The March 2010 issue of PC Pro magazine here in the UK carries a positive review of the new version of Sibelius First, and I’m delighted to say that reviewer Ben Pitt has bestowed the software with a PC Pro Recommended award.
Giving Sibelius First the maximum rating of six stars for value for money, Ben says:
There’s little to criticise about this package. That it’s based on such a sophisticated application certainly helps, but just as impressive is how it meets the needs of potential buyers. While it won’t cut the mustard for professionals, by and large it caters amply for composers and arrangers producing conventional scores for small and medium-sized ensembles.
The inclusion of Sibelius 6’s revolutionary Magnetic Layout feature is a key point in Sibelius First’s favour:
It excels at handling page layouts, giving lots of space for complicated passages and adjusting everything to fill pages neatly… [Magnetic Layout] ensures automatic formatting of scores is extremely reliable and, for the rare occasions when the layout could be better, simply dragging objects with the mouse provides a quick fix.
Ben draws attention to some of the limitations that Sibelius First has relative to the full Sibelius 6 program (in particular, early music note durations, Panorama view, cue notes, and the limit of 16 staves per system), but in the end he concludes:
It isn’t as flexible as the full version but the interface and the quality of the results are just as elegant, and at this price it may even encourage some creativity that would otherwise have gone untapped.
If you haven’t checked out Sibelius First yet, you can try out a fully-functional 30-day trial of the product that PC Pro says is “cut-price but not light on features” from the Sibelius web site.
The March 2010 issue of PC Pro magazine is on newsstands now!
My pal John Hinchey was kind enough to send me a copy of Leticia Wolf’s new album, The Fire and the Flood, which is available now on iTunes. Among his many talents, John is a brass and string arranger extraordinaire, and worked on four songs on Leticia’s new album, including Comfortable in Hell, which eagle-eared listeners may recognise from the ReWire example video on the Sibelius web site.
John was brought onto this project by his collaborator Mark Hornsby, who produced the album. John and Mark made extensive use both of Sibelius and Pro Tools in putting together the final mixes.
“There are four songs with my string arrangements,” John told me. “We recorded string quintet on It’s Fine, The Clue, Dig, and – of course – Comfortable In Hell. I also did an arrangement for three euphoniums and tuba on The Flood.”
John relied on the ReWire feature in Sibelius 6 to make the demos of his arrangements really pop. “It was incredibly helpful on this project. Being able to create good demos for a client is always important, but when you are trying to convince a producer that using three euphoniums and a tuba on a alternative rock track is a good idea… a great demo is crucial!”
Mark, of course, decided to go with the unusual brass combination in the end, and John is delighted with how the final album sounds.
“I’m really tickled with the mix. Mark used only room sound on the strings and brass, no digital reverb. It really brings them to the front and makes for a transparent mix.”
“The album was recorded and mixed in Pro Tools HD,” Mark added. “The vibe of the album was intended to be dry, intimate, and organic. No reverb was used for ambience – just room mics from the tracking sessions. I used IK Multimedia’s T-Racks, Chandler/Abbey Road’s TG Limiter and Massenburg Design Works’s EQ3. This achieved a very warm yet clean sound.”
As for Leticia herself, she has described the album as “a coming of age record”:
There are songs about letting go of the impossible, and songs that revisit the painful. It’s got classic whiskey and cheating tunes, but I tried to make it more than that. It’s about learning how to dream the right dreams, and hold on to them. The album is dark, but it’s soft and delicate, even hopeful at times. The stories explore a meandering path that is green with acoustic guitar, piano, rhodes, organ, strings and even a few euphoniums. The production is dry, warm and at times playful, but never over-done.
The album is definitely worth a listen. Check it out on iTunes today.
Back in November of last year, I blogged about edovia’s NumPad 2.0 app for iPhone, which included a dedicated Sibelius Keypad layout. This morning I received another email from developer Luc Vandal to let me know that NumPad 3.0 has just been released on the App Store, and the support for Sibelius has been further improved in this version with the addition of the other five Keypad layouts. So you can now access all of Sibelius’s note input features directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
It works really well in practice: you can swipe your finger from side to side to change Keypad layouts, and the on-screen Keypad in Sibelius keeps up. You can even run NumPad with your iPhone or iPod Touch plugged into your Mac or PC via USB, and if you find the USB cable gets in the way, you can rotate the iPhone through 180 degrees so that the USB cable comes out of the top of the device rather than the bottom.
If you have a laptop, or perhaps one of those new-fangled wireless Mac keyboards without a numeric keypad, NumPad 3.0 could represent a substantial improvement in your productivity, and at $2.99 in the US App Store (£1.19 in the UK App Store) it won’t break the bank.
A shopping trolley on a laptop, yesterday. (Courtesy alles-schlumpf on Flickr)
It has always been possible to buy Sibelius from our network of expert distributors and resellers around the world, and in select countries (namely the UK, US and Australia) it has also been possible to buy some of our products directly from the Sibelius web site.
Today marks the start of an exciting new era, as the Sibelius web store has been closed (goodbye, old friend!) and a shiny new replacement has been unveiled in the form of the new Avid online superstore. Now you can shop for Sibelius products together with Avid’s other audio and video products from a single online storefront, and from pretty much any country.
In addition to being able to buy boxed versions of Sibelius that are shipped out to you on DVD-ROM in sturdy yet attractive cardboard boxes, you can also now purchase new copies and upgrades for Sibelius for immediate download, so you can scratch that music notation itch within minutes (well, hours – the Sibelius download is pretty big) rather than days.
A word to the wise: if you are going to purchase an upgrade online at the new Avid superstore, beware that you will see all of the various upgrade types available for purchase (e.g. educational, professional, competitive crossgrade, etc.). Make sure you choose the correct upgrade type for your current license of Sibelius, otherwise you may end up with an upgrade you can’t use. To check which upgrade you should buy, use the handy upgrade eligibility tool.
The new Avid superstore carries a full range of products for individual customers, but if you represent a school, college, university or other institution, you should continue to contact a reseller or us directly for pricing for site licenses and other multi-user installations.
Happy shopping!