There's always a fear that when a software company gets bought out its key products will find themselves lost and unsupported in some windowless office somewhere. Thankfully, that's not so with Sibelius and Avid. Sibelius is and always has been the best score writing software available. It's style, ease of use and the way it sort of "flows" is unmatched but it's needed a good kick in the arse for a long time now and it looks like Avid have supplied that. Avid are the owners of Digidesign who make the Pro Tools recording software and have been long criticised for its lack of score editing facilities and so bolting Sibelius into the Pro Tools recording environment seemed like an obvious idea. Thankfully they didn't decide to absorb Sibelius into Pro Tools but instead have developed Sibelius into what it's been crying out to be and provided it with the ability to connect not just with Pro Tools but with everything else as well - we're talking about Rewire. Rewire gives Sibelius the option to run its output through any other Rewire compatible program so you can mix the whole performance together.

Here's some of the other new features:
Magnetic Layout - Sibelius is beautiful to look at but getting the layout right can be terribly time consuming. Magnetic layout automates a lot of the layout issues by inteligently placing all the grace notes, accents and articulations.

Track Changes and Compare Versions - Keeps track of versions as you edit so that you can bring up alder versions for comparison.

Live Tempo - You can "conduct" your score using a key or foot switch to tap in the tempo as it goes (actually this has been available in Finalé for years).

Integrated Sounds - Hallelujah, about bleedin' time. The one thing that software for writing orchestral scores needs is some decent orchestral sounds. In previous versions they used a Kontakt player from Native Instruments which wasn't bad but was still a bit of a fudge whereas now Digidesign have used their AIR technology to create a Sibelius player housing a good range of high quality instrument sounds.

Keyboard and Fretboard Windows - Useful, thanks

Easy Chord Symbols and Guitar Diagrams - All good stuff coming presumably from their G7 guitar notation software.

Unrivalled Pro Engraving - The amount of control you have over the layout is brilliant and the result simply fabulous.

Sell you Scores - Sibelius has a website where you can upload your music.

Sing in Music - Not exactly karoke but Sibelius now has pitchj detection software built in so you can sing into a microphone and it will detect the pitch and slap it on the score.

Sibelius 6 looks amazing and all the enhancements and added features bring it bang up to date and back into the position of best score writing software on the planet.

http://www.sibelius.com