Sibelius 7.5.1 update released with many improvements - Scoring Notes (original) (raw)
Today Avid released Sibelius 7.5.1, the first maintenance update to Sibelius 7.5 since it was officially released on February 28 of this year. The update addresses a number of notable issues with Sibelius 7.5, and users should notice solid improvements across most aspects of the software.
Read on for more information about the Sibelius 7.5.1 update, but if you want to get straight down to business, here are the links you need:
Alternatively, you can simply open any score in your copy of Sibelius 7.5, then click Check For Updates on the Help page of the File tab.
While nothing in the Sibelius 7.5.1 update can reasonably be called a new feature compared to Sibelius 7.5, there are many important bug fixes and improvements — more than 160 in all, according to Avid. In working with 7.5.1 I found it to be appreciably more stable and responsive than 7.5.0.
Here is a partial list of the most noticeable changes:
- Most obvious was the regression in 7.5 that broke offline audio export, leaving users who wished to make audio files of their scores to patiently wait the entire duration of the piece. That issue is resolved in 7.5.1, and exporting audio works as well as it did in 7.1.3.
- Exporting video also happens offline now, and a curious bug where the audio was a beat behind the video in these files has been fixed. This works properly whether you are saving the video file to your computer or sharing it to Facebook or YouTube.
- The Timeline, new in 7.5, had its share of debut bugs. Fixed in 7.5.1 are problems with zooming, scrolling, show/hide settings, the Focus on Staves state of the score, displaying certain tempo markings, and a few other problems. It’s also now possible to drag around the Timeline to navigate the score in a Navigator-like way.
- A problem has been corrected in which the Swing and other new rhythmic feels would not play back correctly or load properly upon creating a new document in 7.5.
- Support for Brazilian Portuguese and Russian was new in 7.5, but many localization problems across all languages were introduced in the initial release as well. 7.5.1 includes many fixes in this area.
- Mordent behavior on playback has been corrected in 7.5.1. Playback of mordent and trill symbols was new in 7.5, but the was a bug where the mordent and inverted mordents played back the opposite of what was expected.
- A regression in 7.5 involving ties not playing back in bars using the 1-, 2-, and 4-bar repeat symbol has been corrected.
- Just as you were congratulating yourself for memorizing what “qaa z=[qp ]e” meant, Sibelius 7.5.1 now accurately displays music fonts in the Performance and Dictionary menus. (There is, a however, a minor cosmetic problem in later versions of Mac OS X that has been newly introduced in Sibelius 7.5.1, in which Sibelius displays a grey background on certain items in a pop-up menu once they have been hovered over with the mouse.)
- A problem with Sibelius 7.5 plug-ins inadvertently reading and writing from the Sibelius 7 plug-in preference file has been corrected.
- The sources of many problems that could crash Sibelius 7.5 have been identified and corrected, including some that have been present for many years, according to Avid.
- The activation process should now allow a user to run both Sibelius 7 and 7.5 on the same computer, within the terms of the software license.
Pop-up menus in Sibelius 7.5.1 now accurately display music fonts in metronome markings
In addition, Sibelius 7.5.1 improves usability for sight-impaired users (specifically when using NVDA on Windows), fixes the GUI for many plug-ins, and includes under-the-hood work on the playback sample engine.
Finally, the official Sibelius Reference is updated for 7.5.1 and has been fully translated into the nine languages that Sibelius supports. (the old 7.1.3 Reference had shipped with 7.5). The PDF is found within Sibelius itself, or if you prefer a printed copy, you can purchase one. (Also refer to a post from this blog which describes how to save the Reference and use it, say, on your tablet.) The tome weighs in at 802 pages, and its most notable updates from the 7.1.3 version are unsurprisingly in the areas of playback, performance, sharing, and Timeline navigation. The Sibelius 7.5 Reference guides are also available on the official Sibelius documentation page.
Updated July 5, 2014 to note that the Sibelius 7.5 documentation is now available from the Sibelius web site.