In addition to rebranding the product as Avid Sibelius and infusing it with the company’s Lenten colour scheme, Sibelius 7 featured an implementation of Microsoft’s Office Fluent user interface. Before we get to Sibelius 7.5, it’s worth spending a moment to recap some of the key changes in Sibelius 7, since we weren’t able to cover it back in 2011.

So it was perhaps a wise decision for Avid to focus on a point-five release of the current version, rather than expecting a new team to deliver Sibelius 8 on their first outing.

And although this application is still in development at the time of writing, it means the stakes are slightly higher for the first release of Sibelius not finished by the original team. Notice the new Timeline view docked to the bottom of the window.To make this transition even more interesting, Steinberg took the opportunity to recruit many of the original Sibelius development team to create a brand-new notation application. In response to user concerns, Avid Audio Vice President Martin Kloiber said the company wanted to “integrate Sibelius development more closely with the rest of Avid’s audio development teams in California”. However, a year later Avid closed the UK office where Sibelius was developed, causing a great deal of alarm at the time - not least because the then-current development team would not be a part of the company’s plans for the future. The release of Sibelius 7 in 2011 returned the program to its original nomenclature (from the early ‘90s when it ran only on Acorn’s RISC OS) and introduced a brand-new user interface. It would be fair to say that Sibelius has gone through quite a period of change since this magazine last reviewed version 6 in the December 2009 issue. Is this much-loved notation package still in safe hands?

The first new release of Sibelius in three years comes from the program’s relocated home in California.

Sibelius 7.5 sounds library download