SIBELIUS SOFTWARE Sibelius 2.1 (MAC/WIN)

Sep 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Brian Smithers

In an effort to speed up and simplify the creation of scores and parts, most music-notation programs use their built-in “intelligence” to make assumptions about layout, transpositions, instrument characteristics, and many other musical elements. If the assumptions fall neatly into line with your needs, they can indeed make your life easier. In my experience, however, the assumptions frequently require complex work-arounds to get the results that I'm after.

When I was introduced to Sibelius in its original incarnation, I was impressed with its version of intelligence, even though I was stymied by a few of its assumptions. I'm pleased to report that version 2.1 comes even closer to the ideal balance between being smart and being flexible.

ON THE DISC

Sibelius comes on a dual-platform disc so you can install it on either a Macintosh or Windows computer. In fact, you can install it on both, but it will only be fully functional on one computer at a time. The program uses a simple challenge-and-response copy-protection system that allows you to authorize only one machine — but with a twist. An unauthorized version of Sibelius lets you open and print scores and parts, but it doesn't let you save your work. You could therefore do most of your work on your notebook but still print from your office desktop. If you need to do some serious work on your desktop, you can simply transfer your authorization from one computer to the other. Doing that the first time is a bit of a pain if the two machines aren't in the same room, but the transfer authorization numbers ordinarily don't change, making subsequent transfers easier.

Installation on my Windows XP machine was as simple as it could be, and I was up and running in just a few minutes. When I started the program for the first time, it recognized my simple MIDI setup and asked me to test it.

ON THE PAGE

FIG. 1: Sibelius is always in page-layout view, and reformatting occurs as you enter data. The Keypad in the lower right lets you select the rhythmic value or symbol. The Navigator has been relocated from its customary lower left corner to the upper right. Note the wood-grain "desktop" and crumpled "paper" look of the score.

Sibelius always presents your scores in page-layout view (see Fig. 1), so data entry and layout are inextricably linked. The upside of this arrangement is that you don't have to switch between views; the downside is that watching the page reformat itself with each change can distract you from your focus on data entry. It's fine with me as a composer, but as a copyist I sometimes find it troublesome.

On the program's main page, a small gray overview called the Navigator graphically represents the pages in the score. A white rectangular overlay in the Navigator corresponds to the currently visible part of the music. You can drag the overlay around to reveal other parts of the score, or you can simply click where you want the view to go. You can also click and drag directly on the score itself to move it where you need it. If you prefer navigating with the computer keyboard, the Home and End keys move the score to a previous or later page; the Page Up and Page Down keys move you higher or lower on the current page.

Sibelius's onscreen Keypad (in the lower right) is one of the program's best features. It provides access to five sets of notes and symbols that you can select from your computer's numeric keypad (or onscreen with the mouse). It's an efficient system, as you will see in a moment. Above the Keypad, six collapsible Properties panels keep numerous layout options and other parameters close at hand. Changing the lyric font or assigning alternate note heads, for example, is quick and easy with these panels.

Sibelius takes the prize for offering the cleanest desktop; it lets you move or hide (but not resize) the Navigator, Keypad, and Properties panels. In addition, you can hide the menu bar, tool bar, and even the title bar, leaving only the score onscreen. That's the way I prefer to work, with nothing coming between me and my score. If I really need to retrieve the Properties panels, I can use a keyboard shortcut to call them up and then hide them again. The menus reappear when you move your mouse to the top of the screen or when you use the appropriate keyboard shortcuts to open them.

Another unique feature in Sibelius is its use of paper and desk textures to spice up the user interface. In an effort to combat the boring (and arguably fatiguing) black-on-white display in most notation programs, Sibelius lets you select from numerous wood grains, marbles, and similar textures for your desktop and combine them with various other textures ranging from cotton to parchment for your score “paper.” (Both options draw from the same set of textures, so you could have wood-grain paper if you really wanted to.) You can turn the textures off completely if they bog down your video or offend your sensibilities.

