Avid Technology : Sibelius 2018 Now Available—What’s New

This, when used in conjunction with moving notes that we introduced in Sibelius 8.1, makes editing notes and whole passages incredibly quick.

For now, this has replaced the old method in which Sibelius would erase the next note when lengthening a note value; however, we're aware of your muscle memory and have added a new preference that you can toggle on-if you so wish-called 'Replace subsequent notes with rests when extending duration'.

Find in Ribbon

Along the same theme of speeding up your workflow, we have made several improvements to the 'Find in Ribbon' search box. We've refined the layout of the search results to make it easier to see what you're looking for, as well as made it faster to execute the commands you need. In most cases, you now only need to remember one keyboard shortcut, and you can access everything in the program.

The shortcut for accessing the Find in Ribbon box has been made to happen immediately. Instead of doing Ctrl (on Mac) or Alt (on Win) and then separately pressing 0, you can now type Ctrl+0 or Alt+0 simultaneously. You can now also change this shortcut in Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts to anything you like, so if you'd prefer a single key press, for example ',' then you can set this up.

Searching and executing-these are now one and the same thing. Previously, you had to know about the Shift+Return shortcut to find and then perform the feature you were asking it to do, but only after you waited for an animation to play. We've now simplified this and, where possible, the feature is executed immediately-e.g., type Reset Design and press Return (or in fact you only need to type 'Re' and press Return as it's at the top of the search results). When doing this, you'll find that the design gets reset right away rather than having to wait for the glowing animation to finish.

This works for anything in the Ribbon, allowing you to type '12/4' to create a new 12/4 Time Signature, 'Trill' for a trill etc. If you prefer, you can even hide the Ribbon and simply use this as a command pallet for Sibelius.

The layout of the search results is also clearer.