Avid Technology : Sibelius 8.3 Now Available—What’s New

It's been just more than a month since our last release, and hot on its heels is another release of Sibelius that's small, but packs a punch. It reintroduces a nice feature, to colour notes independently in a chord, but also extends this to our ManuScript API scripting language for automating the colouring of notes and other objects. In addition to this, there are over 60 other smaller fixes and tweaks to help you get even more out of Sibelius.

If you own Sibelius 8, the upgrade will be waiting for you in your My Avid account, or in the Avid Application Manager installed on your computer. If you haven't upgraded to Sibelius 8 yet, you can do so from our webstore or from all good retailers. When you upgrade, you not only get Sibelius 8.3, but it also entitles you to a full year of software upgrades.

In summary, here are the improvements in Sibelius 8.3:

We've added the ability to colour notes independently in a chord. In earlier versions of Sibelius, the color applied to any note would affect the whole chord, but with Sibelius 8.3, the notes can be coloured independently. This feature is useful not only for educators to help students learn music in more vibrant and engaging ways, but it's just as useful in contemporary scores or even for simply marking up a score for editing.

We've updated the ManuScript Plug-in language in Sibelius (the built-in scripting language for automating tasks in Sibelius) to take advantage of the new coloring features. As part of this, the Color Pitches and BoomWhacker plug-ins that ship with Sibelius have been updated to use these new methods as well.

These changes have been added without any change to the file format version, so you can can open files saved in Sibelius 8.3, in 8.2 and 8.1. However, when opening scores in 8.2 and earlier, the colors you have applied to notes will be stripped out as those older versions won't know how to handle the new coloring attributes.