The Sibelius music notation program could already have been considered to be a “mature” product, with all of the major features and capabilities that almost any musician might need or want.  So what could they possibly build into their new version 7 that could make it worth considering an upgrade?  While I have not yet had the chance to kick the tires on the new version we can still glean a lot of information from the Sibelius blog and press releases.  Here is a bit of what’s new with Sibelius 7.

New Sound Fonts In Sibelius 7

One of the biggest additions to Sibelius 7 (and yes, we mean BIG) is the inclusion of a 35 gigabyte sound library from Avid.  The new sounds compliment the old Garritan sounds and apparently were produced by a professional orchestra specifically for the Sibelius release.  Also included are a compliment of jazz sounds and a fully decked out pipe organ.

New Simplified Ribbon Menus

Like I said I have not had the chance to try Sibelius 7 in person yet, but in watching the Sibelius 7 demo video it looks like they have taken a page or two from products like Notion and Maestro Composer and expanded their menus into ribbons that change their contents based on which functions you are wanting to use.  They are presented visually rather than with plain old text links, making it much more easy to navigate and more intuitive to use.  

FINALLY!  Full MusicXML Export Added to Sibelius 7

The best thing, in my opinion, about Sibelius 7 is that they finally added something that I have literally been complaining about for years about previous versions of the product.  In other reviews of Sibelius 6 I openly complained about the fact that coverting between Sibelius and Finale formats required me to purchase a $200 plugin called Dolet in order to export music to MusicXML format.  Sadly we live in a world where Sibelius has to compete with another major music notation system and getting music back and forth between the two products was all but impossible without that plugin.  Now, it looks like they have finally included full MusicXML export into the software natively!  That alone makes the upgrade worth it for me and in my personal situation but it also makes the program much more attractive to new users or to users of other notation systems.

There are many more changes in Sibelius 7 than I have time at this point to mention, but once I manage to get ahold of a copy and kick it around for a while I will report back with a full review.