Dorico Pro 2.0, released today, is a major update to Steinberg’s music notation software, with new features across the board in many areas. Smart staff management, slash notation, bar repeats, a new handwritten music font, a new system track, support for large time signatures, automation in Play mode, video support, and much more round out an impressive release.
Avid today released Sibelius 2018.5 to fix an issue in Sibelius where running some plug-ins would cause a memory leak that slowed Sibelius down until you restarted it. This most notably affected the Dolet MusicXML export plug-in, and only on Windows, not on Mac.
The Check Pizzicatos plug-in ships with Sibelius and it has saved me many minutes of work on many scores, and saved many minutes of rehearsal time. Its sole purpose is to locate suspect arco and pizz. markings in your score.
An essential element of Sibelius’s dynamic parts feature is the ability to make certain changes in a part without affecting the score. This extends to the ability to have different names for instruments in parts than what they are in the score. This useful feature has its intricacies and comes with a few caveats, so we’ll explain what those are and how to make the most of the available options.
Andrew Noah Cap gives a thorough review of Dorico’s playback capabilities and the wide variety of needs it attempts to address — from engravers preferring simple playback, to those wanting adequate sound rendering without thinking too much about settings and post-editing, to those that expect playback and editing functionality that is comparable to MIDI editing within a DAW.
Neil Radisch collects tips from across many aspects of Sibelius into a tutorial on creating aleatoric music notation. Some are less commonly used Sibelius features, while others are hacks to stretch Sibelius beyond its originally intended use. You’ll want to bookmark this post and keep it handy!