DATA ENTRY

Like any first-rate notation program, Sibelius offers a variety of methods for entering notes and other information into your score. The simplest is to choose notes and symbols from the onscreen Keypad with the mouse and then place the notes and symbols on the score by clicking in the desired location. If you use this method past your first ten minutes with the program, though, you're wasting time and missing one of the best features of Sibelius.

A far more efficient way to work is with your right hand on your actual numeric keypad and your left hand on the alphabet keys. Working that way, you can choose a rhythmic value with your right hand and a pitch with your left; each note is entered as soon as you press the letter key that corresponds to the pitch name. The onscreen Keypad controls five layers of symbols, starting with the most common rhythmic values and including articulations, beaming controls, and accidentals from double sharps to quarter tones. Other functions, such as repeats, slurs, glissandi, and pedalings are available with single-letter shortcuts. It's an extraordinarily efficient method and the best justification I've ever had for buying an external keypad for my laptop.

FIG. 2: Flexi-time actually lets the metronome follow the tempo of real-time MIDI input. You can speed up for simple passages and slow down for more technical passages.

Moving your left hand to a MIDI keyboard makes adding accidentals and chords even easier. Of course, once you have your MIDI keyboard fired up, you'll be tempted to try real-time note entry. Sibelius makes that easy with a function called Flexi-time (see Fig. 2). In Flexi-time mode, Sibelius actually follows your tempo, allowing you to speed up for simple passages and slow down for complex passages. If that sounds too good to be true, let me assure you that it works quite nicely. Once you become accustomed to manipulating the tempo, you can really bend it to your whim. I did, however, run into a bit of a snag on my laptop using the built-in software synthesizer. The latency of the instrument made Flexi-time think I was playing consistently behind the beat, so it kept slowing down to accommodate me. With a hardware synth that wasn't a problem.

Although Sibelius applies an extraordinary amount of intelligence to your scores, I found that it sometimes allows objects to overlap. If I force a large number of bars onto a single system, I naturally expect to have to adjust some object spacing manually, but sometimes even the default spacing leaves a sharp overlapping a quarter note or lyrics bumping into each other. Spacing problems were frequent only with lyrics (because spacing follows the notes, not the text), but the occasional overlap of notes and accidentals should never be allowed to happen.

HOUSE OF STYLE

FIG. 3: House Styles can be saved and recalled to make quick changes in every aspect of score appearance, from fonto to line thickness and object spacing.

Sibelius lets you modify everything from accidental spacing to staff line width, and it lets you save sets of your preferences as House Styles (see Fig. 3). House Styles are a great feature if you copy for several different clients. Switching from a civilized classical layout to a dramatic jazz style is a three-click operation, making it a breeze to quickly adapt the manuscript look and layout to the needs and expectations of your clients.

As you might expect, Sibelius's playback capabilities are impressive. The program recognizes and performs pedal indications, repeat signs, tempo markings, glissandi, trills, tremolos, and many other markings including some idiomatic guitar markings when notating in tablature. In addition, the playback of scores can be made more human (and more appropriate sounding) by choosing one of several preset performance styles. “Espressivo” offers various degrees of interpretive intelligence above and beyond the notated dynamics. “Rubato” adds variations of tempo to make the performance less mechanical. Rhythmic feel can be selected among a wide variety of options from reggae to several swing variations to Viennese waltz. What's more, Sibelius's SoundStage feature automatically adjusts the reverb, panning, and volume parameters to simulate a concert stage setting for large ensembles.

FEATURED PERFORMER

Sibelius's list of features goes on and on, including an Arrange function that will happily take a piano part and arrange it for strings, full orchestra, brass ensemble, or any of more than 130 other user-definable ensembles. It's not going to put human arrangers out of business, but it's certainly useful for automating the less imaginative parts of an orchestration. Sibelius can also work in the other direction, creating keyboard reductions from orchestral works.

