Sibelius Internet Edition™ is the world's first complete solution for publishing sheet music on the Internet. Many major publishers use Sibelius Internet Edition to publish music securely on-line.

The problem with traditional publishing is that it's expensive to print and ship music, customers are hard to reach, and it's not cost-effective to produce a score in multiple arrangements and transpositions. For customers, sheet music is hard to find, they can't check how it sounds before they buy, and they often can't get it for the instrument or key they want.

Now there's a solution: Sibelius Internet Edition.

Sibelius Internet Edition is a special new version of Sibelius, the world's best-selling music notation software. It includes extra features such as secure encryption and control over the functionality available for each score on your web site (e.g. play, print & transpose).

This enables publishers and music websites to:

• Sell sheet music worldwide - instantly
• Reduce printing, storage and shipping costs
• Deliver scores securely straight to the customer's printer

It helps customers too:

• Fast, easy and fun
• They can find, play and print music in seconds
• They can change key and instruments - all within a normal web page.

Unlike other formats such as PDF and MIDI, Sibelius Internet Edition provides high-quality printing, playback, and customization such as transposing - all in one secure format. And because Sibelius Internet Edition handles composing, arranging, engraving and traditional publishing as well as Internet publishing, it provides a complete end-to-end solution.

Creating scores

Sibelius and Sibelius Internet Edition let you create scores in several fast and easy ways:

• Computer keyboard, mouse or MIDI keyboard
• Convert existing music files in seconds (including Finale, SCORE, MusicXML and MIDI formats)
• Scan printed scores.

See elsewhere on the site for a tour of Sibelius' sophisticated features.

Thousands of composers, arrangers, publishers and copyists already use Sibelius (fully compatible with Sibelius Internet Edition), so they can send you their files on disk or by e-mail ready for publishing on your web site, with no costly re-inputting required. Once any score is in Sibelius Internet Edition, just click 'Save as Scorch web page' and it's instantly turned into a file customized to your design - ready to go straight on your web site.

Scorch is the free plug-in software which lets your customers view, play, customize and print Sibelius Internet Edition scores on the Internet - they don't need Sibelius themselves. It's free, secure, fast to download (less than 1Mb), and runs inside Internet Explorer and Netscape, on both Windows and Mac.

• Scorch makes scores interactive - play, turn pages, transpose, change instruments and print.
• Scores automatically download in 2 seconds - a typical score is just 15K!
• Scorch provides realistic playback with expression, stereo and reverb
• Customers can choose the instrument and key they want - there's no need for you to publish multiple versions of a score
• Scorch works seamlessly within a web page - no switching between programs or saving files to disk
• There are already over 400,000 Scorch users.

When you publish a score, Sibelius Internet Edition offers you a wealth of options to control what your customers can do with it. These are accessible via the Scorch tool bar, shown below.

Scorch options

Sibelius Internet Edition gives you, the publisher, complete control over which buttons appear on the tool bar, and how much they let your customers do, including:

• Whether customers can view the whole score or only specified pages
• Whether or not customers can play back the score. This option can also restrict playback to just a fixed length (say 30 seconds) of the score
• Control over playback tempo, sounds, whether to use Espressivo™ (automatic expression) & reverb
• Control over printing. Customers can be allowed to print a free sample page, pay to print the whole score or print the score free of charge. Printing can also be completely disabled.
• Control over the paper size, orientation, music and text fonts used
• Transposing can be enabled or disabled
• The customer can be allowed to change instrument (from a custom list), or the instruments can be made unchangeable.

All of these options can be altered on a score-by-score basis: for instance, you can have some scores on your site that can be downloaded and played back for free, and others where only the first page can be played and the customer has to pay to print it.

Security & e-commerce

Click here for more details on security and e-commerce provided by Sibelius Internet Edition.

More ways to use Scorch

Scorch isn't just for selling printed music on the Internet - it has many other uses:

• Playback for tuition and automatic accompaniment
• Offer free scores for special promotions
• Advertise music for mail order
• Internal use for print-on-demand (e.g. to mail one-off scores to customers)
• Coursework, distance learning and libraries
• Digital archiving
• Even distribute scores securely on CD-ROM - fit 50,000 scores on one CD! (Customers browse for free, and are automatically taken to your web site to pay and print).

What we provide

When you start Internet publishing, we provide a complete package of software, assistance and a range of additional services:

• Sibelius Internet Edition
• Converters for other music file formats
• Example e-commerce web site which you can use or modify if you don't already have one
• Full documentation
• Full technical support from our San Francisco and UK offices and direct from our programming team
• New versions of Sibelius Internet Edition and Scorch as they are released

What it costs

Unlike the standard Sibelius program, Sibelius Internet Edition is licensed on an on-going basis related to your volume of usage.

If you want to sell printouts of music online, our charges consist of:

• Initial one-off license fee, related to the size of your business
• Monthly maintenance fee (to cover technical support and software updates), related to your volume of sales.
• Transaction fee, related to the volume of sales.

We offer different tariffs for different volumes of usage, to make Internet publishing cost-effective for anyone from individuals to major publishers. We automatically move you between tariffs as your volume of sales increases, and we always charge you using the cheapest tariff.

If you want to use Sibelius or Sibelius Internet Edition online for other purposes than selling printouts online, e.g. to advertise music sold by mail order, different charges apply.

How to get started

If you have any immediate questions, they may be answered by our Internet publishing Frequently Asked Questions. To get further information:

• If you're a publisher, retailer, portal, or other business/organisation, please see the contact details below to discuss your particular requirements.
• If you're an individual, you don't need to get Sibelius Internet Edition yourself - just go to our sister site SibeliusMusic.com to sell or give away your Sibelius & Finale scores on the Internet.

Contact details for Internet publishing

North America, Central America & South America:
Peter Maund, email: pmaund@sibelius.com, tel: 925-280-0600

Europe & Asia Pacific:
Justin Baron, email: jbaron@sibelius.com, tel: +44 20 7561 7999 (freephone: 0800 458 3111 in UK)

This page last updated 23 August 2005.