongs to the ISM’s Devon & Cornwall Centre. He is a member of the Society’s Specialist Sections for Musicians in Education, Performers & Composers and Professional Private Teachers.

Sibelius Software, an ISM Corporate Member, is at the Old Toy Factory, 20-22 City North, Fonthill Road, London N4 3HN, tel: 020 7561 7999,
fax: 020 7561 7888, email: infoUK@sibelius.com, web: www.sibelius.com.

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