MusicRadar

• Related News
• Review

Other additions

Perhaps as important to some will be the newfound ability to use Sibelius as a ReWire slave, so that you can route Sibelius' output and sync it to a ReWire-capable DAW.

Also, if your music requires fluctuating tempi, you can now 'conduct' the piece by tapping on the keyboard – Sibelius will then record the tempo variations (though this feature cannot be used in conjunction with ReWire, since Sibelius works as a slave only).

The resulting accelerandos and rallentandos can be displayed as a graph above the music though, disappointingly, they can't be edited from there. In our testing, this feature seemed rather difficult to control at first and may require some practice in order to be useful.

One new feature that will hold great appeal for those using Sibelius in education is the ability to save Versions – ie, stages in the development of a piece that you can return to and compare to the current state (although you can only edit the latest version). In addition, you can add comments in the form of virtual sticky notes that can go anywhere in the score, perhaps as feedback or instructions for a student.

"If your music requires fluctuating tempi, you can now 'conduct' the piece by tapping on the keyboard."

An onscreen virtual keyboard is now included (as well as a virtual fretboard for guitarists), which can not only be used to input notes via the mouse or QWERTY keyboard but also lights up during playback.

If that still sounds like too much manual labour, then the addition of Neuratron's AudioScore Lite may be of interest – this takes a live monophonic audio input (ie, you singing into a microphone or playing an instrument) and converts it into notation.

There's a host of other useful, if less spectacular, enhancements in v6. For example, the keypad now has an extra layout, including a handy set of repeat signs and jazz-type articulations; cautionary accidentals can be automatically displayed (with or without brackets); there are easy scale and chord diagrams for guitar; and so on.

Summary

Whilst we acknowledge that Sibelius' main contender for scorewriting dominance, Finale 2010, is exceedingly good (and will be preferred by some for perfectly sensible reasons), we think Avid has landed a rather heavy hit with Sibelius 6.

In particular, we're enamoured of Magnetic Layout, which will speed up the finalisation of a score considerably, and ReWire support, which could open up a whole world of possibilities (and rather puts Finale's single audio track facility in the shade).

The numerous smaller tweaks and improvements might only ease workflow marginally when considered in isolation, but taken as a whole, they should have you cranking out sweet-looking scores faster than ever.

If you're in the market for a seriously good scorewriter, you need to consider both Sibelius 6 and Finale 2010. But ask yourself first if you really need all of the bells and whistles that both applications provide – if you just need to print out a few bars of something for a real-world musician to overdub, you might get by with the score editor in your DAW.

Listen to a score played through the Sibelius soundset: