Focus Families

Version 01.10.00
Added 17 Jul 2009 (last updated 16 Jun 2015)

For use with Sibelius 5, Sibelius 6, Sibelius 7.1, Sibelius 7.5, Sibelius 8.x, Sibelius 18.x, Sibelius 19.x, Sibelius 20.x, Sibelius 21.x, Sibelius 22.x, Sibelius 23.x and Sibelius 24.x

The Focus Families plugins let you display, in Focus On Staves, instruments contained in one or more families of instruments. The families are predefined by Sibelius and are: "Brass", "Exotic", "Fretted", "Keyboard", "Other", "Pitched Percussion", "Singers", "Strings", "Unpitched", and "Wind".

Use Focus Families (and its 2 clones, Focus Families 1 and Focus Families 2) to display multiple instrument families. These plugins bring up a dialog, at least the first time run in a session, and save their settings across Sibelius sessions.

There is also a set of plugins that will display one family of instruments. These have no dialog, and are meant to be assigned to shortcut keys. They are Focus Brass, Focus Exotic, Focus Fretted, Focus Keyboard, Focus Other, Focus Pitched Percussion, Focus Singers, Focus Strings, Focus Unpitched, and Focus Wind.

All instruments are in one family only. So for example, though you can find a Harp in Create > Instruments in both the Strings and Pitched Percussion families, the plugin will always place a harp in Pitched Percussion.

While these plugins are less customizable than the Focus Set plugins, they do not require setup for each score, and so can be mixed and matched with the Focus Set plugins.

It is recommended that these plugins be installed into a separate user Plugins subfolder (e.g., Focus Families). A PDF help document is included in the zip file.

Updated 23 June 2010. Focus Families/2/3 were not restoring their saved settings, and this in fixed.

Updated 29 January 2011. Added Focus Families 4..9, and added an option to put harps in either the Strings or Pitched Percussion families. the PDF document was also updated.

Updated 29 August 2012 to restore the missing single family plugins, such as Focus Brass.

Updated 5 September 2012 to fix settings for including Harps in string and pitched percussion.

Updated 16 June 2015 to make the Focus Families plugins remember the settings for Wind instruments

Plug-in written by Bob Zawalich.

Categories