Other noteworthy features include the ability to display SMPTE time code above each measure and in the elapsed-time display — a great feature for film composers. Sibelius also boasts powerful new music-scanning capabilities (see the sidebar “Scanning Comes of Age”), a 10,000-level Undo command, a 500-page hard-copy manual, and integrated Web-publishing capabilities.

In the final analysis, though, it's not an ever-expanding feature set that makes a music-notation program great. It's all about getting the data in and having control over it, and that means entry and formatting tools. Sibelius excels in both those areas, putting it squarely in the notation-software big leagues. Whether I approach the program as a composer, orchestrator, copyist, or educator, I find that Sibelius makes my job easier, faster, and more efficient. And those are three words that mean a lot to me.

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Brian Smithers teaches music technology at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, and is Course Director of Audio Workstations at Full Sail Real World Education in Winter Park, Florida.

Minimum System Requirements

Sibelius 2.1

MAC: Power Mac G3; Mac OS 8.6 (OS X compatible)

PC: 486 CPU (Pentium II recommended); Windows 95

SCANNING COMES OF AGE

Sibelius now ships with Neuratron PhotoScore Light, an optical character-recognition (OCR) program for printed music. I had a chance to check out the Professional version ($199, or $699 when bundled with Sibelius), which is distinguished by the wider range of elements that it can recognize. My last experience with scanning music into a notation program left me convinced that I could enter the data manually in a lot less time than it took to fix the mistakes made by the character-recognition algorithm. Although I approached this review with a bit of skepticism, I walked away a believer.

Musical notation is an amazingly complex and subtle sort of abstraction, and the process of interpreting a scanned bitmap of a score into the language of a notation program makes the job of alphabetic OCR seem like child's play. Doing even a bad job of sorting a sharp from a flat from a natural, correctly interpreting bar lines and brackets, and deciphering complex rhythms is a noteworthy accomplishment; doing it well is miraculous. PhotoScore does it well, and I found that I could scan a page of material and have it in Sibelius ready to edit, annotate, transpose, or print in a matter of minutes.

PhotoScore performs its magic in four steps: scanning, reading, editing, and exporting. The scan must be clean and level, and it must be at a suitable resolution. The PhotoScore manual, though thin, shows you how to determine the optimum resolution for your score, and it guides you clearly through the entire process.

Reading the score is the tricky part for the recognition algorithm, although it only takes a single mouse click to make it happen. Neuratron realizes that there will inevitably be some errors at this stage, and it provides tools (a subset of Sibelius's tools) to clean up anything that would make exporting into Sibelius problematic. In particular, you are well advised to resolve issues of key, meter, and rhythm before exporting the score to Sibelius.

After scanning a highly technical etude, all I had to do was fix a few rhythms, correct the meter, and change a couple of slur attachments before I exported the music to Sibelius, where I transposed it into another key. I then imported a duet for two alto saxophones, cleaned it up, and had Sibelius transpose one part for soprano saxophone. The page had one rhythmic mistake, some incorrectly attached text, and a couple of articulation mistakes, but I was still able to produce a clean score in less time than it would have taken me to enter the data manually.

PhotoScore didn't do as well on examples that included ossias and other subtle elements, and it's not happy with photocopies or anything else that produces a scan that's less than perfect. It is also not intended to handle hand-copied scores. But those limitations are entirely reasonable, and they don't negate the time-saving potential of the program for typical scores.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

Sibelius Software
Sibelius 2.1
music-notation software
$599

FEATURES	4.0
EASE OF USE	4.5
DOCUMENTATION	4.0
VALUE	4.0
RATING PRODUCTS FROM 1 TO 5

PROS: Simple, powerful, and efficient data-entry methods. Highly configurable. Intelligent formatting and playback. Auto-arrange function. Sophisticated MIDI support. Flexi-time follows tempo of real-time MIDI entry. Useful and accurate scanning support.

CONS: Real-time reformatting of page layout can be distracting. Symbols still sometimes crash into each other, especially lyrics.

Manufacturer

Sibelius Software
tel. (888) 474-2354
e-mail infousa@sibelius.com
Web www.sibelius.com