Power tools

Music Fonts
Reprise™: Reprise is the latest in Sibelius’s growing range of elegant fonts. In fact, Reprise is a whole family of 9 fonts that produce an astonishingly realistic simulation of handcopying. Its music symbols are drawn with a fixed-width nib (rather than the italic nib used in Inkpen2), and additionally it includes two rubber-stamp fonts for titles and other large text. Special characters and plug-ins are included for adding hand-drawn lines and boxes to text and rehearsal marks, and house styles for incorporating Reprise into scores. Overall Reprise is a beautiful reproduction of traditional hand-copying, in a style particularly suitable for jazz, lead sheets, big band, and show music.
Opus Note Names: The new Opus Note Names font lets you write the names of notes inside the notehead – ideal if you’re writing music for students who are just taking up an instrument, particularly those learning piano.
Chord symbols: There are two new fonts for chord symbols – Opus Chords Sans and Opus Chords Sans Condensed – with regular and narrow sans serif characters, similar to Arial / Helvetica. Plus various extra characters can now be included in chord symbols.
Functional analysis: Musicologists and students can now write functional analysis in Sibelius 5, thanks to the new Opus Function Symbols font and text style.
Early music & avant garde: Sibelius 5 now includes over 200 extra music symbols for early and contemporary music, such as prolations, Bach ornaments and clusters.
Fits lyrics to music
To save typing all the lyrics into a score, you can now add them automatically from a text file – Sibelius 5 even splits them into syllables for you. Or if you type the lyrics in yourself, Sibelius will check that you’ve split syllables in all the right places.
Plug-ins
You can now undo plug-ins, so you needn’t be afraid of trying them out!
What’s more, the ManuScript language used to write plug-ins now supports tuplets, object deletion, notehead types, bar number changes, cue-sized objects, blank pages, time positions, score duration, and lyric syllabification. This makes current and future plug-ins far more powerful. With a total of over 100 plug-ins, the latest ones in Sibelius 5 include:
Tuplets: Split, join and modify tuplets, e.g. turn two triplets into a sextuplet, or a sextuplet into a quintuplet. Many other plug-ins now work with tuplets, too.
Simplify Notation: Cleans up music input from Flexi-time or a MIDI file by adjusting note values, split points, voicing, etc..
Film scoring: Fit a passage of music into an exact time by adjusting tempos, and show the exact rhythmic position of all hit points.
Transform Scale: Turn music from one scale into another, e.g. minor to pentatonic.
« Previous: Complete layout control | Next: More new features »
What's new for education
Summary of what's new in Sibelius 5
Capture, use and re-use snippets
A new, clearer way of viewing music
150+ high-quality built-in sounds
Mix and match from different libraries
Instrumental parts made even easier
Flexible page layout and numbering
New fonts and plug-ins
Over forty other improvements
Maximise access for your students
Questions about the upgrade