Sibelius launches Sibelius 4 – the spectacular new version of the world's leading music notation software

New video feature • Over 1700 worksheets included • Revise parts instantly

LONDON, 5 July 2005 – Sibelius Software Ltd today announces Sibelius 4, a major upgrade to the leading music notation software used by musicians and educators worldwide.

From television series such as The Simpsons to new works at the Sydney Opera House, Sibelius helps people all over the world to write and teach music. Sibelius achieves the rare combination of extremely sophisticated software that's genuinely simple to use.

From today, the ground-breaking new version, Sibelius 4, is the first notation program to enable you to write music to video, produce teaching materials in seconds, and instantly revise instrumental parts. With 1700 worksheets and curriculum resources developed in collaboration with educational specialists, and a range of licensed videos from Charlie Chaplin to Mr Bean for students to compose to, Sibelius 4 also supports teachers' need for high-quality educational content.

CEO of Sibelius Software Ltd Jeremy Silver comments, “This is without doubt our most revolutionary upgrade yet – for both educators and professionals.

“We consulted our users very carefully in designing this upgrade. We collaborated with a wide range of experts from around the world to present a substantial body of educational content and have responded to the increasing popularity of film score and TV soundtrack composition with our new video feature. With Sibelius 4 we have returned to our themes of simplicity, elegance and efficiency to transform working with scores and parts.”

The Dynamic Parts™ feature is revolutionary for anyone who needs to produce separate instrumental parts, such as for orchestral or band music. Whenever you make revisions to a full score, Sibelius 4 now instantly updates all of the relevant parts. Or you can even edit a part, and the full score changes to match. This can save composers and arrangers hours of time on a score. Additionally, the new Auto Layout feature ensures that the parts are beautifully formatted on the page, ready to print.

The unique Worksheet Creator™ enables teachers and educators to create instant teaching materials, instead of having to spend time designing them themselves. They can choose from over 1700 ready-made worksheets, exercises, pieces, posters, reference material and other resources; or create their own using a variety of templates. Educators can then print the materials out, give them to students to fill in on computer, or publish them on the new web site SibeliusEducation.com, for students to view, play back and print from anywhere. The Worksheet Creator even saves time with marking, by providing a completed answer sheet to compare against.

Sibelius is the first ever notation program to let you compose to video on the screen. You can add any video file to a score, which is then displayed on the screen in a video window, and plays in sync with the music. In fact, whether you're writing music, playing back, fast-forwarding or rewinding, you can always see exactly what's happening in the video at any point in the score, and vice versa. You can also add ‘hit points' to mark important visual events in the score, which make it easy to make the music fit the action.

Ben Finn, Founder and Director of Sibelius Software says, “A striking example of how we've been tackling the most complex programming challenges is the new Sibelius 4 feature, Dynamic Parts. Two other programs in the past have tried and failed to achieve the dream of parts that automatically update when you change the full score. This required months of design and extensive restructuring of Sibelius's architecture. But for the user, the end result is beautifully simple and effective. So with one sweep we've done away with the tedious and time-consuming process of extracting and revising parts. We doubt that any other notation program has any prospect of achieving this in the foreseeable future.”

Howard Goodall, film/TV composer (Mr Bean, Red Dwarf and Blackadder), is excited by the new video feature: “For those of us who spend our days either fitting music to pictures or teaching others how to fit music to pictures, this new feature of Sibelius 4 is a dream come true. I only wish it had been available for the last 20 years.”

There are dozens of further new features, too. You can now copy and paste music straight from Sibelius 4 into other programs such as Microsoft Word, rather than by exporting a graphics file. Music publishing features include the Helsinki music font for an elegant, plate-engraved appearance, and Optical™ rules for positioning ties and beams perfectly. There are 11 new plug-ins, covering everything from harmonizing tunes to copying groups of slurs and articulations. And even though it's very easy to use, Sibelius 4 has extensive built-in help – more than an hour of tutorial videos teaching you the main features clearly and simply, and comprehensive searchable on-screen reference.

Notes to editors

• Sibelius is the world's market leader in music notation software.
• Sibelius was founded in 1993 by Ben and Jonathan Finn to sell music notation software for the Acorn computer. The Sibelius notation software was released for Windows and Mac in 1998/99.
• Since then the Sibelius Group has developed 13 additional music products for the professional, educational and home user, ranging from Internet publishing to guitar software.
• Sibelius has customers in over 100 countries.
• Sibelius is used in 50% of schools in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
• Sibelius is endorsed by the Royal Academy of Music and is used by all the major music academies and colleges: the Royal College of Music, Trinity College of Music, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the Juilliard School, Berklee School of Music, the Sibelius Academy in Finland, the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
• The world's leading music publishers including Music Sales, Hal Leonard and Yamaha use Sibelius.
• Sibelius was recently awarded a prestigious Queen's Award for Innovation.
• Sibelius is headquartered in London, UK, with a US subsidiary, Sibelius USA Inc., in California and a new Australian subsidiary, Sibelius Australia Pty Ltd, in Adelaide.