A First Look at Sibelius 5

Is the new Sibelius 5 music notation software worth the big price tag? Read on for a quick test drive!

I have been using music notation software for over a dozen years now, dating back all the way to my college days pecking out basic melodies on antiquated computers in the University's music lab. Thankfully the technology has made great leaps forward in usability and function, culminating with the recent release of the Sibelius 5 music notation software package. Of the major music notation software vendors, Sibelius Music and Finale are the two major players. I recently did a first look at Finale 2008 by MakeMusic, and have done my best to not compare the 2 in the article. Debating the merits of the two competing systems will be reserved for a later date. For now, let's take a look under the hood of this new import from across the pond.

First, allow me to tell you how I went about evaluating the Sibelius 5 software. I installed the program on two PC's, one being a desktop with plenty of RAM and disk space, and another on a laptop with a configuration typical of what you might find on a school band director's desk. Out of the box you notice that the program is shipped on a single DVD-ROM rather than multiple CD's. This is convenient, but could also prove a problem as there are still school districts that do not have DVD drives in every machine. The install went smoothly, but on the laptop I was required to download and install a separate package from Microsoft before I could proceed. The installed Sibelius software clocks in at over three gigabytes in size. The vast majority of this bloat is caused by the special MIDI sounds fonts that are included. These sound files are optional, but the quality of the music playback is unquestionably superior to the standard MIDI voices that most computers have available.

The first thing I did with Sibelius 5 was to read through the handbook to familiarize myself with the changes that had been made to the program since my last encounter (Sibelius version 3). I then proceeded to create a very basic concert band score and attempted to enter in an arrangement of the traditional song "London Bridge." Manual note entry was very easy and intuitive, but I have always had a problem with mouse based input in that Sibelius is very sensitive to where in the measure you click. If you are too close to the previous note the program places your new note on top of the old one, sometimes kicking you into an alternate voice in the process. Using a MIDI keyboard greatly speeds up the note entry process, but I had some major problems with the Flexi-time music input settings at first. Notes that I was attempting to play in as quarter notes came out as strange, convoluted lines of note heads. I eventually fine tuned the preferences to match my personal playing style and the accuracy greatly improved.

In future articles here on Suite I will jump into the very handy worksheet creation utility that comes with Sibelius 5, the many useful plugins that ship with the full version, and the great improvements in part handling and extraction.