Dorico music notation software from Steinberg Price: $559.99; discounts of 50% (71% for education) for cross-grades from Sibelius, Finale, Notion available Until October last year
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Tag: Sibelius
Sibelius 8 – Review
Jean Sibelius, the 150th anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year (he lived from 1865 to 1957), officially composed only seven symphonies. Certainly only seven were published. Yet fragments of an 8th do exist; and indeed were performed in 2011 barely three minutes long, though. Sibelius certainly withdrew and tried to suppress his 8th.
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Sibelius 7.5 – Review
Avid has received a lot of criticism from Sibelius users of late. Two years ago the Finsbury Park, London, HQ of the Sibelius development team was closed, many developers laid off, and the suites coding and maintenance operation relocated to the Ukraine. Rumors of serious financial trouble circulated and the company’s Vice President, CFO and CTO resigned. Yet the market-leading score-writing software did not disappear as some both predicted and feared. In fact, a new version has recently been released; here Sibelius 7.5.1 (a significant further milestone release for bug fixes and maintenance) is examined. Its found to be as good as ever.
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Vienna Symphonic LIbrary’s MIR Pro – Review
Digital Audio Workstations (DAW’s) and notation software like Finale and Sibelius have made great progress towards realism in recent years. But they still need to reach into the real acoustic world in two long and deep ways in order to pass muster.
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Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials – Review
Avid’s Sibelius 7 is new enough for there still to be a dearth of supporting materials. But James Humberstone’s substantial new book in the Avid Learning Series, Sibelius 7 Music Notation Essentials, sets very high standards and is a welcome resource.
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Ivory II Grand Pianos Review
Ivory II is a Virtual Instrument (vi) – a large set of sophisticated high-quality sound samples of the concert piano. It can be used as a standalone application, which has a sophisticated yet easy-to-use single window interface; this was custom built with its own DSP engine and worked extremely well during testing. The piano samples in Ivory II also function as a bespoke plugin soundset for sequencers, DAWs and notation software such as Sibelius 7. The latter was concentrated on during this evaluation.
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Sibelius 7 – Review
When Sibelius 7 was released recently, its appearance was sufficiently different from that of Sibelius 6 to have thrown some (long-time) users. Avid was criticized on those listservs and forums which do such a sterling job of supporting Sibelius owners and prospective owners. Since so many creative professionals and enthusiasts have so much invested in a piece of software which they use for extended periods each day and to the ways of which their muscle memories had become fully used, change seemed particularly hard.
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Vienna Symphonic Library Solo Strings Review
Virtual Instruments (VIs) allow you to work with lifelike sounds in sequencers and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like Apple’s Logic and notation packages like Avid’s Sibelius. (Avid has just announced Sibelius 7: watch for a review here shortly.)
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XCE: Xsample Chamber Ensemble audio instrument library
It has to be said immediately that this is an excellent collection, worked flawlessly in testing and – although expensive (aren’t they all?) – would make a prized addition to any musician or composer’s set of original audio resources.
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Sibelius 6 resources
PhotoScore Lite comes with Sibelius 6. It’s a great taster of what this truly amazing product can do. But the Ultimate version is even more impressive.
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Sibelius 6 – Review
Sibelius is a music notation package. Although its output is music, it’s neither a sequencer nor a synthesizer nor Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). It’s a package that allows music composition as a score following the conventions of “engraving” music – in much the same way as a word processor allows a novel or play to be written as text. But Sibelius’ power extends far beyond that of even the most complex and sophisticated DTP software.
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