Sibelius
Write music with up to 16 instruments—great for smaller ensembles
(includes desktop + mobile)
Compare versions: Sibelius and Sibelius Ultimate
Introducing Sibelius on iPad
From couch to coffeeshop, work on scores anywhere with your favorite Sibelius tools at your fingertips—literally. With the new mobile version of Sibelius, you can seamlessly move between desktop and iPad—with nothing to slow you down. Best of all, it comes free with all desktop versions and also as a standalone app.
Features
Compose
Write music with ease
Sibelius makes music composition easy, giving you the flexibility to work anywhere using your computer or iPad. Whether you prefer to enter notes from the onscreen notation Keypad, a MIDI keyboard, your computer keyboard, or using an Apple Pencil, Sibelius takes care of all note layout, orientation, and rest details for you.
Build up compositions
Create music for everything from piano to orchestra, with multiple instrument parts. And not just with notes and rests—you can add chord symbols, guitar tab, guitar chord diagrams, expression text, articulations, lyrics, titles, graphics, and more to give your music the detail, depth, and dynamism it deserves. You can even loop playback to improvise ideas.
Hear your music in stunning detail
Sibelius includes a high-quality sample library filled with a variety of musical instrumentation, so you can hear what your music will sound like when performed by real musicians. You can also plug in third-party sound libraries, such as NotePerformer, giving you more flexibility with the instrumentation you hear.
Orchestrate
Arrange parts fast
The Arrange feature makes it easy to orchestrate additional instrument parts from existing ones. Simply select an orchestration style and Sibelius automatically creates new parts based on your sources. You can also “explode” chords across different parts, speeding up multipart instrumentation. Or consolidate multiple parts into one with a click.
Get Intelligent Import
With a single click, you can import a MIDI, MusicXML, or Sibelius file into a new or existing score. All notation, instrumentation, techniques, and articulations are automatically assigned, preserving the composer’s intent and saving you hours—if not days—of clean-up time. You can even combine several scores together, with control over what’s imported.
Perfect and review scores
Sibelius takes the manual effort out of adapting instrumentation, transposing parts, and adding slurs, so you can work faster. And when your score is ready, Review mode lets you lock things down, enabling collaborators to freely view your score and add comments and annotations without fear of accidentally changing anything.
Engrave + Copy
Create parts dynamically
Sibelius can create individual instrument parts when you create your score and will automatically update them accordingly whenever you make changes to the score. For copyists, this eliminates the need to extract parts or make destructive changes when prepping sheet music for different parts. Plus, parts can be changed without affecting the full score.
Engrave intelligently
Create beautiful professional scores quickly with advanced notation tools and multi-edit capabilities. Add slurs, hairpins, ties, or other staff lines across multiple instruments, and make edits to barlines, expression and technique text, and lyrics all in one action. Sibelius intelligently spaces notes and elements, keeping everything in perfect alignment.
Fly through complex tasks
Thanks to the Sibelius user community, you can supercharge your software with more capabilities through free plugins. With over 140 included (and hundreds more available), these plugins can help you with complex engraving, notating, layout, processing, text, and other tasks. Check out the Install Plugins dialog in Sibelius to find what you need.
